The week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “Une famille”, documentary film by Christine Angot and “Hors-saison” by Stéphane Brizé.
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Reading time: 7 min
The idea of this documentary A family, came from Christine Angot herself, in the summer of 2021. EShe is on tour in France to promote her latest book, The Journey to the East (Flammarion) which once again focuses on the rapes she suffered as a teenager at the hands of her father.
And as stages of this journey are located in Mulhouse, Nancy, and Strasbourg, my father’s city, she decides, accompanied by the great cinematographer Caroline Champetier, to go and confront the latter’s widow. HASith a camera, to film their reactions, interactions, and therefore make cinema. VSIt is brilliant, of incredible and almost unprecedented power, and Christine Angot wants to send hypocrisy, cowardice and silence flying.
Each scene is overwhelming, we are at first plunged into real unease, when, so many years later, neither this woman, nor the author’s own mother, manage to show empathy, and bring everything back to themselves. But don’t think that the film, necessarily harsh, is often only sad or heavy, In other dialogues between Christine Angot and her ex-husband Claude, or her daughter Léonore, there is a lot of light, appeasement, healing. And all this makes for true, beautiful, great cinema.
Out of season by Stéphane Brizé
After three films with Vincent Lindon with a strong social and political tone, between which had slipped A life, according to Maupassant, Stéphane Brizé takes us to Brittany where an actor, Guillaume Canet, treats himself to a luxury thalassotherapy session to recover from having cowardly fled a play.
Depressive Canet in a bathrobe and slippers, we tell ourselves that it’s off to a bad start, especially since he’s already done it in his own films. But, magic of cinema, this character of a spoiled child, who we want to shake like Obélix shakes a Roman, finds (again magic of cinema) a youthful love, who came to get lost on the edge of the ocean, the sublime Italian actress, Alba Rohrwacher.
15 years earlier, he, beginning to have success, had left her like a spa slipper, she reminds him, he finally apologizes. And Miracle again, these reunions are touching, well filmed, especially thanks to Alba Rohrwacher, moving as a wounded woman, who, perhaps, will once again allow herself the fire of passion.
An actress often seen in the films of her sister Alice, but not only that, Alba Rohrwacher is very subtle in her acting, the same cannot be said of Guillaume Canet, especially when he plays the depressed Canet.