The week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “Les Pistolets en plastic” by Jean-Christophe Meurisse and “Kinds of kindness” by Yorgos Lanthimos.
Published
Update
Reading time: 7 min
Jean-Christophe Meurisse has been developing in cinema what has made him successful in theatre for 15 years, with the company “Les chiens de Navarre”: unfiltered, trashy, schoolboyish and political humour.
Three years ago, in Blood Oranges (his second film) he was inspired by the Cahuzac affair. Here, he revels in the Scottish episode of theDupont de Ligonnès affairwhen a poor innocent man, mistaken for the murderer of Nantes, was arrested at Glasgow airport, and we all remember the inglorious media hype surrounding this false lead.
In Plastic guns, It is in Denmark that a good guy is arrested because he looks like the murderer Paul Bernardin, who is having a great time in Argentina. Kafkaesque interrogation among the very scrupulous Danes, useless French cops, a duo of amateur investigators on the loose, Jean-Christophe Meurisse delights in the morbid fascination with the news item, in what we consciously or not project into the successful escape of the murderer and offers his actors a formidable playground, with very effective duets and controlled improvisations.
In this game of massacre which does not spare us the gore, let us salute the performances of Jonathan Cohen, Laurent Stocker, Vincent Dedienne, Aymeric Lompret, Norah Hamzawi, Romane Bohringer, Philippe Rebbot and the faithful from the theater: Delphine Baril, Charlotte Laemmel, Anne-Lise Heimburger, Gaëtan Peau, Fred Tousch and Anthony Paliotti.
A rather unclassifiable and indefinable film, divided into three parts and three stories, more or less independent, which rely on the same trio of main actors, each time playing different characters.
Either Emma Stone, for their third collaboration, and in the wake of her Oscar won for Poor CreaturesWillem Dafoe, and the discreet but omnipresent in Hollywood Jesse Plemons, honored at Cannes with a best actor award.
Three stories that talk about control, emotional dependence, toxic masculinity, and even a cult. It’s dark, stifling, and even sometimes quite gloomy, it’s often perched, we’re not far from a form of contemporary art happening, but Yorgos Lanthimos seems to inject more humor this time than in his films that preceded Poor Creatures.
You would have understood it, Kinds of Kindness is not devoid of qualities, we must recognize the Greek director for making films which both resemble him, and do not resemble any other, but it remains uneven, sometimes bloated, and in this specific case, unfortunately, far too much long, with still 2h45 on the clock.