It is sometimes risky to compare the roles and achievements of those able to pass in front of as well as behind the camera. As for Nicole Garcia, her deep voice and intensity further inspire filmmakers to offer her tragic and incandescent characters (Peril in the house, by Michel Deville, do you remember?), her personality as a director is not so different. Of Place Vendôme at Evil of stones Passing by The adversaryshe has been weaving for 30 years and in nine feature films a canvas in chiaroscuro where devouring passions are accompanied by shameful secrets, and how many cruel silences.
This is how we could sum up loversco-scripted by his lifelong accomplice, Jacques Fieschi, since One week-end out of two, a variation of the threesome in its most shadowy form, close to film noir, even if Garcia does not seek to perfectly reproduce the codes of the genre. Her characters may sink into misfortune, but she never offers a breathless vision of the nightmare in which they are plunged, focusing instead on their inner excesses and their impulses of the heart. This posture is supported from one end to the other by the director of photography, Christophe Beaucarne, another regular in the world of Garcia, who captures the beauties of Mauritius under often twilight looks.
This heavenly corner represents the central part of a story in three chapters, and in three distinct places, each serving as the setting for the turmoil of a dangerous affair between Lisa (Stacy Martin), a hotel student, and Simon (Pierre Niney), a drug dealer for the Parisian upper class. Their osmosis, both carnal and psychological, will not resist the death by overdose of a client in the prime of Simon’s age, which will cause a brutal and painful separation. It is precisely under the sun of Mauritius that they find themselves, by chance and a few years later, he a beach attendant and she a woman of the world on the arm of Léo (Benoît Magimel), a rich insurer who has cashed in his Swiss passport. . Their reunion will not only revive old memories, but also the flame, the one that burns everything in its path. And the immolation will take place in Geneva, presented here in its least romantic light, if by chance it has one.
As Evil of stones belonged body and soul to Marion Cotillard, Nicole Garcia made of Stacy Martin, passed by the hard school Lars von Trier (Nymphomaniac), the tiara of this conjugal drama, the object of desire of two men separated by everything (age, social condition, physical strength, etc.), but who are blinded by the same woman. Evolving in transient places, squatting in sinister apartments, luxury or low-end hotels and soulless chic houses, this infernal trio multiplies evasions and deceptions.
In a style reminiscent of that of Claude Chabrol, minus the well-oiled mechanics, Nicole Garcia surrounds her characters with a halo of lies, provoking misunderstandings, failed appointments, aggressive behavior (Léo demonstrates his silent domination in the bedroom) or erratic that lead them to new trajectories. Garcia does not bother with plausibility either, including that surrounding the reunion of the cursed couple in the Indian Ocean as in Switzerland, preferring to describe in minute detail the psychological turmoil of this waltz of feelings in three times and on two hemispheres.
Many clichés stick to the skin of actors who have become directors, including this supposed benevolence when directing their playmates. There is nothing exaggerated about Nicole Garcia, because she knows how to get the best out of three great performers from different backgrounds . Niney and Martin are never eclipsed by the calm strength of a Benoît Magimel who we have already seen more expressive (unforgettable in In his lifetime, by Emmanuelle Bercot), here in flayed skin camouflaged his wounds. Less a hectic thriller than an implacable loving x-ray, lovers soberly exposes the fatal desires of this tragic threesome.