The Poet’s Bride: an enchanting and enchanting parenthesis (review)
Awarded for her screenplay at the Angoulême festival, Yolande Moreau returns to directing with a tale as joyful as it is melancholy.
A film like an enchanted parenthesis. A film like a poetic declaration of love to those who prefer the side roads to the main roads. Ten years after HenryYolande Moreau (César for first feature 2004 for When the sea rises…, co-signed Gilles Porte) returns to solo production. And she plays the central role: a woman in love with painting and poetry who, as a waitress in a cafeteria, makes her living mainly from small businesses. A source of income that is no longer sufficient when she inherits a large family home that she must maintain. Which explains why she decides to take on three tenants, soon joined by a fourth man, her childhood sweetheart who she hasn’t had for years, a false poet but a real crook. The Poet’s Bride tells with infinite empathy, poetry and finesse this strange team who will improvise as picture forgers to meet their needs. There is no room here for the easy picturesque. Through her writing (in tandem with Frédérique Moreau), Yolande Moreau goes deep into her characters, reveals their contradictions, the limits of this life outside the confines of the nails where utopia regularly crashes into reality. But there is a joyfully melancholic tone, a way of telling about this little corner of the province which only resembles it. And a group of irresistible actors, from Sergi Lopez to Gregory Gadebois and William Sheller for his big cinema debut as a cross-dressing priest who, in his spare time, plays ABBA on the organ of his Church! A hell of a team.
Of Yolande Moreau. With Yolande Moreau, Sergi Lopez, Gregory Gadebois… Duration 1h43. Released October 11, 2023
