Cannes Film Festival 2025: Mélanie Thierry and Bastien Bouillon are breathtaking in “Connemara”

In the applause, when the film crew entered the hall at the Cannes Film Festival just before the screening, the writer Nicolas Mathieu was almost more celebrated than the actors, Mélanie Thierry, Bastien Bouillon, Clémentine Célarié or the director Alex Lutz. This shows the anticipation for this adaptation of "Connemara" (2022), his highly successful novel , which marked a generation. Because he speaks like no one else about forty-somethings, the illusion of a second chance in love, burnout and its aftershocks, like an internal earthquake, invisible and unstoppable, about the family that is taking on water but without which we dry up irremediably.

So how was Alex Lutz going to transpose to the screen the love of Hélène and Christophe, of this Parisian executive who returned with partner and children to Epinal, her hometown, to regain her health, her beauty, to rebuild herself like in poker, and of this ex-local hockey player, ex-star of the high school and the team, ex but neo nothing at all, loser not exactly magnificent but with good remains, that she met one evening in a parking lot?

It was mission impossible, but the filmmaker still succeeded by escaping from the literary for a maelstrom of images, ellipses, emotional collages a bit like Lelouch or Sautet. And by finding the perfect pair of actors: Mélanie Thierry and Bastien Bouillon are simply breathtaking in this couple - or rather an attempt at a couple - of young forty-somethings totally exhausted, rinsed by life and the relationship precisely - he is divorced, she is on the same path - but still a bit adolescent, dreamy. They each have this way of acting without needing to speak, with a trembling of the lips, a stolen glance. In the impossible exercise of imposing a face on overly striking novel characters, they give them a depth of each moment.

There is something unbreathable in "Connemara," the film, like the novel before it, because it tells the story of a woman who can no longer breathe. A woman like you and me, if we dare say so, because Hélène is the little soldier who can't take it anymore, neither at work nor at home, but who refuses to give in to her beauty, her desire, her lifeline. She goes to Christophe like someone trying to rise to the surface to avoid drowning. And Mélanie Thierry knows how to express through each of her movements, her way of walking, of speaking, of questioning, of loving, of trusting in the flesh, this rage to live despite all the failures and small shames quickly swallowed up in everyday life. In the room, the audience often smiled, sighed with relief or complicity at many of her lines, as if listening to a friend.

Jacques Gamblin, as a grandfather who is slowly but surely losing his mind, also brings that extra touch of soul that illuminates what many experience with their loved ones, their elders. "Connemara" is the absolute anti- "Mission: Impossible" : each theme is drawn almost from banality, old age that damages, love that only brightens very briefly. Not even a plot with twists and turns, no, Christophe is trying to become a little Vosges ice hockey star again at forty, but the ice is a real pain. Forty too. These Epinal images are not banal.