The week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “The Animal Kingdom” by Thomas Cailley and “Bernadette” by Léa Domenach.
The Animal Kingdom is a “mixture of genres”, but in the good sense of the word. We are in a science fiction and anticipation film, an ecological fable, an intimate and family film, also with pure moments of humor and comedy. Welcome to the world imagined by Thomas Cailley, whose first feature film we loved so much, The fighters in 2014.
The story is that of a father-son duo, played by the excellent Romain Duris and Paul Kircher. We understand that the mother has been marginalized because, like a large part of the population, she mutates and gradually transforms into an animal. François and Emile are moving to the Landes de Gascogne, in Gironde, where she can be taken care of, to also escape the city, and find a little nature. But several of those called “creatures” escape, and find themselves hunted by locals.
Film about living together, about difference, but also about animal and plant nature, which would reclaim its rights from a civilization which mistreats it. The film is, as you will have understood, a real success, a sort of “auteur blockbuster”, poetic and very original. Everything works, from the direction of the actors to the special effects, sober and stunning for a French production, and we wish the best to the Animal Kingdom in theaters.
Bernadette by Léa Domenach
An unpretentious comedy, which says things about what Bernadette Chirac endured during the two mandates of her husband’s president. It’s our recent past, but it seems so far away, because the men there are so misogynistic without the slightest complex. Léa Domenach takes some liberties with History, but the essential is there: the rebellion of Bernadette Chirac, determined to assert herself at the Élysée, despite the deceptions and humiliations suffered, and the little space left to her the father-daughter duo, Jacques and Claude Chirac.
Catherine Deneuve enjoys playing this character who frees herself, not too much, from her bourgeois conventions, and her duet with Denis Podalydès, the first lady’s chief of staff, works at full speed.