This morning, it’s a first film, Stay Awake by director Jamie Sisley, who moved the Deauville audience to tears. Shocked by the story of Derek and Ethan, two teenage brothers, brilliant students and promoted to a bright future and who will have to manage their mother’s drug addiction on their own. A mother caught in the spiral of depression and addiction to opiates who spends her life in the hospital to undergo gastric lavages. Unable to take care of herself, she drags down her two loving boys who are very attached to her. The strength of the film lies in the relationship between his two brothers, unable to resign themselves to their mother’s illness and ready to sacrifice their professional future to save her. In the role of these two united brothers, the two young actors Wyatt Oleff and Fin Argus are surprisingly close and natural.
It is an understatement to say that the abnegation and devotion of these two brothers touched the festival-goers. Without pathos or sentimentality, Jamis Sisley manages to deal with a heavy theme, addiction, drug dependence, but from the point of view, not of the patient, but of those around him. The film was initially in 2015 a short film that circulated in festivals. In front of the reception of the public, the scenario writer had the idea to flesh out the history, which is besides his. During an exchange this morning with the spectators, he confided that his mother was addicted to drugs and that his brother and himself had to take care of her for many years. A very personal film.
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Stay Awake is to date the most delicate and sensitive film since the start of the competition. It should, in view of the enthusiastic reactions of the public, appear on the charts.
The second film of the day also appealed to viewers as its theme resonates with current events. Peace in the Valley is about a young mother and wife Ashley who finds herself widowed after a mass shooting in a supermarket. How not to identify with this so happy lambda family? He is a firefighter, she, the fulfilled mother of a 10-year-old boy, and their destiny will change one evening while they are shopping. They are there in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ashley’s husband will become a hero by protecting customers at the risk of his life. The director is interested in the slow reconstruction of this woman and her child following this tragedy. How to envisage the future? How to find the strength to raise a child alone, deprived of her dad forever “her hero”. Ashley will find comfort in a support group and get closer to the twin brother of her deceased husband. To the spectators who asked her about the problem of the circulation of arms in the United States, the actress, Brit Shaw replied that it was above all a film about mourning and resilience.
The fact remains that the film suffers from a “little air of deja vu” as confided at the exit of the projection the first spectators.
To date, there are 5 films left to see by the jury chaired by Arnaud Desplechin. Verdict Saturday night.