Yes Passengers of the Night begins on the famous May 10, 1981, the evening of François Mitterrand’s election, we quickly jump back in time, and the film is more of a chronicle of the decade to come, which we follow in the daily life of a family.
Take that of Elisabeth, who after a break-up finds herself alone raising her teenage son and daughter, and finds two odd jobs, in a local library, and as a switchboard operator in a radio show that takes place at night, where she meets a young girl who lives on the street and ends up taking her in. And in the role of this shy, moving woman, who better than Charlotte Gainsbourg, for one of her finest performances in recent years:
“I had the impression of playing myself a lot as a child. To play my childhood shyness, almost what I was able to play in ‘L’Effrontée’. And this shyness is something that I already have lived. But I’m no longer in it. I was able to blush, but I’m not going to blush anymore.”
Charlotte Gainsbourgat franceinfo
“In tenderness, continues the actress, I hope that this character is not so far from me: with her children, or this young girl she picks up. It’s our “lost” sides perhaps that differ, mine is more grandiloquent, will go faster in depression. His is much more restrained, in something more modest, and that’s not me.”
And the rest of the cast is to match: Emmanuelle Béart, as a radio host freely inspired by a certain Macha Béranger, the young Noée Abita and Quito Rayon Richter, or even Laurent Poitrenaux. And this family seems so just on screen, in their apartment in the Beaugrenelle district of Paris, rarely as cinematic as here, an ideal setting for the cinema of director Mikhaël Hers, whose unifying sensibility we had already felt, but never cutesy, in the very beautiful This feeling of summer in 2015 and Amanda in 2018:
“We make films based on our own sensitivity, so it’s always on the edge. I don’t want my films to be free from harshness or violence, but it’s true that it happens in a more underground way. Me of the works which helped me, they are those which succeeded in making pass this violence of the world and to make it bearable.
“I like the idea that we can curl up in my films as we would with a song, for example, not in an intellectual way, but that we can be carried away by a melody. And that there are things harsher, more disturbing, but that it is caught in a flood and that we can accept them.
Director Mikhaël Hersat franceinfo
Passengers of the Night also seduces with its tributes to culture, in all its forms: books, films by Éric Rohmer, music by Kim Wilde and Joe Dassin, among others, and its sober but successful reconstruction of the streets of Paris or the Maison de la Radio de those years.
On a tiny fishing island in the south of Scotland, a group of asylum seekers are waiting to be determined on their fate. It is with this premise that the young Scottish filmmaker, Ben Sharrock, who himself has lived in Syria, decided to tell a story of migrants, but in a humorous vein.
A risky project on paper but which in the end offers us Limbo, this strange and very pretty film. The comical and even absurd situations recall the films of Aki Kaurismaki or Elia Suleiman, and the actors, again, are excellent. In particular, the British of Egyptian origin, Amir El-Masry, who plays Omar, a Syrian refugee who left his brother to fight in the country, and who never separates from his oud, this traditional plucked string musical instrument, whose he will end up playing for the people of the island.
“The oud is used as a metaphor for his identity, and what Omar is going through about him, emphasizes Ben Sharrock. He was a famous and very talented musician in Syria, and now he is just an anonymous refugee like the others. There is no one there. So the instrument is tied to his identity it’s his soul it was his grandfather’s so also tied to his family it’s a very culture specific instrument so all there is around corresponds to its identity”
Note also the presence in the casting of Limbo by Sidse Babett Knudsen, Danish actress seen in the series Borgen or in the French film Brest’s daughter.
And to stay in the wacky, you can also go see the comedy little love lessonby Eve Deboise with Laetitia Dosch and Pierre Deladonchamps, a young woman who finds a desperate letter from a high school student, in love with her teacher, and goes looking for her, for an adventure that will last all night between Paris and the suburbs.
Finally, the documentary Detroiters, by the French Andréi Schtakleff, who introduces us to the inhabitants of the former flourishing capital of the automobile, Detroit, today suffering, between nostalgia and faith in a better future.