Out of season, Averroès and Rosa Parks, Bis repetita: What’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
OUT OF SEASON ★★★★☆
By Stéphane Brizé
The essential
A great and beautiful love film by Stéphane Brizé, carried by the incandescent alchemy between Alba Rohrwacher and Guillaume Canet
With Out of season, Brizé reconnects with the origins of his cinema – talking about love – in a gesture of pure romanticism, because it is lived in the heads of its two main characters. A man (a prominent actor who, after having staged a play, comes to recharge his batteries in thalassotherapy) and a woman who loved each other fifteen years earlier then separated and lost touch before fate brought them together again in this little corner of Brittany. Brizé films this dormant passion which little by little resurfaces in spite of them with a sensitivity which is matched only by the precision of the loving gaze which he casts on his two actors. Never in years has Guillaume Canet appeared so naked in front of a director's camera. And in front of him, there are no words to describe Alba Rohrwacher's interpretation, so fair, so precise, so spare, so profound. This film is above all that of their stunning alchemy.
Thierry Cheze
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
AVERROES AND ROSA PARKS ★★★★☆
By Nicolas Philibert
By reconnecting, 25 years later The least of itwith the theme of psychiatry with On the Adamant, Nicolas Philibert had probably not anticipated that he would not stop there and that he would go and place his camera in Averroès and Rosa Parks, two units of the Esquirol hospital (also belonging to the Psychiatric Center Paris-Centre). And once again the result impresses with Philibert's incredible ability to capture incredibly intimate moments without turning his spectators into voyeurs. Crossed by the same humanity as On the Adamant, Averroes and Rosa Parks is first and foremost a tribute to caregivers, to their gift of themselves, and to that soothing smile that never leaves them, even in the most critical situations.
Thierry Cheze
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SMOKE SAUNA SISTERHOOD ★★★★☆
By Anna Hints
In the distance, an isolated cabin deep in a snowy wood where several women rush, leaving behind the freezing cold of the Estonian winter. Inside, a stifling heat: that of the smoke sauna, a sacred place purifying the body and soul. It is at the heart of this ancestral Fennic ritual that director Anna Hints plunges her camera. And as naked silhouettes emerge from the darkness and form in the clouds of vapor, the senses are activated and speech becomes unbound. Monologues, both painful and modest, follow one another on sexuality and illness, to the rhythm of droplets streaming down bodies, a mixture of sweat and tears. By prioritizing listening to others and vulnerability, Anna Hints returns to the very foundation of sorority and delivers a bewitching documentary where faceless beings become allegorical figures of femininity.
Lucie Chiquer
FIRST TO LIKE
BIS REPETITA ★★★☆☆
By Emilie Noblet
Delphine is a Latin teacher in a provincial high school. She has five students to whom, for a royal peace, she automatically gives an average of 19. The trouble begins when his class is selected for an excellence competition in Naples. The five wankers and their resigned teacher will therefore have to represent France in this competition, accompanied by the principal's nephew, a detective obsessed with teaching ancient languages. Emilie Noblet succeeds here in a consistently funny, intelligent and touching first film. The gags are written to perfection, the characters all avoid caricature and the director even allows herself some beautiful escapes from pure cinema. This mix between teen movie, romance and hypokhagneux comedy works wonderfully. And rests on the shoulders of Xavier Lacaille who shows a stunning sense of slapstick.
Gaël Golhen
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IMMACULATE ★★★☆☆
By Michael Mohan
Cecilia, an American nun, is taken in by a convent in the depths of Italy. As she becomes part of the group and takes care of the dying sisters, she observes a strange atmosphere, which reaches its climax when a miracle occurs: although a virgin, she would have become pregnant… A thousand miles from yet another variation of the possession film, Immaculateee rather calls into question patriarchal structures and the confinement of women. By transposing the codes of the horror genre rather well to the systematic oppression of Cecilia, the film surprises by asking completely contemporary questions such as the fate of an unwanted pregnancy. And impresses with the solution he provides in a staggering final sequence, where the violence is matched only by the talent of interpretation of Sydney Sweeney.
Nicholas Moreno
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SUICIDAL CONSENTING HUMANIST VAMPIRE ★★★☆☆
By Ariane Louis-Seize
A birthday party with a vampire family, who will eat a rather lame clown and above all realize that their little daughter, who is too emotional, is not very keen on the idea of drinking the blood of other human beings. Thus begins this first Quebec feature film, whose heroine, while social pressure is growing stronger, will set her sights on another depressed kid to take the plunge. The great drama of the discovery of sexuality told by Quebec vampires! A bet that works thanks to its constant humor which is charged with melancholy at the most appropriate moments. And thanks to its main actress, the formidable Sara Montpetit, discovered in Falcon Lake.
Sylvesbe Picard
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A FAMILY ★★★☆☆
By Christine Angot
In 2018, Catherine Corsini tackled Christine Angot's autofiction story, An impossible love, which went back to the root of his tragedy: the meeting of his parents, leading to the incest that his father would subject him to. Five years later, Angot takes back the reins of his own story. Exorcising one's trauma through writing no longer seems sufficient, it is now a matter of seeking reparation. So, the author becomes a director. The pen becomes a camera. An on-board camera with which Christine Angot confronts a major enemy: silence. Out of a vital need to break it, she raises her voice and begins (sometimes by force) a dialogue with those who have been complicit, to end up intruding into the viewer's comfort zone. The result is a raw and incisive documentary, uncomfortable but necessary, in which resonates the anger of a woman who will never again be silent.
Lucie Chiquer
THE GIRL ET THE PEASANTS ★★★☆☆
By DK Wechman and Hugh Wechman
After The Van Gogh Passion, the Welchmans return to dust off animated cinema. In a late 19th century pictorial style inspired by the painters of Young Poland, the duo paints the portrait of the intoxicating Jagna, an indomitable young woman trapped in a forced marriage. But at the rhythm of the seasonal harvests, his revolt will little by little shake the earth of his village rotten by the patriarchy… Adapted from the Nobel Prize for Literature Farmers by Wladyslaw Reymont, this film-picture immediately fascinates with the richness of its animation. The magic really happens when the soundtrack of LUC & Rebel Babel Film Orchestra merges with the impressionistic features, and the characters twirl. But a wild dance is never eternal, and the film sometimes struggles to reconcile the audacity of its form with its substance, losing the thread of its reflections on community excesses…
Lucie Chiquer
THE WORLD ISYOUR THEM ★★★☆☆
By Jérémie Fontanieu
“It’s different, but it’s meant to be successful.” The least we can say is that it is different. At the Delacroix high school in Drancy, Jérémie Fontanieu, an economics teacher who looks like a young financial wolf, is trying a “unprecedented experiment”. Every year, the least promising final year students from this disadvantaged suburban high school undergo intensive coaching in order to obtain the holy grail: baccalaureate and, if they like, admission to the preparatory class. The method – and the film, made by the teacher himself – sometimes leave one wondering. Everything requires discipline (parents, regularly contacted by SMS, are invited to become involved in the children's education), and this mechanism sometimes has the appearance of cruelty, even class contempt. As annoying as it may be at times, this documentary nevertheless asks important questions about the weight of social determinism, and what it costs to extract oneself from it, with or against one's will.
Emma Poesy
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
LET ME ★★☆☆☆
By Maxime Rappaz
A very devoted mother to a disabled son, Claudine (Jeanne Balibar) grants herself a day of freedom every week by sleeping with passing men in a mountain hotel… With this portrait of a fifty-year-old who aspires to a romantic life, Maxime Rappaz creates a melancholic and timeless atmosphere for his first film (even if the story takes place in 1997). But the theme of fantasy is treated in a seen and reviewed way, within an artistic direction that leaves us wanting more.
Damien Leblanc
KARAOKE ★★☆☆☆
By Stéphane Ben Lahcene
A ridiculously bourgeois opera singer is taken in by the chambermaid of her luxury hotel, after a bad media buzz. The latter takes him into a karaoke competition and takes the opportunity to open his eyes to the reality of working-class France. Even if the Michèle Laroque/Claudia Tagbo duo convinces, Karaoke is limited to a comedy full of clichés about the confrontation of classes with falsely political discourse like we see so much and too often.
Downhold on Assie
BLUE SUMMER ★★☆☆☆
By Zihan Geng
For her first feature discovered at the Filmmakers' Fortnight, Chinese director Zihan Geng portrays a 15-year-old teenager, a shy child of divorced parents, whose heart races for the rebellious daughter of her father's new partner. An initiatory love story with an air of déjà vu, because of characters locked into archetypes. Too bad because the play on colors and the grain of the image expresses with great finesse the troubles of adolescence and the contradictory feelings that accompany it.
Thierry Cheze
FIRST DID NOT LIKE
CABRINI ★☆☆☆☆
By Alejandro Monteverde
In 1946, Sister Francesca Cabrini was canonized for having devoted her life to the rights of Italian immigrants on American soil. After Sound of Freedom, Alejandro Monteverde decides to tell his story. Through ignorance or simple laziness in writing, however, he seems to forget that a central female character does not automatically make a film militant… But what could be better than riding the feminist wave to convey a religious discourse. The finality: a story that goes in circles and makes you dizzy.
Lucie Chiquer
Et also
Dust, by Jean-Claude Taki
Repeats
Red like the sky, by Cristiano Bortone
Amelie's Journey – Amelie Rennt, by Tobias Wiesman
