A lonely nurse, at the end of her rope, played by Marina Foïs, whom panic attacks prevent from getting out of her car, and a young man who plays it rogue who has promised to avenge the death of his brother, played by Benjamin Voisin, César for the best male hope after his performance in Rubempré in The lost illusions by Xavier Giannoli.
Here is the duo – improbable in appearance – that Didier Barcelo presents to us in Freewheeling. Two endearing characters who will travel together to Cap Ferré, crossing paths with other colorful protagonists.
We don’t really know, says Marina Foïs: “It’s not bad, we are in an era where you have to pitch, classify, label, format. All those who manage to resist this thing, that’s good, it’s more of a plus. No ?”
Benjamin Voisin, for his part, took great pleasure in working with a more experienced actress, with a multi-faceted game:
“She’s super humble, because I find that the tone of the stage, she was often the one bringing it in, and I was just wandering around in that as much as I could, but great actors bring everything up to standard. where you feel the difference, you say to yourself: hey, he’s made 100 films, he’s often the actor with whom you get bored, where you feel a bit of a lesson. There, it’s just two artists who are trying to meeting and doing the prettiest thing possible. So that’s what I love.”
Marina Foïs will be showing two other films in the coming weeks, As Bestas by the Spaniard Rodrigo Sorogoyen on July 20, and Year of the Shark of the Boukherma brothers on August 3.
Ronit Elkabetz died of cancer in 2016, she was 51 years old. In three films, Take a wife, The 7 days and The trial of Viviane Amsalem, co-directed with her brother Shlomi and in which she plays the main role each time, she dazzled by her talent, by the tragic depth of her acting. Six years after her death, Shlomi Elkabetz offers two films on the magnificent love story that binds to his sister, Black notebooks 1 and 2for he says,,“give a new appointment to Ronit, in the cinema, if not to live it in reality”.
Much better than a documentary, this unique work is situated between fiction and reality. Because for decades, Shlomi Elkabetz has been filming, all the time, her sister, her parents, the life of this Jewish family, who came from Morocco to Israel, and whose dramas cross her trilogy, from Tel Aviv to Paris. The film extracts dialogue with the images of real life, we get lost with emotion in the links woven between the two worlds. Ronit Elkabetz appears as the female character of an Italian opera, death rode, but there is such an impulse of life and so much love in these two films, that one would like to believe that the cinema has worked a miracle.
“I wanted to magnify life, because we know what happened, how it will end. But to magnify life, to give it the full sum of feelings, emotions, thoughts, in everything that we feel every day when we open the window.
It’s never just opening the window, it’s opening up to the world. This is where I wanted to come from, by making this kind of cinema. Try to create in this film the connection that would say to the public: it’s a movie, but believe it’s reality. Afterwards, of course, it was more difficult, I really had to say goodbye to Ronit. But I had the chance to make this film.”
Third and last tip of the week, again in a completely different genre, the thriller Decision to Leave, by South Korean Park Chan-wook, who this time takes a step back from baroque violence to introduce us to an investigator from Busan who falls in love with a woman suspected of murdering her husband. A dense and multi-layered script, a virtuoso and graceful production, a film that takes us on several contradictory emotions. Decision to Leave was awarded the prize for directing at the Cannes Film Festival.
Finally, starting tomorrow it’s “Cinema Festival” in France, until Wednesday. All films at all screenings, in all cinemas, at the single price of 4 euros.