He is a leading director of French cinema who is making his return for his 10th feature film. Jacques Audiard, who has directed the greatest (Emmanuelle Devos, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris, Marion Cotillard …), this time brings together four actors little known to the general public. They are the heroes of the film The Olympics, a black and white drama that follows the romances of young people aged 20 to 30 in this district of the 13th arrondissement of Paris.
Émilie (Lucie Zhang), a telephone advisor who is looking for her way after studying at Sciences Po, and Camille (Makita Samba), an enlightened professor of literature, become lovers from the first minutes of their roommate. The burning desire that connects them quickly gives way to contradictory feelings that invite them to open up to other encounters. Nora (Noémie Merlant), who is resuming her studies at Tolbiac after starting her career as a real estate agent in Bordeaux, tries to fit into a party where her look will make her unwittingly pass for Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth), a porn actress who shows off on the web during paid services. Humiliated, the young thirty-something turns her back on college and ends up working for Camille, who will immediately fall under her spell.
In this often suggestive and unbridled loving square, but never embarrassing, desire forms the basis of all relationships. Jacques Audiard’s camera is invited into the apartments of these young adults with confused feelings, for whom sex is a safe haven. Through a succession of sketches and a few lengths, we focus on four characters who in themselves represent the diversity of the neighborhood: they bring “a great social and cultural interpenetration”, as the director points out in an interview with Franceinfo. We like to guess the outcome of their emotions, which without much surprise, will converge on love very gently.
Between a few very geometric aerial views of the 13th arrondissement, the black and white reinforces the aestheticism and the nuance of the emotions of the four characters, touching by their history and their sensitivity. If sexuality remains at the center of the game, it is always illustrated to lead to the search for a need, whether it is to overcome a trauma, to fill a weakness, to overcome a frustration. Jacques Audiard remarkably puts forward these states of lightness, jealousy or surprise which follow antics and ends up presenting them as a means of accessing more stability, in an era that facilitates meetings excessively.
We wonder for 1h46 about the blurred border between passion and love, but we also laugh a lot with these young people sentimentally disoriented. A real change of style in the filmography of the 69-year-old director, who adapts the comic here Intruders Adrian Tomine with the help of Céline Sciamma (Best Screenplay Award at Cannes 2019 for Portrait of the girl on fire) and Léa Mysius (César 2020 for the best adaptation for Roubaix, a light).
Far from his black films which have earned him so many awards (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a prophet, Rust and bone …), Jacques Audiard once again shows his ability to renew himself, as he had done for A very discreet hero Where The Sisters Brothers. With a superb photograph as a common denominator, it is this time a modern, fair and humble love story that the public will discover in The Olympics, Wednesday November 3 at the cinema.
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Kind : Drama
Director : Jacques Audiard
Actors : Lucie Zhang, Noémie Merlant, Makita Samba, Jehnny Beth
Country : France
Duration : 1h46
Exit : November 3, 2021
Distributer : Memento Distribution
Synopsis : Paris 13th district of the Olympiades. Emilie meets Camille who is attracted to Nora who herself crosses paths with Amber. Three girls and a boy. They are friends, sometimes lovers, often both.