This week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “Last Summer” by Catherine Breillat and “The Book of Solutions” by Michel Gondry.
In May, during the last Cannes Film Festival, Catherine Breillat was jubilant to be there, in competition with her film Last summeralmost incredulous, 10 years after her last film, evoking how she had been defrauded by Christophe Rocancourt who had taken advantage of her weakness, following a stroke.
At 75, she still films desire in a unique way: her main character, Anne (Léa Drucker), a bourgeois woman, throws herself body and soul into a relationship with Théo (Samuel Kircher), her husband’s son. It’s dizzying and Catherine Breillat makes Anne say: “Dizziness is the irrepressible fear of the desire to fall”. The love scenes are sublime, inspired by a painting by Caravaggio, between love and death, Eros and Thanatos.
Léa Drucker plays here undoubtedly her best role, she is as moving in her abandonment as in the way in which her character extracts herself, without empathy, from this sulfurous affair.
The Book of Solutions by Michel Gondry
His last film was in 2015, it was called Microbe and Diesel, few people have seen it and remember it. Before that, there had been the relative failure of his adaptation of The foam of the days, 20 million budget for 800,000 entries. And it was during the post-production of this film that Michel Gondry broke down, before being diagnosed with bipolar disorder shortly after.
A period that he therefore chooses to recount in this new film, with Pierre Niney as his alter ego, the so-called Marc, a filmmaker, who, faced with the producers’ refusal to validate the editing of his latest film, leaves to finish it at his aunt’s house, in the countryside, with a small team.
The film is a comedy, it is very funny, but be careful, it still tells something dark: we often laugh out loud in the face of someone who is doing badly, and who is abusive to those around them. The Book of Solutions is therefore a UFO – unidentified film object – a habit for Gondry. Laughter is never far from discomfort, and vice versa. But it still remains often hilarious, and Pierre Niney’s comic dejection is quite astonishing.