Thriller by Paul Schrader, 1h50
“Gardening is believing in the future,” says Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), who is a horticulturist and manages the Gracewood plantations, an estate belonging to the formidable Norma, a patrician for whom “the best fertilizer is money”. Haughty, disdainful, Sigourney Weaver, with her pastel outfits and her Nancy Reagan hairstyle, is very Empress of the South. The lady is as terrifying as an evil queen from Walt Disney. A charity gala is getting ready. It’s the event of the year. Everyone is on deck. The nurseryman is not worried. His boss, with whom he has intimate relations once a week, has an additional favor to ask of him. His niece with a complicated background will disembark. Could he teach her the basics of botany, which might put her back on the right track? Maya is mixed-race. In the evening, in his dark room like a dungeon, Narvel keeps a diary from which his voice-over reads extracts. It only talks about plants. The man has come a long way. We realize this during a scene where he takes off his shirt. His chest is studded with neo-Nazi tattoos, swastikas in black ink. The apprentice will discover them by getting closer to her mentor, to the great displeasure of her aristocratic aunt. Filmed in images of quiet beauty, in a calm that is that of sleeping water, this story of redemption goes straight towards its goal, between perennial asters and climbing roses. IN
Drama by Juan Diego Botto, 1h43
In the Madrid of 2008, battered by the banking and real estate crisis, and mass unemployment, the ringing of an alarm clock, strident. The countdown begins. It’s the start of a film that will gallop over 1:43, following the crossed destinies of several characters stuck in an alarming daily life. Produced by Penélope Cruz, À contretemps, the first feature film by Argentinian director Juan Diego Botto sets up three parallel plots. On the one hand, we follow Rafa (Luis Tosar, very convincing). This lawyer specializing in social law, who had to take his stepson on a school trip, decides to find the mother of a little girl left alone in unsanitary accommodation. If he does not contact the mother before midnight, the little one will be placed in a home…The second plot features a couple with a young child who is unjustly threatened with expulsion. Played by Penélope Cruz, this supermarket employee is betting everything on an anti-eviction collective, which is fighting in solidarity against an administration overwhelmed by events, while her husband, who works in the building industry, is instead thinking of expatriating his small family to Argentina. The last story shows the steps of a lonely old lady who stands surety for her bankrupt son. These narrative frames will come together, showing that everything is linked. Between thriller and social chronicle, Àcontretemps plunges the spectators into a race against time at the heart of a painful reality evoking in turn injustice, solidarity and resilience. Juan Diego Botto’s straight-forward staging bets on realism, without being miserable. One thinks of course of the social cinema of Ken Loach, that of the Dardenne brothers and even sometimes that of Stéphane Brizé… But this captivating Madrid suspense in the form of immersion as close as possible to the dysfunctions of our modern societies, has its own DNA: a hint of Iberian toughness mixed with charm and warm hope. O.D.
Dramatic comedy by Arnaud Viard, 1h13
Boulevard Saint-Germain is deserted. The Luxembourg Garden is closed. Rue de Rennes, Arnaud Viard walks in the middle of the road. The containment was good. On television, Emmanuel Macron declares: “We are at war.” The hero keeps his children alternately. His ex-wife lives in the same neighborhood. This does not prevent resentment, disputes. Life circulates in this little film taken from life, as if live. Viard was right not to follow the instructions, to walk on these empty sidewalks. A voiceover tells us about the character. He is a provincial. Paris always seems to him a miracle. During the pandemic, the city belongs to him. What a bargain! He has just moved into a new apartment. Her son and daughter discover the place, jump on the beds, act stupid during dinner. Their father recounts his memories of high school. In third grade, he smoked JPS, those long cigarettes in their black patent packets. He took a photo of his father on his deathbed. Emotion slips into the images on tiptoe. No need to overdo it. Everyday life has its share of poetry. The pharmacy is a practical refuge. As it is held by Marianne Denicourt, behind its plexiglass wall, we understand that the divorced person buys gel and masks all the time. It’s a good time to fall in love. Everything is possible. Everything is allowed. You can put on a white suit à la Eddie Barclay, sketch out dance steps in the Place Saint-Sulpice, become the kings of the world. At 8 p.m., applause broke out to greet the caregivers. We had forgotten all that. Arnaud Viard, as comfortable in front of as behind the camera, has the merit of reminding us of this. What an intuition he had to keep traces of this unprecedented period. It’s like a diary, a declaration of love for the capital, a hymn to fantasy and freedom. IN
Animation by Jérémy Zag, 1h45
Ladybug arrives at the cinema. Marinette and Adrien, alias Ladybug and Cat Noir, stroll through the heart of a Paris recreated in the manner of Minnelli’s American musical comedies. This blockbuster of musical animation, in the French style, benefits from a neat drawing, and pretty sequences of action. We are swept away by its drive and this unacknowledged romance that runs through the plot… O.D
Documentaire de Kaouther Ben Hania, 1h50
Kaouther Ben Hania adapts a news item relating the radicalization of two Tunisian sisters and the family tearing that ensues. The film depicts the true story of Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian woman and mother of four daughters. Two of them left Tunisia to fight alongside the Islamic State in Libya, where they were arrested and imprisoned. Olfa Hamrouni went public with the fate of her teenage daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane, in 2016. She appeared on radio and television to bear witness to this family tragedy. Kaouther Ben Hania wanted to deepen the springs of this radicalization. Filmmaker experienced in documentaries (Zaineb doesn’t like snow) as much as in fiction (La Belle et la Meute, L’Homme qui a vente sa peau), she is the subject of a retrospective these days at the La Rochelle Festival, she mixes the two genres here. Olfa is not alone in telling her story. The actress Hend Sabri also interprets her role. In addition to this duplication, two actresses play Rahma (Nour Karoui) and Ghofrane (Ichraq Matar), the missing sisters. Olfa’s other daughters, Eya and Tayssir, play their own roles. In a disused hotel in Tunis transformed into a film studio, they replay scenes from their childhood and adolescence. If Kaouther Ben Hania’s sincerity and voluntarism are undeniable, his “therapeutic laboratory” gives the impression of forcing emotions, or at least of bringing them about with suspect efficiency. The device and the assembly induce a form of manipulation. Olfa and her daughters often cry on screen. Understandable tears. One can nevertheless wonder if they are enough to illustrate the resilience and the cathartic virtues claimed by the filmmaker through this hybrid object. E.S.
Documentary by Mateusz Kudla and Anna Kokoszka-Romer, 1h15
Michèle Halberstadt (ARP), who is releasing Promenade à Cracovie this Wednesday, a documentary on Roman Polanski, denounced the poor treatment that would be reserved for the film. It attacks the operators. “ They refuse to see it, says the distributor. They tell me that, in the context, it is better not to program it”. The context in question is the accusations of rape against the Franco-Polish director, which have earned him prosecution in the American courts for more than forty years, and other accusations of the same nature which he disputes. Exhibitors interviewed by AFP reject any form of censorship and question the quality of the documentary, which they believe is unlikely to attract crowds. ARP’s agit-prop paid off as Promenade à Cracovie was finally released on eleven prints in France this Wednesday. We see there stages Roman Polanski and his old friend Ryszard Horowitz, a photographer based in New York, back in Krakow. Co-directors Mateusz Kudla and Anna Kokoszka-Romer film the two Jewish artists walking the streets of their childhood. There is nostalgia. “‘It’s a bit like Disneyland,’ Polanski says. Alas, nothing remains of the past. There is also great pain in returning to the scene of the tragedy. Horowitz was deported to Auschwitz when he was 5 years old. It owes its survival to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist popularized by Steven Spielberg’s film. Polanski managed to escape from the Krakow ghetto and was hidden by a couple of Polish peasants, Stefania and Jan Buchala. In 2016, this family was recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem (the International Holocaust Remembrance Institute). Polanski attends the ceremony in Israel, in the presence of the grandson of Buchalas. He is also seen eating a sausage and being offered a beer by a fan in exchange for a role in an American film. Unlikely. E.S.
Also read Notre critique de Promenade à Krakow: Polanski sur les traces de son passé
Drame d’Alex Lutz, 1h31
A woman (Karin Viard) and a man (Alex Lutz) argue on a subway train. Then they make love in a photo booth before strolling through Paris at night, confiding, seducing each other. There is a final twist worthy of the Sixth Sense. Not very credible, it gives a little salt to this nocturnal romance. E.S.
Thriller by Guillaume Bonnier, 1h28
They are naive, these French. Venture by sailboat near Somalia with, on board, a complete stranger. That’s not the only quirk of this sometimes goofy film. On the other hand, he knows how to tell about life at sea, with its swims and its silences. Daphne Patakia shines in the sun. She is the first to see the pirates arrive. BP
Horror film by Patrick Wilson, 1h48
They are cursed from father to son. On the father’s side, Josh, a possessed forty-something, calls on an exorcist to forget the mental illness that led him to attack his family with great hammer blows. Any resemblance to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is purely coincidental. A short decade later, the son, Dalton, who has become an unpopular and tortured art student, frantically draws an eerie blood-red door. Like his father before him, he travels in a sort of horrific underworld from which monsters arise. The latter are revealed during student parties on a caricatural American-style campus. Patrick Wilson builds his torturous plot around an overabundance of clumsy clichés about the United States, which give his film an air of deja-vu. The whole offers a few moments of fright, quickly swept away by the slightly grotesque make-up of the monsters supposed to terrify us. E.P.
