The week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “A few days, no more” by Julie Navarro and “Sidonie au Japon” by Elise Girard.
Published
Update
Reading time: 7 min
A few days no more, it is the improbable meeting between a music journalist, a volunteer, and an Afghan migrant. The film first introduces us to Arthur Berthier (Benjamin Biolay), a somewhat jaded culture journalist, who sees himself “demoted” to general news by his boss, after a slip-up one evening of drinking while reporting.
Sent to cover the dismantling of a migrant camp, he takes a beating with a police baton, and then agrees to sponsor one of these exiles, Daoud, a discreet Afghan and chef by trade, by welcoming him – for a few days. no longer – in his small Parisian apartment, and at the same time he falls under the spell of Mathilde, the volunteer, played by Camille Cottin.
Or, in appearance, the French scenario and setting of a somewhat cliché French film, but miraculously, the director and ex-casting director, Julie Navarro, by adapting the novel by her companion, Marc Salbert, signs a very pretty surprise, the humor of the situations and dialogues balance very well with the subject of the film.
A few days no more is therefore a nice, original film, which works pleasantly, thanks to its writing and its duo of main actors. Benjamin Biolay has never even seemed so fair, with self-deprecation, and Camille Cottin is very involved and intense. But we must also salute the supporting roles, associations or migrants, most of them non-professional.
Sidonia in Japan by Élise Girard
Sidonie, a globally successful French writer, has been lacking inspiration since the death of her husband. She agrees to go to Japan, at the invitation of her publisher, for the publication of her first novel. We learn that in Japan, cohabitation with ghosts is common.
Sidonie’s ghost is her deceased husband, who lives in limbo; he appears when she floats in a world that escapes her. Burlesque situations, Sidonie understands nothing about social codes, who to greet, and when what to say and what not to say. She lets herself be carried away on this strange journey, and shares with her handsome, very dark editor, a melancholy, a relationship with death, which will end up bringing them together, under the benevolent gaze of the ghost of the late husband.
We obviously think of Lost in translation by Sofia Coppola and, from afar, to the masterpiece of Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, my love. Sidonia in Japan offers Isabelle Huppert a score written for her, which obviously works, in these images which are intended to be loaded with symbols, too bad the scenes do not all have the outfit of the last one, on the island of Naoshima, among the chefs -work of architect Tadao Ando.