Reminiscence: Lisa Joy on the trail of great film noir (review)

This thriller with Rebecca Ferguson and Hugh Jackman reminds you of Inception? It's normal ! The director feeds on the same thematic obsessions as the cinema of… her brother-in-law Christopher Nolan.

In a half-submerged Miami (climate change obliges), Nick Bannister (played with class by Hugh Jackman) is a former soldier turned private detective. With the help of a strange machine, he invites himself into the memories of his clients who can relive moments from their own past in 3D. When the mysterious Mae (Rebecca Fergusson as an inscrutable femme fatale) walks through the doors of Bannister's office, she wants to use the machine for an obscure pretext. Mae will actually take the hero on a dangerous adventure where he will have to face crooked politicians, corrupt cops and violent drug dealers.

ReminiscenceLisa Joy's first feature, can be (re)watched this evening on TF1, after Dune : the channel is planning a special evening Rebecca Fergusonwhich should please viewers who spent the whole week investigating the mystery she left hanging in her interview: which movie star dared to yell at him on a set?

Hugh Jackman is ruled out as a suspect because they had already appeared together in the musical The Greatest Showman before signing for this film, very reminiscent of the work of Chris Nolan. They got along well enough to team up again for this very different project, which First advise you.

Here is our detailed review, originally published in summer 2021 for its cinema release.

From the start, the filmmaker takes great care to display her references, like blanks. From the voice-over to the femme fatale, including the cynical billionaire and the neon-lit sets, Lisa Joy follows in the footsteps of the great noir films. A little of Chinatowna lot of Blade Runner a hint of Minority Report : the homage film is conscious and controlled.

The filmmaker skillfully plays on genre clichés; she can rely on a couple of glamorous actors, and achieves some great action sequences (including a graceful underwater scene). But it is above all Christopher Nolan that we think of when we see Reminiscence. Lisa Joy is the sister-in-law of the director ofInceptionbut she is above all obsessed with the same themes as her beau.

Its blockbuster-prototype thus explores the realm of dreams, examines the (devastating) effects of time and plays with superimposed narrative layers. She telescopes timelines, realities, death impulses in a ballet that is sometimes confused but always seeks to orchestrate the loss of the senses. The trouble is that his techno-thriller never quite takes off, the fault of pretexts that are a little too phoney (the femme fatale returns to the private detective because she has lost… her keys), non-existent characters and ultimately very little at stake. It is only at the end, when she finally touches the shore of pure mythology, when she plays with notions that are ultimately more literary than visual or theoretical, that she ends up finding the note of her film and its emotion. – a little too late.

Trailer :

Dune: meeting with Rebecca Ferguson, the mother of the messiah