Cédric Kahn’s Uneven Teen Psych Ward Drama

Writer-director Cédric Kahn is perhaps best known outside France for helming tense, extremely bleak thrillers — Red Lights, Roberto Succo and L’Ennui — bathed in both film noir and existential angst. But he’s also tried his hand at several other genres, including a supernatural kids flick (The Plane), a gritty tale of rehab and religion (The Prayer), an engrossing courtroom drama (The Goldman Case) and, for his memorable second feature from 1994, a striking coming-of-age story called Too Much Happiness.

It’s that last movie that most comes to mind when watching A Place to Heal, which marks another impressively performed youth ensemble piece from the French auteur, albeit one set in a rather unusual location: the psychiatric wing of a public hospital in which teenagers between the ages of 15 and 18 are kept as in-patients for a stretch of time. (The film’s French-language title, 15/18, is the nickname given to the ward.)

That setting is both the raison d’être of Kahn’s latest, which he co-wrote with Kahina Le Querrec after spending months immersed in an actual institution, and sometimes its Achilles heel. Scattered among nearly a dozen characters, even if a love triangle eventually emerges amid the group, the script is a tad too loose-limbed to turn into a gripping drama. But perhaps more questionable is how Kahn chose a mix of professional and amateur performers — some of them making their feature debut — to portray kids with deep psychological issues, toeing the line between fact and fiction, group therapy and an Actors Studio exercise, in a way that doesn’t always sit well.

That said, A Place to Heal reveals the director’s knack — he’s a gifted actor himself, portraying the ward’s tough-loving chief psychiatrist, Étienne — for working with promising young talents, in this case the three leads who compose the trio at the story’s center: Zoé Monpart, Kenji Peyran and Malou Khebizi (the last of whom already showcased her skills in movies like Wild Diamond and Madame). Strictly as a performance piece, Kahn’s latest is an engaging work, capturing the subtleties and excesses of teenagers in the throes of depression, bi-polarity and other emotional disorders. But as a narrative, it never shapes into a powerful enough whole, with a final stretch that takes too unlikely a detour.

Khebizi plays Lucia, who starts off as the film’s protagonist but doesn’t quite remain so till the end. As a 17-year-old rebel with anger issues and other problems — we learn she’s been involved in hard drugs and prostitution — Lucia arrives at the 15/18 with plenty of swagger as an alumnus who’s been admitted a few times already. She reconnects with the other patients, including introverted Éloïse (Monpart), while sitting through therapy sessions with Étienne and the ward’s new trainee, Jules (Antoine de Foucauld), who becomes our entry point for a place that has its own special rules and routines.  

The chronicle-like nature of the story, which oscillates between scenes that push the plot forward and others that feel like theatrical improvisations, means we’re often observing the characters without getting too attached to them. Kahn is certainly respectful of the unique world of the 15/18 ward and the incredible work done by the doctors and educators — not to mention the delicacy of young patients dealing with major psychological traumas at crucial points in their lives. A subplot involving Marvin (Daoud Gary), a shy boy of African origin suffering from hallucination issues, is especially moving in that sense, following his evolution from crisis to recovery.

But there are times when A Place to Heal feels like it may have worked better as a straight-up doc rather than as the fictionalization of a real place filled with real people. No matter how well Kahn has his cast pretend that they belong in a psych ward — and to restate the above, he’s a solid director of actors — there are moments when it still seems like pretending compared to the real thing. Something like French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert’s recent documentary, At Averroes & Rosa Parks, which offers a rare glimpse inside an actual psychiatric institution east of Paris, reveals unforgettable scenes of human suffering and healing among patients with deep-seated neuroses in ways that fiction could never do.

Kahn pivots much more toward plot in the latter half of his film, which shifts gears when a bad boy named Enzo (Kenji Peyran) arrives in the ward under false pretenses, hoping to avoid going to jail. He has a quick fling with Lucia but then takes an interest in Éloïse, who eventually succumbs to his charms. The drama that results among the three of them seems a bit trite considering the greater things at stake within the 15/18, and an overwrought third act involving arson, escape and love-on-the-run doesn’t quite fit the film’s overall tone, even if it circles back to Éloïse’s deep inner traumas by the end.

And yet by having his characters exit the facility to enter a more movie-like world in the last segments, Kahn seems to be saying that even the most emotionally damaged kids have the right to their fantasies too — to live and dream as we all do. His compassion for the patients and caregivers in A Place to Heal is undeniable, highlighting the camaraderie that exists in a rather dark place like the 15/18. And although the director never loses sight of that sentiment, he sometimes loses sight of the film itself.