Debacle: the first shocking film by Veerle Baetens (review)
Alabama heroine Monroe makes her directorial debut in a stifling film that explores the cruelty of children to each other.
There is in front of and behind the camera a constant in Veerle Baetens: his lack of appetite for lukewarmness and his taste for rough stories with heightened passions, whether they are subdued or explosive. The heroine of the heartbreaking Alabama Monroe chose as the start of her career as a director to adapt a novel by Lize Spit, the story of a trauma experienced as a child by Eva, which, buried for a long time within her, will resurface twenty years later with the irrepressible need to settle the accounts of his suffering. It is about Debacle like recent A silence de Lafosse: revealing too much would go against the uncomfortable – but never complacent – experience that this story brings to life, without it being constructed as a suspense.
Veerle Baetens excels at filming childhood at its cruelest but also those parents who prefer to look away rather than assume the consequences of their children’s actions. Debacle speaks with the same acuity of the violent loss of innocence as of the long time it takes to become aware of it. Veerle Baetens always films from a good distance and with relevant framing choices the moral and physical violence distilled here, never hypocritically looking away. As if to support her young heroine, to tell her that she is not alone and to emphasize that her attackers were unable to remove such acts from their memory. And Rosa Marchant and Charlotte de Bruyne – who play Eva as a child and adult respectively – command admiration with the depth and power of their interpretation
By Veerle Baetens. With Charlotte de Bruyne, Rosa Marchant, Sebastien Dewaele… Duration 1 hour51
