Céline Salette is remarkable in Green Algae (review)

This evening, on Canal +, Pierre Jolivet, the director of My Little Business, focuses on a health scandal that shook Brittany.

Following suspicious deaths, Inès Léraud, a young journalist, decides to settle in Brittany to investigate the phenomenon of green algae. Through her encounters, she discovers the fabric of silence that surrounds this ecological and social disaster. Faced with pressure, will she succeed in making the truth triumph?

Famous for its comedies or social dramas, from My small business (1999) Men of Fire (2017), Pierre Jolivet returned to the cinema last summer with Green algae. An investigation carried out by Celine Sallette (The Apollonides, The Ghosts, The Flame…) on the health scandal which has affected Brittany in recent years.

Told by Inès Léraud and Pierre Van Hove in the comic strip Green algae, the forbidden story, published by Delcourt, this true story is adapted for the screen by the first, accompanied by the director. And it is therefore she that Sallette plays in this drama.

Nina Meurisse, Julie Ferrier, Jonathan Lambert and Hervé Mahieu complete the cast of this film to be seen again this evening on television, in encrypted form. Here is our review.

The green algae scandal has been polluting – in every sense of the word – life in Brittany for years. An ecological disaster which, to be eradicated, requires radical changes in the region’s agriculture and its use of pesticides, at the risk of forcing certain farms already over-indebted to close down.

Halfway between The Girl from Brest And Dark Waters, Pierre Jolivet takes up this subject with a great sense of pedagogy by bringing to the screen the investigation of journalist Inès Léraud (Céline Sallette, remarkable) to bring out the truth. But with his desire to transmit messages, he signs a film that is unfortunately too academic both in its cinematographic form and in the exchanges between its different protagonists, with often artificial dialogues. And it makes you wonder if a documentary wouldn’t have been a more appropriate form.