A group of French vacationers spend their summer under the crushing Italian sun, by the sea. We swim there, we tan, and overall we are very bored; quite a bit of Campari in the glasses, and water in the gas between the couples. But the arrival of a handsome stranger, by boat, will upset all that, and question desire or fidelity.
“My desire was to work with these actors and actresses. I did not at all want to form a ‘perfect’ group. I wanted to attach myself to the story, but especially to the dialogues , so I reworked them a bit”, says Matthieu Rozé.
“I kept Duras’ dialogues as much as possible, asking the actors to be as precise as possible. And that’s what was funny for them, being in a frame, but having fun without being too literary, without necessarily having this Durassian musicality, of being very natural, I always told them: nothing is serious.”
Matthieu Rozé, directorat franceinfo
Known above all as an actor, Matthieu Rozé, for his first feature film as a director, therefore adapts The Little Horses of Tarquinia by Marguerite Duras, keeping the main part of the text, well helped by actors comfortable with this slightly offbeat side, such as Valérie Donzelli or Florence Loiret-Caille. And if Azure could have gone even further in the strangeness or the subversive, like the original work, the film is pleasant, also well helped by the image, the colors, or the music of Kid Francescoli.
Another adaptation, this time in documentary, of a book, that of the philosopher and sociologist Didier Eribon. Back to Reimsdirected by Jean-Gabriel Périot, is interested in nearly 100 years of life of the working classes in France, and the cross-cutting themes of housing, the relationship between communities, the condition of women too, thanks to numerous television archives or cinema, dialoguing with the text of the book, read by the actress Adèle Haenel.
“Didier’s personal story, Explain Jean-Gabriel Periot, it’s an example of the life of working-class people: his mother is a cleaner, then she goes to work in the factory, his father is in the factory, they live in Reims, so there is a whole context, but all the same there is something in common with this story and other particular lives, and bringing back archives made it possible to bring back other experiences. Some are clearly close, and sometimes there are differences, and despite these differences, there is therefore something in common.
So for me it was not a question of illustrating the text, as if for example I had done it in the form of fiction, so strictly telling the story of Didier’s family, precisely there we can ‘open up’ their story.”
Back to Reims also evokes, in almost all of its second half, the evolution of the vote of these popular and working classes, roughly from communism to socialism towards the extreme right or abstention, with also images of demonstrations of Yellow Vests, perceived as a continuity of certain struggles.
Finally, among the other releases of the week to advise you, the animated film Icarus by Luxembourg director Carlo Vogele, who takes slight liberties with mythology to tell us about the friendship of the boy who wanted to fly to the sun and son of the famous inventor Daedalus, with Minos, child with the head of a bull and son of the fearsome Minotaur, with a fine and very pretty drawing line, and above all magnificent decorations to represent ancient Crete, with the voices of Camille Cottin, Féodor Atkine and Niels Schneider.