Every day, a look back at three highlights of the 2020 edition of the Francophone film festival
The film : The things we say, the things we do by Emmanuel Mouret
Love at first sight, the links that are made and broken by chance encounters, remorse, regrets… With his tenth feature film Emmanuel Mouret tells the story of love with this mixture of sweetness and cruelty which makes all its singularity. And sign, over the crossroads of love that compose it, his most successful film, the most fluid, the lightest, the deepest and the most brilliant. We thus follow Daphne, three months pregnant, who welcomes Maxime, the cousin of his companion François, who has had to be absent for his work, in his holiday home. Daphne and Maxime have never met. And, at first a little intimidated, they will get to know each other and rather quickly indulge in the little game of intimate stories about their love stories of yesterday and today
Then begins a story in flashbacks and flashforwards of a fluidity never failing. Each story that is developed there, each love at first sight, each attraction for one or another than the loved one, each suffering, each rupture are told, developed, shared with an art of rebounding and doing nothing. ‘let it show. Mouret’s brilliant dialogues and his virtuoso delicacy staging echo the restraint of his actors. At Mouret, almost no trace of these eruptive shouts which sweep away a love story to better tackle the next one. With him, love stories are like scars that never fade and build future couples. The violence and the pain felt are all the stronger as his characters refuse the confrontation. Not out of cowardice but out of education, because they have been used to fighting against the violence of their desires so as not to damage the other (too much). Without realizing that in doing so, the cruelty can only be more unbearable.
The things we say, the things we do is a great film about the irreconcilable desires of our lives, symbolized by the common thread of its story: can we both desire our companion’s cousin and be a good person? Everything is both extremely natural and written with an unstoppable literary sense. These words and these situations, each of his interpreters devours them and savor them with contagious pleasure. Interpreters who reflect the absence of any chapel spirit in Mouret. His cinema family does not close the door to any other, from Camelia Jordana to Niels Schneider, including Vincent Macaigne, Emilie Dequenne, Guillaume Gouix, Jenna Thiam or Julia Piaton. With one thing in common that connects them all: we’ve never heard them speak like that. With this mixture of restraint and intensity that make the quiet power and the gourmet flavor of Mouret cinematic universe. Today like yesterday. Today even more than yesterday.
The actress: Emmanuelle Béart in The Embrace
The emotion was palpable tonight when Dominique Besnehard, the big boss of the Angoulême festival called on stage the team of Ludovic Bergery’s first feature film. Starting with its main performer, Emmanuelle Béart, of whom he was the first to give her tests (for Pirates of Polanski … which she declined). The emotion was palpable because it accompanied the great comeback of Emmanuelle Béart after 9 years away from the big screen, devoted to the theater. “I ended up convincing myself that I could no longer play in the cinema” explains the actress. As if she had mourned it. And then Ludovic Bergery arrived. With a film about a character, she too at a crucial moment in her life. Her name is Margaux. She married very young to a man older than herself, with whom – we quickly understand she had not had a carnal relationship for a long time – and who has just died. So there she is faced with mourning as well as a certain regained freedom. But reviving your desire and relearning to desire the other is not a long quiet river. Ludovic Bergery tells it here in a perfect mix of modesty and rawness, humor and sadness. A sublime portrait of a woman standing, as if living a new adolescence but loaded with a past that weighs tons. The script is never condescending with his character. And his filmmaker’s gaze on the one who embodies it obeys the same logic. He does not need to push Emmanuelle Béart to her limits as she masters her subject down to its smallest cracks. And as a spectator, what a joy to pick up the thread of a conversation stopped 9 years earlier and which connects the Manon of Claude Berri, the Nathalie of Anne Fontaine, the Marie of Children of disorder, the Marianne of The beautiful noiseuse, Ingrid of I don’t kiss, Camille d ‘A heart in winter or the Nelly so dear to Monsieur Arnaud. All these women took her to Margaux. And seeing an actress surrender so emotionally and physically but never losing control is particularly fascinating. Run to admire it on February 3.
The revelations: Anna Cazenave Cambet and Tallulah Cassavetti for Gold for dogs
Festivals are fascinating in that, depending on their programming, unexpected links are woven between films. Like those who unite The Embrace And this Gold for dogs. In The Embrace, Margaux is reinventing itself. In front of Anna Cazenave Cambet’s camera, Esther, 17, invents herself, seeks herself, bumps into herself, constructs herself. Both will eventually come to pass. But both will do it mostly without depending on a man’s look of approval. A trend that we have seen growing this year in Angoulême and proof that the writing of female roles is changing profoundly in French cinema. But let’s come back more precisely to Gold for dogs which also offers a real trip to the land of cinema. It opens as 37 ° 2 in the morning (a sex scene as if to set the scene: start with what generally constitutes the conclusion of a coming of age story) and sees the shadows of No shelter, no law Agnès Varda,A violent poison by Katel Quillévéré, from Hadewijch by Bruno Dumont… Shadows that are never overwhelming, so much the power of Anna Cazenave-Cambet’s cinema grabs you from its foreground to never let go. Here she signs a sublime portrait of a young woman, with an appetite for life, sex and devouring love, who will lead her from the arms of a boy who does not deserve her to a fascination for a young nun in a convent whose doors she pushed open, a night of wandering. Sensory cinema, in motion that allows the viewer to project themselves into Esther, whatever their age or gender. And an appearance: Tallulah Cassavetti. For her first role, she delivers a breathtaking composition, managing to beautifully translate through her body, her face and her gaze the metamorphosis of her character. To see at the cinema on November 25.
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