The week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “A Difficult Year” by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, and “Killers of the Flower Moon” by Martin Scorses.
As in each of their films, the Toledano/Nakache duo takes on a social theme, and even two here: over-indebtedness and new environmental activists.
The film presents us with a trio: Albert, played by Pio Marmaï, big mouth, a bit of a crook on the edges, baggage handler in Roissy, and himself riddled with debts and credits, who meets Bruno, Jonathan Cohen, in a personal situation and financial even worse than his. Third protagonist, Valentine alias Noémie Merlant, young environmental activist, in an association which advocates symbolic and spectacular actions, such as blocking roads or supermarkets, at the time of “Black Friday”. A trio who will meet thanks to the free aperitifs organized by the activists.
Even if this time we are not at this level of absolute mastery that we were able to see in The meaning of the party in 2017, it still works very well, we laugh a lot, thanks to the dialogues and the writing. And even if there are some slight lengths, the three main actors do the job.
Special mention to Jonathan Cohen, who we have certainly seen a lot in recent months, but who is in a depressed version here, almost mute, and to the supporting roles like Mathieu Amalric, freewheeling and quite irresistible.
Killers of the Flower Moon by Martin Scorsese
It is the 27th film by the New York maestro which opens a little-known and inglorious page in American history. In the 1920s, in Oklahoma, the Osage Native American tribe lived in opulence, thanks to the oil discovered on their reservation. But for white people it’s an anomaly,
Robert De Niro plays a breeder, patriarch, who boasts of protecting the Osage, while he does everything to despoil them, his greed involves unsolved blood crimes. Leonardo Di Caprio, his nephew, freshly returned from the 1914-18 war, enters his service and marries a native woman, the formidable Lily Gladstone. His uncle plays on his crass stupidity, but the love story he lives is sincere, it goes off the rails. Martin Scorsese goes intimate, and works for history with a capital H.
So yes, it’s very long (3h26) but it’s remarkably documented, filmed by and with the Osage, who validated the film, there are a host of fascinating characters, we witness the birth of the FBI, the romantic and political breath is there. The final scene, a radio play with Scorsese as a guest star, is crazy, and Lily Gladstone, revealed by Kelly Reichardt in Some women in 2016, is overwhelming.