Fabrice Luchini, astonishingly sober in La Petite (review)
The French-speaking film festival opened last August with this contemporary drama about mourning and family reconstruction, by Guillaume Nicloux. A success, to be (re)watched this evening on Canal +.
A free electron who regularly likes to change register, Guillaume Nicloux returns with The littlea few months after the violent horror thriller Tower to a more sober and peaceful melodrama but no less rich in contemporary themes.
Adapted from the novel by Fanny Chesnel, The cradle, the film follows the steps of Joseph, a widowed and lonely cabinetmaker who learns of the accidental death of his son and his companion. The couple was expecting a child from a surrogate mother living in Belgium and Joseph decided against the advice of those around him to go looking for this young woman to convince her that he can take care of this baby which he will theoretically be Grand father.
Attracted by the subjects of mourning and resilience, the filmmaker treats his story with restraint by focusing on the meeting between two beings who everything seems to oppose (a taciturn sixty-year-old and an anxious surrogate mother played by the excellent Mara Taquin) but who will have to find common ground. Addressing the legal status of GPA in the background and highlighting the rebirth in the protagonists of hope and vital energy, the filmmaker gives a golden role to Fabrice Luchini and takes full advantage of the haggard gentleness whose the actor is capable. Nicloux thus enjoys drawing, with a salutary absence of irony, a luminous hero who wants to ward off fate to repair his intimate wounds. And the film deploys from start to finish a humility that is almost too demonstrative but highly comforting.
Trailer for The little :
