The Rapture, Lost Country, The Poet's Bride... Films to see or avoid this week

Drama by Iris Kaltenbäck, 1h37

Already, the evening had started badly: on the cake, the pastry chef had got the first name wrong. That's not all. Her fiancé admits to her that he slept with someone else. Lydia will go to the party alone. There is at least one good news: Salomé, whose birthday it is, discovers that she is pregnant, which earns us a nod to a sequence from Friends. Lydia welcomes the news in silence. Jealous? Maybe not. She didn't tell her best friend that she had just broken up. Lydia is a midwife. In the evening, instead of going home, she walks the streets of the big city, in her little red teddy jacket. She meets Milos who is a bus driver. They spend the night together. For him, the episode will be without tomorrow. Lydia doesn't hear it that way. She harasses him. He asks her to leave him. Months have passed. The big day is coming. Lydia assists Salomé in her delivery (“Faster, faster, faster!”). She holds the baby in her arms to relieve the mother. In the elevator, she comes across Milos who has come to visit his hospitalized father: she suddenly tells him that the child is his.

A slow spiral takes place. Lydia plays the babysitter. Milos is happy to be a father. Real parents suspect nothing. With The Rapture, Iris Kaltenbäck gives flesh to a news item that would fit into ten lines in a newspaper. The company owes a lot to the performance of Hafsia Herzi. The actress makes the distress tangible, with her funny voice, her even, unforgettable tone. IN.

Also read: Our review of the film The Rapture: a funny child’s play

Drama by Vladimir Perisic, 1H38

We are very serious when we are 15 years old. Stefan is a wise teenager, a diligent student. But, in this year 1996, in the streets of Belgrade, anger is brewing. The Socialist Party lost the municipal elections; Slobodan Milosevic's regime refuses to admit defeat. Students mobilize, print leaflets and prepare demonstrations. Stefan has little interest in politics. He has a close relationship with his mother, Marklena. This beloved mother is the spokesperson for Milosevic's government. It spreads in the media to denounce the fifth column which wants to plunge the country into civil war. At home, she whispers on the phone, organizes propaganda, manipulation of opinion and repression of demonstrators. Stefan becomes the traitor, the son of the “bitch.” His friends turn their backs on him. Obituaries are posted in Stefan's building. They announced Marklena’s death, “following a shameful speech on May 20, 1996.” Stefan tears them away, filled with suppressed rage. The conflict of loyalties consumes the boy.

In Lost Country, written with French filmmaker Alice Winocour (Revoir Paris), Vladimir Perisic draws inspiration from his own story. He was twenty years old in 1996. His mother worked in the Ministry of Culture under Milosevic's government. Upon his arrival in France for his studies at Fémis, in 1994 he also read an article in Libération on the suicide of the daughter of Mladic, the leader of the army of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia, convicted of crimes against humanity. A year before Srebrenica. The ending of Lost Country, of terrible pessimism, undoubtedly has the value of an exorcism for these children of war. E.S.

Also read: Our review of Lost Country: shame as a legacy

Dramatic comedy by Yolande Moreau, 1h43

In Charleville, along the banks of the Meuse, a strange procession parades. At its head, an unconventional bride and groom, a lunar cowboy in a fringed jacket and immaculate jeans, hat on his head and leather cord around his neck (Esteban), hand in hand with his “young” wife (Yolande Moreau ) in a long blue and gold embroidered dress, looking like a Slavic babushka, her long white hair pulled up in a loose bun. The marriage is not quite one, the spouses are a false couple, but that doesn't matter, it's time for the wedding.

In her new film, The Poet's Bride, Yolande Moreau has summoned a joyful and baroque cast, surrounded by a beautiful line-up of actors. In this lovely comedy, she is indeed Mireille, this “fiancee of the poet” who, after a stay in prison, returns to her hometown and her childhood home, which she inherited. In this large decrepit building, guarded by the statue of a monumental deer, she decides to welcome three very different tenants, but who are all hiding something. Cyril, a young student at the Beaux-Arts, where she works as a canteen attendant, angry with her family; Bernard, a municipal gardener who goes out at night transformed into a transvestite; and Elvis, an undocumented Turk who loves folk and America. They are soon joined by Fernando, Mireille's former great love, who betrayed and abandoned her years before.

Brooding over these rascals with her melancholic blue gaze like a falsely severe mother hen, ensuring the smooth running of the household with small cigarette deals, she will take her world on a strange adventure. Yolande Moreau undoubtedly reveals a lot in this film, her third, a little crazy like her characters but madly endearing, with a tender humanity that is a little outdated but radiant. V.B.

Also readOur review of The Poet's Bride: Yolande Moreau puts us at the wedding

Drama by Jean-Pierre Améris, 1h43.

Chatty waitress, Marie-Line (Louane, La Famille Bélier) has little horizon beyond her native Havre. Her docker father lost his leg in a work accident, the school didn't really want her. So when the handsome and cultured Alexandre (Victor Belmondo) gives her the eye, she melts. But what future do they have for a cinema enthusiast and a neophyte who thinks that François Truffaut is the founder of the garden centers of the same name? The breakup is brutal and cowardly.

In her pain, the young woman comes to blows. Here she is brought to court where the judge (Michel Blanc, grumpy and wild as hell) tells her his four truths. But through a curious game of chance, Marie-Line will become his driver. Their cohabitation, their abrasive frankness will push everyone to confront their fears to reconnect with their ambitions and dreams.

Despite a trailer suggesting an intergenerational comedy, Marie-Line and the Judge is more of a fable about melancholic social determinism. The sincerity and spontaneity of Louane and Michel Blanc are not entirely enough to convince us of the truth or the scope of the predictable statement. This pretty duo goes around in circles a little too much. C.J.

Drame by Vanessa Filho, 1h59

“I was with Gabriel, mom. He wrote me a poem.” “Is he in your class?”, the mother responds ingenuously to her child. As in Perrault's tales, she did not see the wolf coming. The viewer, yes, who knows the story of Vanessa Springora, through her story Le Consentement, which told how the writer Gabriel Matzneff had abused her and made her his thing when she was not yet 14 years.

Published in 2020, the work had the effect of a bomb in the Parisian literary world, which, after a few convolutions and coughs, banished the one it had praised for more than forty years. “He’s a pedophile!”, chokes up Laetitia Casta, who plays the mother of young Vanessa (Kim Higelin) in Vanessa Filho’s film. What does it matter that Gabriel is 50 and she is 14. In the role of the pedophile Jean-Paul Rouve, thin, bald and precious, puts on his dark glasses outside and takes them off inside in the privacy of his bachelor pad where he abuses his young prey. Was it necessary to make a film of this story which forcefully imposed its truth? This is the question we ask ourselves when we come out of this painful projection. One of the producers' arguments aims to make this text about control and dispossession known to an audience who does not know Gabriel Matzneff.

The author was not named in Vanessa Springora's book, except by the letter G. He is clearly identified and cited here, but, by reducing the character to his perverse dimension alone, it is difficult to understand how a teenager could succumb to its charm. It would have been interesting to decenter the story by focusing on describing this environment which is so complacent with the mature man appearing with teenage girls. The film misses this opportunity to paint this society in both its most seductive and darkest shades. F.D.

À lire aussiNotre critique du film Le Consentement: Gabriel Matzneff pour les nuls