Boxing movies are a dime and have been talking since the birth of the cinema, or at least since. This is a type of instant gratification - because it is more inner and entertaining than watching two people beat Hell on screen?

The difficulty of bringing original genre into this genre, which is why Belgian writer director Valéry Carnoy deserves his feature Début, Wild fox ((Fox dance), separate from the typical testosterone fuel slugfest.

He made an action in a highly special position: Elite French Sports Research Boarding school, select teenage athletes to train during high school. Public institutions seem to hit all the fists they swung in the ring as badly as young fighters, driving them towards desperate behavior or self-sabotage when they try to become professional players.

Wild fox Added an interesting twist to adult sports flick templates that would otherwise be very compliant. Its 17-year-old hero Camille plays the tenderness of Samuel Kircher, the best fighter of his age and the most promising fighter that represents France at the Olympics one day. But the minor injury eventually regained him in an unexpected way, causing Camille to question the cruelty of his trade and whether life is more than becoming the next Marcel Cerdan (for those familiar with French boxing masters).

His surprising trajectory from a fearful ruthless man to a satirical escapee directs a film that questions the violence Camille committed in the ring, and the imposition of his classmates on him, including his best friend and husband-and-wife partner Matteo (Fayçal Anaaaflous).

When we first met them, the two were like peas polished in a pod, training together all day, making Tiktok videos made with teammates LBF (Jef Jacobs), Nasserdine (Hassan Alili) and CoreB (Salahdine El Garchi) and working hard as well. When they weren't doing 10k runs, or as requested by their coach Bogdan (Jean-Baptiste Durand), Camille and Matteo sneaked into the nearby forest and fed the foxes with sneaky meat to radiate potential brushes.

On one of their trips, Camille fell off the cliff, almost killing himself, miraculously leaving with only one annoying right arm cut open. Soon, he was ready to wear gloves, but for some reason he couldn't escape the trauma caused by the accident. He began to feel phantom pain, refused to fight or train, and a panic attack kept him the same all night. Meanwhile, he meets a girl, Yas (Anne Heckel), who trains in Taekwondo, but has other interests, including playing classical music on the trumpet.

The dangerous fall and its consequences will be Camille (we learnt he has been boxing since he was 8, stimulated by his abused father) to open up to new experiences beyond. Usually this is a good thing, except in a competitive pressure cooker Sports Research Plan, students are expected to perform extremely high. Other boxers, especially rival LBF, started to take no weight with the team against Camille, hitchhiking between the young champion and best Bud Matteo.

Carnoy maintains a rather tempting enemy from beginning to end, filling the drama with moments of violence and breathing, during which we retreat into the huge forest adjacent to the school. Some plot points can be somewhat incredible, including the fox hunt, which forces it into Act 3 without warning. However, the director maintained a strong sense of lifelike tension as the boy was hit a lot, insisting on Camille's side, but also doing his best to move towards the form of self-realization.

Return to Cannes with two movies (this one Girl in the snow) After Catherine Breillat's debut Last summer Back in 2023, Kircher - the son of actress Irène Jacob and actor Paul Kircher (Animal Kingdom) - Carry the movie in a convincing way. In some scenes, he may seem vulnerable and can hardly stand or defend himself, while in others, he seems cruel and explosive.

It is this dichotomy Wild fox Continuously explore, looking for similarities between young boxers fighting for the future and young boxers fighting for survival in the nearby woods. Both live in a ruthless world, like Camille, you can suddenly go from hunting to being hunted. The question that the movie ultimately raises is whether it is entirely possible to be the third approach, resulting in a much smaller final battle than the victory of the elimination.