Love me tender, She doesn’t hear the motorbike, Resurrection: what’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
LOVE ME TENDER ★★★★☆
By Anna Cazenave-Cambet
The essentials
A powerful adaptation of Constance Debré’s book about her fight to regain custody of her son. And Vicky Krieps once again masterful!
In 2020, Constance Debré published Love me Tender, a book where she candidly recounted her fight to regain custody of her son that her ex-husband had removed when she revealed to him that she was now having love stories with women. Anna Cazenave Cambet (Gold for Dogs) captures this intimate story while retaining all the emotional power that twists your stomach in the face of the injustice experienced by this woman. Thanks to the strength of the text of course. Thanks to the filmmaker’s intelligence in understanding that duration constitutes a central element of the way in which we, as spectators, experience her heroine’s fight. But also and above all thanks to the way in which Vicky Krieps takes on this eminently complex character in a constant economy of words and gestures since she must absorb everything without overreacting otherwise her chances of regaining this famous guard will be further reduced. A huge actress.
Thierry Cheze
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
SHE CAN’T HEAR THE MOTORCYCLE ★★★★☆
By Dominique Fischbach
It was around 2000 that Dominique Fischbach met Manon, then aged 11. She was looking for a family to talk about disability from the point of view of siblings and will therefore film that of Manon, two of whose three children are deaf. The director fell in love with her at first sight and will therefore come at regular intervals to film her surrounded by her family, giving birth to two short films. Before proposing that they continue this long-term work with a feature film for the cinema, starting from a moment of family reunion which would allow them to tell their story over 25 years using their archives and the material that she had collected herself. The result turns out to be a marvel of sensitivity. Dominique Fischbach is always at a good distance from those they film and from the images of the past at his disposal. She knows how to ask the right questions at the right time, as well as remaining silent to give way to eloquent silences. And never confuse curiosity with intrusion. A tour de force.
Thierry Cheze
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FIRST TO LIKE
THE CONDITION ★★★☆☆
By Jerome Bonnell
Change of register for Jérôme Bonnell (Le Temps de l’aventure) with this adaptation of Amours by Léonor de Rocondo. He, who knew how to explore romantic passion so well, here depicts the drift of non-sentiments through an arranged marriage in the France of 1908. The one which unites, in a small provincial village, André, a haughty notary, and Victoire, who quickly finds herself cramped in the role of the model wife. Before a third person invites himself into this duo: their maid Céleste whom André – to whom Victoire refuses any carnal contact – forces to sleep with him and who will become pregnant. A child that will be “stolen” from him to be the long-awaited heir… Here we find what makes Bonnell’s cinema so special. The quality of his direction of actors, the always relevant look he takes on his female characters and his mastered staging which avoids any academicism. A film of infinite delicacy where this story of more than a century reveals itself with great modernity.
Thierry Cheze
ANIMAL TOTEM ★★★☆☆
By Benoît Délépine
A year after Gustave Kervern (and his magnificent Je ne me sera plus faire on Arte), here in turn is Benoît Délépine, sole master aboard this Animal Totem where we have the pleasure of rediscovering what makes the salt and spice of their works as a duo, this way of intertwining humor, poetry and politics through stories that go off the beaten track. In this case, a road movie – their emblematic genre, from Aaltra to Saint-Amour – in the footsteps of a mysterious character who arrives at Beauvais airport, with a simple suitcase on wheels. And which we follow throughout his pedestrian journey towards La Défense, where we will discover the goal of his mission, driven by an ecological fight. And we will quickly forget his last straight line to retain the gentle madness which accompanies this journey carried by the always immense Samir Guesmi who one might believe escaped from a Tati film and the excellent supporting roles which surround him, including Patrick Bouchitey so rare on the big screen.
Thierry Cheze
LOUISE ★★★☆☆
By Nicolas Keitel
Nicolas Keitel says that Louise was born from an image that haunted him: two kids huddled on a staircase who heard their mother being beaten by her partner. This is the starting point of this first feature and the flight of one of the two sisters from the family home to start a new life under another identity. Before, 15 years later, she finds traces of her mother and her sister, manages to get in touch with them without saying who she is and ends up wondering if and when she should reveal who she is to them. Audience Award at the Saint-Jean-de-Luz festival, Louise is a film dominated by a permanent tension where Keitel mixes genres – psychological thriller, melodrama, family drama – with a dexterity which nip any tearfulness in the bud. A real film about actresses too where the trio formed by Diane Rouxel, Salomé Dewaels and Cécile de France bring relief and accuracy to this heartbreaking chronicle on resilience and forgiveness.
Thierry Cheze
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
CHASING SANTA CLAUS! ★★☆☆☆
By James Huth
Furious that Santa Claus (played by Patrick Timsit) did not deliver the gift she wanted – a compressed air blowgun to destroy the favorite toy of the boy who harasses her at school, the son of the very snobbish family that owns the biscuit factory that keeps the town going! – little Zoé decides to go find him so that he can repair his mistake, whatever the cost! This is the starting point of this Christmas family comedy where we find in the writing the gentle madness of the pen of the late Laurent Tirard (for his final screenplay, co-written with Benjamin Dupas) and in the production – colorful, hectic – everything that made the salt of the delirious Serial lover, Hellphone or Brice de Nice by James Huth, to the subscribers absent from his two previous films Rendez-vous chez les Malawas and Le Nouveau toy. It’s a shame that the specifications – to address as many people as possible and to all generations – inevitably lead to a final stretch whose cuteness contrasts with the rebellious spirit of its beginning and makes the film stick too closely.
Thierry Cheze
LADY NAZCA ★★☆☆☆
By Damien Dorsaz
A mathematics teacher between the wars, the German Maria Reiche struggles to cope with the frantic pace of the city of Lima, Peru. His chance meeting with the archaeologist Paul d’Harcourt offers him a way out, heading towards the calm desert of the Nazca province. While the character of Paul was partially invented, that of Maria did indeed exist: Damien Dorsaz here fantasizes the life of the Lady of Nazca, a little woman who devoted her life to the study of pre-Inca geoglyphs. If he gives us a most conventional period film on a story that is nevertheless unusual, it is to better spare us the artifices of staging which would have slowed him down in his quest for purity. All that remains is the ethereal dialogue between the breath of the wind and the grains of sand, between the stifling heat and the sparkling water, like a call to meditation.
Lucie Chiquer
GIRLS FOR TOMORROW ★★☆☆☆
By Nora Philippe
In 2015, French documentary filmmaker Nora Philippe arrived in New York with a baby under her arm, met four students at Barnard College, and promised to film them until 2045. Ten years after the start of the enterprise, the result is difficult to convince: too many journeys to tell, too many historical events to synthesize. How can we talk about all these important things, the sum of which makes up life, without reducing them to sad truisms? The director still has twenty years to find the answer.
Nicholas Moreno
FIRST DID NOT LIKE
RESURRECTION ★☆☆☆☆
By Bi Gan
After Un grand voyage vers la nuit in 2018, we wondered what type of artist Bi Gan was: a new prophet or his perfect counterpart, an author who wouldn’t have much to say with his pen camera and would smoke us out under a layer of artificial virtuosity? This Resurrection has the merit of lifting part of the veil. If the first part places its staging in the service of a visceral and sincere love for the cinema of origins, once Pandora’s box (here a suitcase!) is opened the magic immediately evaporates. The film then embarks on a long nocturnal stroll into the heart of its own emptiness. In the absence of mystery, the images and sounds, flatly treated, produce nothing other than a fairly basic dialectic of cinema: Gallery of broken reflections, reconfiguration of time, senses awakened by subtraction… It is not only with intentions or intuitions that a film exists, it needs bodies, living things, organs…
Thomas Baura
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MEHDI’S LITTLE KITCHEN ★☆☆☆☆
By Amine Adjina
Mehdi (Younès Boucif) works as a chef at the Baratin restaurant – a name that suits him well. Always playing the role of the “perfect Algerian son” with his very traditionalist mother, he hid his love for French gastronomy and for Léa (Clara Bretheau) from her. When she demands to meet her family, Mehdi asks a friend, the whimsical Souhila (Hiam Abbass), to pretend to be her mother… A comedy about the complicated relations between France and Algeria, Amine Adjina’s film suffers from a big problem: we never believe the incredible deception imagined by its hero, and we therefore don’t laugh much at the laborious misunderstandings it causes. The sympathy capital of the actors could make everything pass, but even the great Hiam Abbass looks a little lost here – especially in this scene, emblematic of the forced fantasy of the film, where she teaches belly dancing to passengers on an Intercity train.
Frédéric Foubert
And also
Alice here, there, by Isabela Tent
Private Hunting 2, by Antonin Fourlon and Frédéric Forestier
The Chosen One, by Osgood Perkins
Mission Santa Claus, by Damian Mitrevski and Ricard Cusso Judson
The covers
Fires on the Plain, by Kon Ichikawa
Me Ivan, you Abraham, by Yolande Zaubermann
