Sentimental Value, Alpha, Salve Maria... This Week's Movies to See and Avoid at the Cinema
REVIEWS - A long-absent father returns to his daughters, offering them a role in his film, a 13-year-old girl contracts a mysterious virus, a writer becomes fascinated by an infanticide... Le Figaro 's cinema selection.
Drama comedy by Joachim Trier - 2h13
Agnès and Nora see their father arrive after many years of absence, at their mother's funeral. That's all that was missing. This returning filmmaker has no shame. His last success dates back about fifteen years. In one of his films, he gave Agnès an important role, and it was the only time she felt like she mattered to him. What does he think? It's not enough to come back, snap your fingers, and ask Nora to be the star of his new project. She refuses. Since that's how it is, he falls back on a Hollywood star.
Also read: Our review of Sentimental Value, by Joachim Trier: the torments of a filmmaker and his daughters
Skip the adJoachim Trier makes these roller-coaster relationships devilishly romantic, films these colliding egos with a velvety, Chekovian gentleness. Sentimental Value , winner of the Grand Prix at the last Cannes Film Festival, gracefully sweeps through the range of the most violent feelings, like a contemporary Bergman. This is no small compliment. É.N
Drama by Mar Coll - 1h51
At what point is the line between good and evil crossed? Maria , a young mother and writer, finds herself lost in the twists and turns of a daily life disrupted by motherhood, oscillating between constant worry and profound exhaustion. One day, an infanticide shakes the city. Little by little, she sinks, something inside her wavers. The tragedy obsesses her, haunts her. From that moment on, the specter of infanticide hangs over Maria like a haunting possibility. Haunted by the question " Why did this woman kill her children? ", the young writer begins writing a novel inspired by the tragedy—and gradually loses herself in it.
The protagonist is frozen by fear, shame, and loneliness. Laura Weissmahr ( Fanatico ) embodies this inner reality with overwhelming intensity. Thanks to her natural acting, the viewer gains access to a rare intimacy: that of a woman lost in a whirlwind of forbidden thoughts. Halfway between a feminist manifesto and a thriller, this adaptation of Katixa Agirre's novel Los madres no , acutely traces the contours of a "before" and an "after" motherhood. Memories of freedom seem distant, almost unreal. MW
Drama by Julia Ducournau - 2h08
Skip the adThe action takes place in a city that could be Le Havre in the 1980s. At the heart of this port city, buffeted by a mysterious red wind à la Mad Max , a mysterious virus is raging that is decimating the population. The allegory with AIDS is transparent. Alpha (Mélissa Boros), 13, is not afraid of anything. At a drunken party, the teenager, drunk, has an "A" engraved on her arm. In the early hours of the morning, her doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani) panics. Was the needle sterilized? Alpha is quickly quarantined by her mother, who forms a loving wall so powerful that the young girl experiences it as a confinement. While everything collapses, Alpha nevertheless awakens to love, freedom, and desire.
Also read: Our review of Alpha, Julia Ducournau's new family drama, as gory as it is annoying.
Working alone on the script for this plot that affects her so closely, the director got herself into a tangle with her creative juices. By trying to disguise the truth of her feelings to the extreme, Alpha multiplies the crying fits, the loud arguments and the clumsy dialogues. By mixing the teen movie , the family chronicle, the horror film and the paranoid "body horror", Alpha transforms itself into a "chaos film". OD
Animated/Fantasy film by Hayao Miyazaki - 2h15
Princess Mononoke , the animated film from Studio Ghibli, is getting a makeover in theaters, almost thirty years after its release. Hayao Miyazaki's feature film will be presented for the first time in 4K and IMAX to showcase the splendor of the hand-painted sets. A visual and audio masterpiece, this fantastic epic takes place in Japan in the 15th century. Once protected by giant animals, the forest is depopulated by man. Wounded by a wild boar driven mad by demons, the young warrior Ashitaka leaves his family and sets out in search of the deer god who alone can undo the spell that is eating away at his arm. During his journey, Ashitaka meets Lady Eboshi, the head of a community of blacksmiths, who must defend herself against those who accuse her of destroying the forest to fuel her forges. Among her worst enemies is San, a wild girl raised by wolves, also called Princess Mononoke.
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