Proxima: Eva Green in her best role (Review)
Alice Winocour signs an ambitious film, impressively masterful, with a deliberately feminist message.
With each film, Alice Winocour likes to explore new territories. His first feature, Augustine recounted the relationship between Professor Charcot and his patient suffering from hysteria in France at the end of the 19th century. His second, Maryland, was a paranoid thriller centered on the relationship between a bodyguard suffering from post-traumatic stress upon his return from Afghanistan and the woman he was supposed to protect. With Proxima, the director sets out to discover the world of space conquest: an astronaut is faced with separation from her 8-year-old daughter before embarking on a year-long journey into Earth orbit. Films like so many journeys guided by the same ambition. That of evolving each time in an extremely realistic environment. With Proxima, Alice Winocour opens the doors to us of the structures where European astronauts train, in Cologne, Star City near Moscow and Baikonur. She details the meticulousness of the preparation, the precision of the training. Everything is done so that the spectator lives this experience in immersion in a world which cultivates its mystery towards the general public. All with a realism that never prevents lyricism and poetry, as underlined by the subtle and heady music of Ryuichi Sakamoto (the Revenant).
AMBIENT MISOGYNY
The first advantage of Proxima, is to present space travelers as ordinary people. Gone are the days of superheroes! Today’s cinema astronauts are scientists, extraordinary athletes but also human beings with their weaknesses and their emotions. This is why, if the director joins the issues of recent films like Ad Astra Or First Manher Proxima never stutter with them. Because its originality lies in the choice as protagonist of a female astronaut, Sarah. A heroine who evolves in an essentially male professional world where her skills are constantly called into question, where she must prove more than the others at every moment. Being a female astronaut, says the director, means facing ambient misogyny, but also, sometimes, refusing one’s femininity. Which is even more complex when you are also a mother, like Sarah. A divorced mother who, without her ex-partner being absent – quite the contrary –, most often finds herself taking responsibility for her child’s daily life. And, here again, in the description of this mother-daughter relationship, Alice Winocour finds the right tone. Proxima never seeks to glorify motherhood: the film reminds us that a child also involves anxieties to calm, whims to manage… A succession of emotional roller coasters weighed down by the question of the long separation and the potential danger of death that surrounds this mission.
DIFFICULTY OF BEING A WOMAN
To play this courageous mother, the director chose Eva Green, whose haughty bearing, apparent coldness and acting stripped of all artifice bring depth to the story. The actress has never been so convincing. Alice Winocour surrounded her with solid supporting roles, from which emerges the impressive debutant Zélie Boulant-Lemesle who, neither model nor rebel, oscillates between the maturity of a child of divorce and the innocence of a cradled child. of dreams. We come out of Proxima lastingly marked by the beauty of this adventure, the desire to salute with respect all the female astronauts presented in the end credits and the certainty of having seen, beyond its subject, a very beautiful film about the difficulty of being woman in today’s world. A feminist film, in the most exhilarating sense of the term.
Proxima, in theaters November 27, 2019.
