The week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “Madame Hofmann” by Sébastien Lifshitz and “Rosalie” by Stéphanie Di Giusto.
Published
Reading time: 157 min
Sylvie Hofmann is a nursing manager at the northern hospital in Marseille. 40 years in the profession, serving others, unfailing dedication, in a profession where resignations are more and more frequent, the portrait of Madame Hofmann is also a gloomy inventory of the hospital public in France.
From the intimate to the universal, Sébastien Lifshitz, a very delicate filmmaker, who takes his time, creates a little gem. He very quickly detected in Sylvie Hofmann a character both common and exceptional, a woman without filter, who exposes as much the beauty of her profession as her doubts, her discouragements.
It’s a beautiful story, from the Covid crisis in an oncology and palliative care department to the retirement of Sylvie Hofmann, with fabulous supporting roles: her mother, little Italian granny, former caregiver, and who fights her cancers with devastating humor, her husband, a wise pre-retiree with a fragile heart. Sébastien Lifshitz was under the spell.
Rosalie by Stephanie Di Giusto
In the France of 1870, Rosalie, played by Nadia Tereszkiewicz, was born with a genetic abnormality. If she does nothing, her body and face become covered in hair, so this is called a woman with a beardand she finds herself married by her father to Abel, an indebted café owner, played by Benoît Magimel, who marries her for her dowry, without knowing anything in the early days of her secret.
In a rather suspicious and hostile community, Rosalie will reveal herself little by little, making her hair first an attraction, then an emancipating force. If Rosalie does not escape a form of classicism, which is sometimes less kindly called academicismit’s quite nicely filmed, with pretty sets and costumes, several scenes lit by candlelight.
In the main role, Nadia Tereszkiewicz is doing very well, it’s more unequal for others, and basically, there is this rather feminist idea of a woman who takes her autonomy in a society which rejects her, and of a pure love which would try to triumph over adversity, two things which can also be attractive.