It takes all the complicity between a director and his favorite actor to allow Vincent Lindon to put on the costume of a senior executive, after having been a supermarket security guard and a trade unionist in The law of the market (2015) and At War (2018), the two previous films by Stéphane Brizé, a filmmaker obsessed with the violence of social relations.
In Another worldVincent Lindon runs a factory, whose parent company in the United States is once again demanding to reduce the workforce for the sole benefit of shareholders.
“There I could no longer borrow from the documentary, I had to account for the intimate, through camera positions.”
Stephane Brizeat franceinfo
Hitherto a valiant soldier of this multinational, this executive has reached his own limit, he can no longer stand the dehumanization of his work, and the managerial newspeak carried by his hierarchical superior, played by Marie Drucker who is making a convincing debut at the movie theater.
Another world explores the ravages of this financial capitalism on the life of its executors, the wife of this man in full doubt asks for the divorce, exhausted by the invasion of the private sphere by the work of her husband. This intimate angle of view modifies Stéphane Brizé’s staging: silences, idle faces filmed on the frame, he closes his trilogy with a sharp cinematographic gesture.
In the current effervescence of Italian cinema, Laura Samani signs a first film in the form of a fable, with very neat images. Piccolo Corpo takes place at the beginning of the 20th century, on the shores of the Adriatic, where a poor peasant woman loses her dead baby in childbirth, even before she could be baptized.
Convinced that the soul of her child will wander for eternity in limbo, she clings to a popular belief according to which, far in the mountain, in a sanctuary, a miracle can occur, the time of a last breath , to name and baptize this baby.
With the small coffin on her back, this woman then begins a long journey and meets characters straight out of fairy tales. The beauty of the landscapes, the power of the faith of this character illuminate this story that Laura Samani contains in controlled sobriety.
This is a documentary that thwarts the rules of the genre and the clichés about the suburbs. Born in Aulnay-sous-Bois in Seine-Saint-Denis, to parents who came from Senegal in the 1960s, Alice Diop films fragments of life from north to south of line B of the RER, and inserts some family videos, memories of his childhood.
This film We does not carry any discourse on the suburbs but questions, through the story, what in France, today, makes this us.
“It’s a film that is part of a dissidence of a dominant imaginary on the suburbs.”
What is the link, apart from an RER line, between a Malian worker who lives in misery at La Courneuve, a retired woman who recounts her post-war youth, Alice Diop’s father, traditionalist Catholics who celebrate at the basilica of Saint-Denis a mass for Louis XVI, the bourgeois of Fontainebleau who practice hunting with hounds, and the writer Pierre Bergounioux met at his home in Essonne? The link is this film, it’s the cinema, which prefers questions to ready-made answers.