Dead Leaves, Acid, Deserts... Films to watch or avoid this week

Drame d'Aki Kaurismäki, 1h21

Holappa is a construction site worker. He doesn't just suck ice. Ansa works in a supermarket. Their jobs are precarious. She loses hers because instead of throwing them away, she gave food that was past its expiration date to a homeless person. He is fired because of his alcoholism. They meet by chance one Friday evening in front of a karaoke show. They don't speak to each other, exchange a few leaning glances. Ansa gives Holappa his phone number. He immediately loses it by accident. She watches for the phone which does not ring. They will meet again, she will invite him to dinner at her place. Her loneliness is such that she is forced to buy cutlery for him. She will ask him to choose between her and the bottle. So. That's all. It is enormous.

Also read: Dead Leaves by Aki Kaurismäki, a jury prize drunk on alcohol and love

Dead Leaves constitutes an ideal “Little Illustrated Kaurismäki”. The characters live in a pale Helsinki that seems stuck in the 1960s, with jukeboxes playing Mambo Italiano and radios as massive as safes. In this city shrouded in fog, hope manages to shine with a fragile light. Comedy, aquavit and feelings, the Finn's talent flows naturally. IN.

À lire aussiNotre critique des Feuilles mortes: deux cœurs en hiver

Drama by Guillaume Nicloux, 1h33

La Petite opens with the organized chaos of a cabinetmaker's workshop, not far from Bordeaux. In the middle of the wood chisels, a telephone rings insistently. This damn phone call that Joseph (Luchini, therefore) is reluctant to make will ultimately cut the misanthropic artisan's stump for good. The following image, the dazed character arrives with his daughter at a medical-psychological center where he is told that his son died suddenly in a plane crash, along with his partner. At the funeral, Joseph speaks with the companion's parents. The couple had launched a GPA (surrogacy). Against all odds, he sets off in search of this anonymous surrogate mother. He ends up getting his hands on a certain Rita Van de Velde (Mara Taquin), a young single mother who lives with her 9-year-old daughter in Ghent, Belgium.

Also read: Fabrice Luchini: “I didn’t really know what GPA was before making this film”

Despite a last act that is undoubtedly too predictable, the drama unfolds some lovely sequences. Fabrice Luchini composes a touching, taciturn and die-hard character. Between lovely moments of humor, a few moments of restrained joy and the dull sadness of a mourning that he cannot cope with, Luchini walks on a thread: that of interrupted communication with his son. Brought to life with a bang, La Petite is a short film lasting one hour and a half. What surprises the most is the subtle complicity between Luchini and the young Mara Taquin. The Belgian actress stands out against him with such endearing passion, energy and sensitivity that she is undoubtedly the real revelation of the film. O.D.

Also readOur review of La Petite: Fabrice Luchini on the edge of emotion

Comedy by Delphine Lehericey, 1h23

Some couples don't know how to age: Germain and Lise escape this sad category. Age doesn't seem to affect them, they feel alive. The pleasure they take in devoting themselves to their activities protects them from the boredom of old age and the anxiety that accompanies it. He (François Berléand), lies in bed in search of lost time with relish. She signed up for a contemporary dance creation with La Ribot - who plays herself and choreographs the dance sequences in the film. The Catalan choreographer, figure of the underground, writes her new show half with amateurs and half with professionals. Lise and Germain secretly made a pact: the survivor will follow in what the other was doing. On returning from a rehearsal, Lise succumbs to a heart attack. The children deploy a military organization to watch over their father: meals, guards, phone calls. He doesn't care. He went to see La Ribot to explain the pact made with Lise. She agrees to take him into the room. Delphine Lehericey delicately writes and films the relationship between the old gentleman and the choreographer, reserving her art as a caricaturist for those around her. She is helped by Berléand who plays an unworthy old man with the grace of an adolescent: grumpy on the outside, chaotic on the inside, but won over little by little by the way the troupe relies on him and understands. his story at a time in his life when he is being infantilized. A.B.

Also read Our review of Last Dance! : praise of old age

Drama comedy by Faouzi Bensaïdi, 2 hours

Ouarzazate, Erfoud or Beni Mellal, between Marrakech and Casablanca. The filming locations of Déserts, ocher landscapes enhanced by the Scope format, inevitably evoke the lands and villages affected by the violent earthquake which hit Morocco on September 8. But Déserts, presented at the last Cannes Film Festival (Cinematists' Fortnight), is not a postcard intended to bring tourists back to the kingdom en masse. It begins with a road map blown away by the wind. Hamid and Mehdi will have to drive on sight, without GPS or moral compass. They work for a debt collection company, traveling miles to reach isolated villages and trying to extract money from over-indebted families. The result is rarely convincing. At best, the two nickel-plated feet leave with a carpet. In this road movie which stands still, or rather which goes in circles, without departure or arrival, Hamid and Mehdi have the false air of Vladimir and Estragon. There is Beckett in the desert in Faouzi Bensaïdi. Déserts then leaves the marked path of social satire. Hamid and Mehdi are entrusted with an unnamed man who escaped from prison. “ The Escapee” supports the narrative. On horseback, gun on his shoulder, a vengeful and silent cowboy, he seems straight out of John Ford's Prisoner of the Desert. Hamid and Mehdi disappear from the landscape to better reappear in the background, wandering spectators, helpless and exhausted of a heroism of a vanished time, of a cinematographic genre which no longer exists – the western. E.S.

Also readOur review of Déserts: red carpet for uberization

Drame de Pham Thien An, 2 h 58

Anaïs Demoustier, president of the Caméra d’or jury in Cannes, warned us. She wanted to reward a purely directorial film. The first feature film by Vietnamese director Pham Thiên Ân illustrates this wish to the point of caricature. Through the return of a man to his native village to bury his sister-in-law who died in a motorcycle accident in Saigon, a slow, mystical road movie, which questions the divine will with an unshakeable faith in cinema and in patience of the spectator. E.S.

Fantastic by Just Philippot, 1h40

After La Nuée and its carnivorous locusts, Just Philippot imagines a world subject to acid precipitation. A father (Guillaume Canet) and his daughter try to survive this uncontrolled climate. An agreed and marked dystopian plot (The War of the Worlds, The Road, The Last of Us). Nothing very new in the rain. E. S.