The Animal Kingdom, Bernadette, The sea air sets you free: What’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
THE ANIMAL KINGDOM ★★★★★
By Thomas Cailley
The essential
Socio thriller, fantasy fable, teen movie… At the crossroads of different genres and influences, the new film from the director of Fighters impresses with its emotional power and its exceptional actors.
All at once a pure teen film, a realistic melodrama, a fantastic nugget and an allegory of our times, the second feature from the director of Fighters is a real mutant movie. We quickly understand that in the world of its two heroes, a father (exceptional Duris) and his son (Paul Kircher, subtle and intense) a strange epidemic affects many individuals. People inexplicably transform into wild beasts and once transformed, society decides to lock them up. Clinging solely to his emotional trajectory, Cailley passes in one shot from the marvelous to the tragedy, from the fable to the thriller or from the comedy to the fantastic. His cinema horizon is as rich as it is varied and we feel the influence of Shyamalan, Spielberg and Carpenter as much as that of Franju. Ecological advocacy will never take precedence over the marvelous, any more than philosophical and social questioning will crush the genre film. A stunning masterpiece.
Gaël Golhen
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
OUR BODY ★★★★☆
By Claire Simon
Claire Simon set up her camera at the Tenon hospital in Paris to record consultations between patients and doctors. Assembling small stories (ranging from abortion to birth, from death to gender transition), the film shows the violence suffered by women’s bodies. Our body at first reminiscent of Wiseman or Depardon in the way he dissects an institution and transforms individual experiences into a universal tapestry. Until, in the middle of the story, in a dizzying twist, Claire Simon appears on the screen. She is discovered to have cancer. And it is she who begins to respond to the doctor, she who agrees to go bare-chested for a clinical examination, she who sheds tears when the diagnosis is announced… And the power of this documentary is increased tenfold.
Gaël Golhen
FIRST TO LIKE
BERNADETTE ★★★☆☆
By Léa Domenach
Bernadette is the story of a cover-up. That of Bernadette Chirac, First Lady of France between 1995 and 2007, confined by her “function” to making tapestry. For her first feature, Léa Domenach imagined a survival which sees her heroine, alone against everyone, finally take her revenge in defiance of official History. She assumes that she looks with empathy at a misanthropic Bernadette (Catherine Deneuve, very good) who in turn looks at a cynical world in which she suddenly intends to take part. This masochistic and rebellious trajectory is a perfect alloy for the comedy which proves to be extremely effective.
Thomas Baura
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SEA AIR SETS FREE ★★★☆☆
By Nadir Moknèche
Since his first feature, Nadir Moknèche has continued to challenge the clichés about the representation in cinema of characters of North African origin on both sides of the Mediterranean. And he continues this quest around a marriage arranged by their respective parents between a young man hiding his homosexuality from his family who, although not fooled, refuses to admit it and a young woman, broken after a toxic love story with a drug dealer. Moknèche creates a film as committed as it is engaging about self-acceptance, about the inevitability of an emancipation that is anything but obvious for both. And its subtlety also owes a lot to the nuanced interpretation of its duo of young actors: Youssouf Abi-Ayad and Kenza Fortas.
Thierry Cheze
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BETWEEN THE LINES ★★★☆☆
By Eva Husson
After the disappointing The Daughters of the Sun, Eva Husson gets back in the saddle by adapting THE Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift, the story of an impossible love in 1924 England between a young aristocrat (Josh O’Connor, Prince Charles of The Crown) and the maid of a neighboring manor, while the first is promised to another. A story which assumes its classicism with the beautiful light of Jamie Ramsay (She will) while shaking it up throughout a scenario made of back and forth between the different periods of the life of its heroine and the multiple trials that she went through and which gave rise to a vocation as a writer in her. And in this role, the Australian Odessa Young bursts onto the screen, magnified by the gaze cast on her by a director who we have known for Bang gang the pleasure of filming and celebrating the sensuality of bodies.
Thierry Cheze
LOST IN THE NIGHT ★★★☆☆
By Amat Escalante
Three years after the disappearance of his mother, an environmental activist, a young man searches for the culprits. His investigation takes him to a rich family of artists… The Mexican Amat Escalante continues to tell the story of the violence and corruption of his country, in a form a little less brutal and “in your face” than that of the smashers Los Bastardos And Heli. Lost in the night evolves at a destabilizing pace, made of false starts, of increases in power almost immediately defused. These convolutions echo the modernist architecture of the house where the film takes place. Coupled with the always very powerful way in which Escalante’s camera captures faces and landscapes (reminiscent of early Bruno Dumont), they end up forming an obsessive canvas, in which the filmmaker expresses his guilt as an artist “feeding “of the horror of the world.
Frédéric Foubert
THE OTHER LAURENS ★★★☆☆
By Claude Schmitz
A private detective must bury his mother while his niece comes into his life to ask him to clarify the circumstances leading to the death of his father, his twin with whom he no longer had contact. On the basis of the script of a film noir, Claude Schmitz (Rob Poitiers) juggles – as he usually does – with genres and dialogues with the American cinematographic imagination. An investigation into a murder near a border, the involvement of illegal groups and foreign countries, a slow slide towards the western… okay, but in Perpignan rather than Texas. Too long and diffuse to achieve the density to which it aspires, The other Laurens however, achieves the feat of being equidistant from Bruno Dumont and Harmory Korine, particularly through its stylized characters and settings, immersed in a fascinating and unrecognizable France.
Nicholas Moreno
I HAIL YOU BITCH – MISOGYNIA IN THE DIGITAL AGE ★★★☆☆
By Léa Clermont-Dion and Guylaine Maroist
On an armchair or a frail chair, four women, very erect, take turns facing the camera (as if they were at the helm). They have different ages, skin types, looks, nationalities and social statuses, but are linked by the same violence. They have been harassed online. Always are. In turn, they reveal themselves, eye to eye, to music, either melodious or frightening (the problem with the film). Recount the humiliations, insults, threats. Describe the same regime of fear and withdrawal. The same delegitimation of the police. This is the tour de force of the documentary: to dissect a process in its entirety, and to show that the violence is systemic. Policy. They come from these masculine-masculinists who silence and terrorize women. It comes from patriarchy. A life-saving documentary.
Estelle Aubin
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
ANY GENIUS IDEAS? ★★☆☆☆
By Brice Gravelle
Driven by “leadership of the heart”, Philippe Ginestet, boss of the GIFI and TATI chain of stores, self-made man, French incarnation of the American dream, is an ideal guru to film, such is his exuberance. But by scripting your appearances too much, there is a great risk of making the behind the scenes unattainable… And this is the trap into which this documentary by Brice Gravelle gradually falls.
Lucie Chiquer
NEGATIVE NUMBERS ★★☆☆☆
By Uta Beria
A decade after the disappearance of the USSR, Georgia’s prisons are still under the influence of the criminal group “thieves in the law”. And when the film opens, Nika is about to become their junior representative in a juvenile detention center, where he is already respected and feared. Negative Numbers depicts the true story of an informal hierarchy that a reintegration program through rugby by two former professional players disrupted. On the improvised field, strewn with dust and gravel, the young inmates – all played by non-professional actors – discover the power of sport which is neither minimized nor excessively supported by Uta Beria. His first feature film is certainly often slow and silent, but it screams the omnipresent violence of a dilapidated environment where nothing matters more than honor and dignity.
Sarah Deslandes
And also
Outside insideby François Havez
The covers
The Battle of Solferinoby Justine Triet
Mark Dixon, detectiveby Otto Preminger
