Second round, The Old Oak, 3 days max: what’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
SECOND ROUND ★★☆☆☆
By Albert Dupontel
The essential
Albert Dupontel takes the pulse of the France of Macron and BFM TV in a political fable which does not find the cartoon virtuosity ofFarewell the idiots.
After Goodbye idiots, which marked a form of artistic achievement for him, Albert Dupontel returns with a new speedy and sentimental fable. A freewheeling journey through the depressed and eco-anxious France of the 2020s. It is about a presidential candidate (Dupontel himself), who hides secrets, under his guise as a Macron-style robotic banker. explosives which the journalist from a 24-hour news channel (Cécile de France) is investigating. The plot resembles a mix between two political fables from the end of the seventies, The Face of the Other And Welcome Mister Chance. Armed with these influences, both poetic and disconcerting, Dupontel intends to oppose his dreamy idealism to the cynicism of the time. But his utopian speech is lost in the twists and turns of a story that is less incredible than laborious.
Frédéric Foubert
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MOVING ★★★★☆
By Shinji Sômai
Thirty years after its discovery in Un Certain Regard in Cannes, Moving is finally released in French cinemas. Proof of the superior quality of the work, time has had no influence on it. Better, this news – even delayed – reinforces its status as an essential and totally synchronous work. This tenth feature film by Japanese director Shinji Sômai, who died of lung cancer in 2001, is the story of a divorce seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old child suddenly tossed between two homes. The staging, which operates mainly through sequence shots, manages to convey both psychological and physical tension. And in the last part, in a formidable mise en abyme of the gaze, the film truly touches the sublime. It’s high time to discover Shinji Sômai.
Thomas Baura
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FIRST TO LIKE
THE OLD OAK, OUR PUB ★★★☆☆
By Ken Loach
Ken Loach goes back in time to 2016 in an excited mining town plagued by massive unemployment where the arrival of Syrian refugees will create tensions in an increasingly impoverished population. And he makes the local pub and its tender, worn-out boss, via his friendship with a Syrian woman keen on photography, the backbone of his heart-wrenching new film. At 87 years old, Loach is not giving up. It has anchored in the heart the certainty that the humanism of some will ultimately triumph over the filth instigated by others, those who seek abroad as the scapegoat for their misfortunes. This utopia could seem fabricated and naive. But in Loach, because of her entire journey, she sweeps you away with her deep sincerity and proves to be the ideal antidote to the sad passions that undermine our time.
Thierry Cheze
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THE SYNDROME OF PAST LOVES ★★★☆☆
By Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni
After having tried everything to have a child, Rémy and Sandra turn to a new doctor who diagnoses them with the poetic “past loves syndrome”. They will therefore have to sleep with all their respective exes to hope to become parents. On this absurd and crazy premise, the young couple embraces different contemporary questions about love: why this desire for a child? why does Sandra’s number of exes embarrass Rémy? Why is she embarrassed when he fully embarks on the mission? The new feature film from the directors ofA crazy life pertinently questions where heteronormative romantic relationships stand. It calls into question almost all the certainties that the couple had at the start, and is overwhelming with the tenderness with which it leads its characters to conceive of love differently.
Nicholas Moreno
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SISSI & ME ★★★☆☆
By Frauke Finsterwalder
70 years after the film that launched Romy Schneider, Sissi continues to inspire filmmakers. After Bodice worn by Vicky Krieps, Frauke Finsterwalder undertakes to dust off the image of the obedient young monarch, both in form (musical anachronisms in the style Marie Antoinette) than on the merits by focusing on the last part of his life and his singular relationship in domination-submission mode with his ultimate companion. As Bodice, Sissi & Me relies on the quality of its interpretation, starting with the duo formed by Susanne Wolff (Styx) and Sandra Hüller. But the portrait of this Sissi, as capricious as she is traumatized by the demands of her functions and fleeing male company to live surrounded by women, she is also seduced by the quality of her writing, playing between pure fiction and historical facts to deliver a feminist manifesto rich in ambiguities.
Thierry Cheze
KATAK, THE BRAVE BELUGA ★★★☆☆
By Christine Dallaire-Dupont and Nicola Lemay
It’s a classic animated fable (a young beluga is mocked for his physical difference and must prove that he is like the others, etc.), with his team of friendly talking animals (special mention to Cyrano the seahorse)… All this is indeed good (and comes to us from Canada), but what brings out Katak of the lot? Surely its very fair way of defusing violence, by showing that it is also a question of heritage: the conflict between belugas and orcas (marine mammals, not Sauron’s cannon fodder) which underlies the film n It’s just a reproduction of the parents’ battles. Katak, the brave beluga explains that it is up to the new generation to try to break the cycle. And so in the infinite ocean of animated children’s films, Katak becomes remarkable.
Sylvestre Picard
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
SAW ★★☆☆☆
By Kevin Greutert
Well, where were we in the saga? Saw ? No need to revise for the tenth film since it slips chronologically between the first and the second. For what ? But to do it again Saw in the old style, let’s see, where Jigsaw tortures people who vaguely deserve it in traps that are really completely twisted (this is not necessarily a compliment: we are swimming in complete delirium). The film ends up making the serial killer a kind of super vigilant and asks his audience to get on his side in order to make the most of (no other word) this Fort Boyard du torture porn. It doesn’t go very far, and, my goodness, it wouldn’t take much for Saw X becomes a genuinely good horror film. Cutting through the fat of this very long film (thirty minutes of exposition!) would already be a start.
Sylvestre Picard
THE POD GENERATION ★★☆☆☆
By Sophie Barthes
At a time when the debate on the excesses of artificial intelligence is in full swing, Sophie Barthes decides to push the reflection to its climax: are technological advances synonymous with the destruction of the natural order? In a (very) near future where excessive digitalization and commodification are the order of the day, this moral conflict is embodied by a couple, Rachel and Alvy, whose opinions diverge as they opt for an artificial ectopic pregnancy in a POD, a sort of interactive egg. But the imperceptible repercussions of this “commercialization of the uterus” leave us unmoved and, accentuated by a smooth staging as possible, the whole thing is sorely lacking in flavor… To the point that the spectator finds himself dehumanized. . But maybe that was the point?
Lucie Chiquer
ROOM 999 ★★☆☆☆
By Lubna Playoust
The once standing tree is now lying down. Wim Wenders filmed this tree forty years ago on the side of a highway which took him to the Cannes Film Festival. He placed it as a preamble to his documentary, Room 666, which questioned the future of cinema. Godard, Spielberg, Antonioni… placed themselves, alone, in front of the lens to try to answer it. 1982 – 2022, Lubna Playoust takes up the torch with Room 999. The tree in the preamble was therefore uprooted, metaphorizing a decline. Wim Wenders is the first to confess, as dejected as the trunk, (from memory): “ digital technology has replaced celluloid and destroyed part of the soul of this art… » Follow Audrey Diwan, David Cronenberg, Olivier Assayas, or even… Kirill Serebrennikov. The Russian, mute, undresses and gesticulates like a puppet in the middle of the suite. The future of cinema belongs to those who do not ask themselves the question.
Thomas Baura
A BRIDGE OVER THE OCEAN ★★☆☆☆
By Francis Fourcon
Two indigenous cultures face to face. One permeates the Osage plains of Oklahoma. The other, the peaks of Occitanie. Two women, Isabelle (the Occitan among the Osages) and Chelsea (the Osage among the Occitans), placed on opposite land, recount their rites. We walk with them through the golden landscapes, the history of these two countries, surprisingly linked, and their fight to preserve their language. But the production remains too classic, with an accumulation of educational and static facing cameras.
Estelle Aubin
YEARS IN PARENTHESES ★★☆☆☆
De Hejer Charf
Three years ago, Covid-19 disrupted our lives. Rather shook them. Canadian director Hejer Charf, confined to Montreal, has collected testimonies (more than fifty), images, sounds, voices, ages, landscapes, objects from these two “years in parentheses”. What emerges is an original, political, prolific patchwork, from here and elsewhere. Melancholic too. A look into the retro necessary and ultra-poetic, but which comes up against a staging that is far too conventional.
Estelle Aubin
PREMIERE DID NOT LIKE
3 DAYS MAX *
In 2024, the Fifi gang will celebrate 10 years of non-stop success since Baby sitting. And we do not see how this sequence of 30 days max – and third production by Tarek Boudali – would interrupt this series. He finds his character there as a clumsy police officer who has three days to free his grandmother kidnapped by a Mexican cartel, with an obvious desire to impress. But this obsession with efficiency is to the detriment of comedy, where he prefers to duplicate certain gags ad nauseam, certain of their effects, rather than inventing others. Bottom line: we quickly tire of the gossip around David Guetta, Chantal Ladesou’s character in search of underhanded husbands to inherit their fortune and the blunders of her cop character, through gags always constructed in the same way and therefore stale. And we get really bored in the face of such little audacity.
Thierry Cheze
THE VOURDALAK ★☆☆☆☆
By Adrien Beau
In the depths of a forest, a marquis finds refuge with a family living under the yoke of its patriarch, Gorcha, who has become a vampiric creature. Adaptation of the short story by Alexis Tolstoy, some will find charm in this twilight atmosphere. But the outdated performances and jarring costumes make the film laughable, and the heightened theatricality quickly gives way to unease…
Lucie Chiquer
And also
Mountain Sailorby Karim Aïnouz
The covers
The Apointmentby Lindsay C. Vickers
False pretensesby David Cronenberg
Kuronekoby Kaneto Shindo
Onibababy Kaneto Shindo
The Munakata Sistersby Yasujiro Ozu
A woman in the windby Yasujiro Ozu
Zombieby George A. Romero
