I will always see your faces: the new success of the director of Pupille (review)

Jeanne Herry takes up restorative justice to create a great and beautiful film of characters and actors.

This evening, Canal + is banking on a very touching film by Jeanne Herry, the director of Pupilwith Leïla Bekhti, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Gilles Lellouche. I will always see your faces is one of editorial favorites in this year 2023. Here is our review.

In 2018, Jeanne Herry struck a major blow with Pupil by managing, with incredible fluidity, to recount all the stages of an adoption process. A perfectly documented work but which 1000% lived up to its fictional status, also establishing itself as a great actors’ film where the smallest role, chosen with care, is something to defend.

I will always see your faces is in his right lineage. Jeanne Herry’s mastery is deployed here around another social subject – restorative justice – which allows her to once again celebrate the beauty of the collective capable of overturning all mountains, the light at the end of the road. A strong political gesture in our era of mistrust and where justice is mainly seen as punitive. But an assumed gesture where she never trembles, especially when it comes to creating emotion, the beating heart of her cinema.

Result: it succeeds in telling a little-known type of justice (and divided into two types of encounters: one in a group between victims and aggressors who committed the abuses from which they suffered; the other face to face with their direct aggressor, here a sister and her brother who raped her) without being didactic. Here the characters speak, with lots of crazy monologues interspersed with lively exchanges. And there too, the collective is at work: we certainly play but first with and for the other whom we never take our eyes off, never in the demonstration. Served by an insane casting, the result of incredible strength leaves KO standing, precisely because we feel that at any moment the tenuous thread could break. A great balancing act.

Trailer :

From Pupille to I will always see your faces: Jeanne Herry reveals her method to us