André Dussollier and Alex Lutz as father and son prisoners of a gigantic fire in the Landes

In full fire, Quentin Reynaud’s third film, in theaters on March 8, 2023, immerses the viewer in the camera of a car threatened by the flames of a huge forest fire in the Landes. A disaster that hides a more intimate, family drama, woven from one father to another, from one generation to another.

Under the crushing heat of a summer evening, the inhabitants of a district of the Landes scan the sky while preparing their luggage. They are waiting for the rain, which does not come. The next day, Simon is awakened by the ringing of an alarm. Fire threatens. We have to evacuate. Simon wakes Joseph, his father, who is cursing. They take their time to leave and are almost the last to leave the neighborhood when they embark on the route scrupulously indicated by the evacuation plans.

Very quickly, they find themselves stuck in a traffic jam. In the car, a sibyl spits out the choppy conversations of the firefighters and the police, which are becoming more and more tense. Simon and Joseph soon find themselves prisoners in the hell of flames that threaten on all sides…

Behind this climatic tragedy, filmed like a thriller, hides a more intimate drama. Simon once lost his daughter, the twin sister of his son Samuel, with whom relations are now difficult, if not non-existent. Added to this drama is Simon’s complicated filial relationship with Joseph, his own father, a former naval officer who was a bit of a gambler, and who, we understand, was not very present for his son either.

Behind closed doors revealing

Quentin Raynaud films the first sequence of this drama like a documentary, the camera closer to the two characters, with close-ups that tell of the fear that sets in, and which swells as the trap of flames closes on them. This device, an interior point of view at the heart of the drama from which the other protagonists are erased, appearing like shadows around the vehicle, is particularly effective and frightening. The director manages to subtly combine the collective drama with the intimate story of the two men.

This tense huis-clos in which the father and the son are together confronted with the threat of death gradually reveals the nature of the relationship between Simon and his father, and reveals another drama, older, which has made Simon, too, a defective father. Then opens the second part of the film, which stages in much wider shots – we left behind closed doors – Simon wandering in the smoke of a fire reviving scenes from the past.

This second part, more perilous, is generally less successful than the first. Even if Alex Lutz does everything he can to embody this lost father in the flames of the fire, and in those, more dreamlike, of his demons, everything is supported there, where one would prefer more mystery and of lightness. The film, shot before the great fires of last summer in the Landes, nevertheless has this virtue, with the force of fiction, of demonstrating the ravages and the very concrete consequences of climate change, and the negligence of men, consumed by a fire which they themselves lit.

The sheet

Gender : Drama, Action, Thriller
Director: Quentin Reynaud
Actors: Alex Lutz, André Dussollier, Laura Sepul
Duration : 1h25
Exit : March 8, 2023
Distributer : apollo movie
Summary: a giant fire ravages the Landes forest. Following an evacuation alert, Simon and his father Joseph leave their home but quickly find themselves trapped in their vehicle in the middle of this climatic nightmare. The blaze is getting closer. What to do ? Waiting for help…? Or will they not find a way out of this by going even deeper into the terrifying immensity of the burning forest?