Every day during the summer, the franceinfo culture department shares its favorites with you. Wednesday July 12, with “The Return”, Catherine Corsini offers a summer tale with teenage girls lost in the magnificent landscapes of Corsica.
The film begins with the image of a black woman, Khedidja, who leaves Corsica by boat, alone with her two daughters. His tears tell us that a tragedy has occurred. Fifteen years later, she returns for a summer job – looking after the children of a wealthy continental couple on vacation – and her two daughters have become teenagers. Two very different looks and temperaments. The family’s past and the things left unsaid around the disappearance of the father will quickly resurface in different forms.
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A past modeled on that of Catherine Corsini: “My father died when I was two and a half years old. My mother, who was not Corsican, fled Corsica. She raised me really in a strange feeling, she revered my father who was the love of his life, but at the same time, it was as if Corsica was a stifling, scary territory. I went back there very late, when I was 15 and then when I was 30. I really put crazy time following in my father’s footsteps or in the footsteps of my family history.”
A cheeky and sensitive film
In the main role, we find a very fair Aissatou Diallo Sagna, caregiver by profession and already revealed by Catherine Corsini in The divide, her previous film, for which she had won a César. Delighted to embark on a new adventure imagined by the filmmaker, she confides: “I had trouble telling myself that I was an actress, so I wanted to be able to interpret something completely different and I was delighted that it could be done with Catherine. Here, we are in a real role of composition. touched a lot because it is also somewhere its own story.
“This question of identity, I think that the Corsicans, like me, we are proud of where we come from. We like to talk about our home, show the customs, our wealth, the heritage.”
Aïssatou Diallo Sagna, actressat franceinfo
The return is rhythmic, cheeky, sensitive and moving. And sometimes very funny too. Catherine Corsini films Corsica and its character, its villages, its scenes of life at sunset beautifully. Many of the qualities of the film are based on its direction of actors and in particular the interpretation of the two young actresses, Esther Gohourou and Suzy Bemba, unknown until then.