Until now, the name of Joanna Hogg was known only to film fans accustomed to festivals, the simultaneous release of her two films,The Souvenir: Part I & Part II, finally allows the French public to discover a director who mixes her own life with her cinema.
In a very British style, as clinical as it is tender, Joanna Hogg tells the painful story of a young Englishwoman from a good family, a student in film school and madly in love with a mysterious dandy, whose addiction to heroin plunges this relationship into a toxic abyss.
“This story is one that Joanna Hogg experienced herself when she was in film school.”
Alexis Mas de Condor castat franceinfo
From the descent into hell to redemption through cinema, the mise en abyme is fascinating. We are in the 80s, but the narration seems to span the ages. Tom Burke is this decadent aristocrat, the young girl is Honor Swinton Burne, the own daughter of Tilda Swinton, who she plays her mother.
You have to let yourself be carried away by this long-term story, with its neat image, and discover a great filmmaker, Joanna Hogg, whose French distributor, Condor, has the courage to release the two films at the same time.
Little Solange by Axelle Ropert
Axelle Ropert also opts for a cinema that frees itself from temporality, while eyeing the new wave. There is Antoine Doinel in the character of Little Solangeyet a teenager of our time, faced with the trauma of the divorce of her parents, Léa Drucker and Philippe Katerine.
“I wanted to tell this horror of the violence that children have.”
Axelle Ropertat franceinfo
Jade Springer, 16 today, whose first film this is, embodies with a disconcerting naturalness this young girl who discovers at her expense the impermanence of adult love. With delicacy, Axelle Ropert makes melodrama without embellishments and captures the emotions of a learning journey, of those childhood moments that mark a lifetime.
Five years after the much noticed Florida ProjectSean Baker continues his exploration of invisible lives, in the shadow of large American cities. Red Rocket takes place in the seedy suburbs of Texas City, where Mike Saber returns, after a failed career in porn in Los Angeles.
Broke but overflowing with sass and mythomania, this magnificent loser settles in with his ex, dealing for a black mama, and seduces a girl who sells donuts, hoping to get back on her feet by making her appear in X movies.
Simon Rex, himself a former porn actor, is dazzling in the lead role, as pathetic and funny as he is touching in this race towards an inaccessible American dream.