Cabourg – day 1: Matt and Mara, Thierry de Peretti and Charlotte Le Bon
Every day, a look back at the highlights of the 2024 edition of the romantic film festival.
Film of the day: Matt and Mara by Kazik Radwanski
Mara's life passed peacefully. In a relationship with a musician, and mother of a child, this professor of literature and poetry at the University of Toronto seems to exercise her profession with talent and passion. Until one morning Matt reappears in her life, a successful writer whom she knew when she was younger in college, who returned to town to accompany the last days of his sick father and whom she has not seen since. years. A reunion that will turn everything upside down inside her. Were they lovers? Will they become so or will they become so again? The first question will remain without a clear answer and the second will serve as the backbone of this romantic suspense ultimately crafted around this very dog-cat duo which seems to follow to the letter the famous rule of “Follow me, I run away from you, run away from me I’m yours.”
Matt and Mara is a film made of small things where what is said is less important than what is kept silent, where the language of bodies translates better than that of words what is happening between the two characters. Kazik Radwanski's camera never lets go of Mara's character. From the back, from the front, from the side, she scrutinizes the slightest of his excitements, of his excitement as well as his fear of taking the plunge and the way in which little by little the link is loosened with his companion without him suspecting it. of something. And this same camera often leaves Matt off-camera, reflecting his elusive side, the difficulty in guessing what he really feels for Mara and more broadly his real personality where a certain arrivism regularly shows under a cool and witty veneer. A sort of Canadian cousin of the mumblecore movement films, Matt and Mara seduced by its finesse and its capacity, right down to its final image, to create uncertainty on a terrain that one might wrongly think marked out
Undetermined exit
Director of the day: Thierry de Peretti with As his look
Both Corsicans, Thierry de Peretti and the writer Jérôme Ferrari are more or less the same age and it has been years since the first wanted to adapt a novel by the second, without it ever coming to fruition. It was said that their meeting would take place aroundHAS his imagewhich the director discovered in proofs even before its publication in 2018. A project which allowed him to return to set up his camera in Corsica as for his first two features, The Apaches (2013) and A violent life (2017), after the parenthesis of the remarkable Investigation into a state scandal.
He recounts in flashback mode fragments of the life of a young photographer from Corsica-Matin, companion of a radical activist, espousing – in particular through her relationship to commitment – the major events of turbulent and often bloody story of the Isle of Beauty and the independence movement, from the 1980s to the present day. A captivating political melodrama where violence dialogues with a heartbreaking melancholy and where De Peretti excels at evolving in gray areas, at shaking up both the certainties of his characters and the ready-made ideas about Corsica. And once again, he impresses with the quality of his direction of actors, revealing a young actress, Clara-Maria Laredo, whose first experience should not go unnoticed.
In theaters September 4.
Actress of the day: Charlotte Le Bon in Niki
The role of a lifetime or more certainly that of a second birth on screen. When Céline Sallette decided to take an interest in the figure of Niki de Saint-Phalle and to bring part of her life to the screen, she had only one actress in mind, Charlotte Le Bon, seized by the physical resemblance between the two women. To the point that she would undoubtedly have given it up if the actress had declined.
Her bold decision to never show the works but to show Niki de Saint-Phalle transforming herself by creating them and gradually seeing the traumas of her childhood come to the surface places the actress here at the center of the game in all the meaning of the term. And as if liberated by the recognition she obtained as a director with Falcon Lake Two years ago, she took on another dimension here as an actress by delivering the fullest, most exciting, richest composition of her entire career so far. Céline Sallette was right.
In theaters October 9
