After “Young Woman”, Camera d’or 2017, Léonor Serraille portrays an Ivorian family between Paris and Rouen, from the 80s to the present day. The trial is not completely transformed into a competition with A little brother, despite advantages. The filmmaker does not escape clichés and conventional realism, but also demonstrates flashes which, here and there, catch up with the film.
Rose arrives from the Ivory Coast in the suburbs of Paris with her sons Jean and Ernest. She meets a companion who installs her in Rouen with his children, and both will go back and forth between the capital, where they work, and Normandy, where Jean and Ernest live alone. But the couple separates and the family finds itself broken up, without giving any news. Jean returns to the country, and Ernest becomes a professor of philosophy in Paris where his mother finds him, proud of his success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4typLu0SN8Y
Léonor Serraille’s heroine, Rose, does not correspond to the submissive woman one might expect. She shows independence with regard to the lovers she chooses, and her sons whom she empowers without neglecting them. But the film hardly comes out of an agreed realism. A trend that also occupies many films of this 75th Cannes competition. Between coffee on a corner of the table, shopping at the supermarket and meal with a grimace, we will have had enough this year.
Léonor Serraille, however, breaks out of this routine in the portrait of a determined and positive woman who fights while remaining confident in her host country, a cardinal notion in her eyes. The director, who assisted in writing the screenplay, does not however decide between an excess of optimism and a clouded vision. The balance sheet is rather half-fig and half-grape, showing a relevant realistic temperance.
A little brother is also a film about childhood and fraternal relationships developed over fifteen years. Jean and Ernest have two well-defined characters, the eldest, promising, will experience difficulties, while the little brother of the title, more measured, will come out better. The former will draw a lesson from it, which he expresses in the pretty clumsy letter that Rose hands Ernest as a conclusion. This last touching scene is the best of a film mixed between convention and insight.
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Gender : Drama
Director: Leonor Serraille
Actors: Annabelle Lengronne, Stephane Bak, Kenzo Sambin
Country : France
Duration : 1h56
Exit : Shortly
Distributer : Diaphana Cast
Summary: When Rose arrives in France, she moves to the suburbs of Paris with her two sons, Jean and Ernest. Construction and deconstruction of a family, from the end of the 80s to the present day.