in a taxi with Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson in an intimate film

Director Christy Hall achieves a feat by putting two stars in a car for the entire film. “Daddio,” a time capsule that keeps the outside world at a distance.

Daddio is presented this Friday, September 13 at the Deauville American Film Festival. Is it a talkative film? Is it an independent experience? Or a work in tune with the times? Or even filmed theater? Daddio is first and foremost an ambition of its director Christy Hall. Everything takes place in a confined, reassuring space. Only Dakota Johnson’s exit from New York’s JFK airport in search of a taxi to go home to Manhattan offers an outdoor scene. Once the customer gets in, the driver, played by Sean Penn, starts the car and the film. A closed-door setting with three characters: the passenger, the driver and… the cell phone. The outside world is represented by this intrusive object.

Yet it is thanks to the smartphone that the dialogue, at first jerky then fluid, superficial then deep, is established. The driver, who has seen it all without ever having gone very far, thanks his client for not having his nose constantly in his phone. Then begins a tête-à-tête, disrupted only by SMS notifications. The passenger is having an affair with a married man. She is starting to get tired of her lover’s sexual messages. What is she really looking for? During the journey, she speaks frankly, exposing herself to this stranger she will never see again.

The film is carried essentially by the two actors who manage to leave the outside world outside the taxi to express their humanity without artifice.. Sean Penn as a battered man ready to revive at the slightest spark of hope, Dakota Johnson as a wounded woman with a stolen childhood. “I first envisioned Daddio as a play that could be staged in a small, off-off-Broadway experimental theater… maybe in the East Village. The play’s run has since exceeded my wildest hopes, but initially I was primarily interested in capturing the spirit of my favorite plays. Stories that provide safe, judgment-free spaces for real adult conversations about the world,” explains Christy Hall.

Daddio may seem a bit long-winded at times, a bit verbose, with the taxi driver who turns his experiences into universal truths, his personal experiences into unshakeable certainties, and the client, intelligent and independent, looking for a reassuring figure. Daddio, filmed theatre not devoid of poetry. A moment of humanity.This film can be considered a kind of time capsule. A short story with global resonances,” defines the director. Daddio, a film out of time.

Form

Title : Daddio

Gender : drama

Duration : 1h40

Realization : Christy Hall

Distribution : Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson

Theatrical release: December 4th

Synopsis: At JFK airport in New York one evening, a young woman climbs into the back of a taxi. As the driver starts his car heading towards Manhattan, these two people who were never meant to meet begin a most unexpected conversation…