THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
Strictly pulled back hair, an impeccably pressed uniform, a face that never leaves an expression of hardness, Jessica Comley is a Customs and Border Patrol agent stationed on the border of Arizona and Mexico. Where a wall was built in 2006 to separate the United States from its neighbor. Caught up in the most mundane of her daily tasks of waiting, checking vehicles and long patrols in the desert, the young woman hides, behind a form of silent zeal, a complex, opaque and tortuous personality. The Wall is therefore, above all, the portrait of a woman, a portrait carried by an actress, Vicky Krieps, of exceptional strength and subtlety. Jessica Comley seems to doubt nothing, and yet her stiffness is only the testimony of a hidden fragility. She’s a loner who pays strangers for a few minutes of sex.
A character who defies conventions
She seems to believe herself invested with an almost divine mission, that of defending her territory from the intrusion of all those who embody, for her, a guilty otherness, illegal migrants and local Amerindians suspected of coming to their aid. But she is also a woman scarred by the fatal illness of her sister-in-law and best friend, her breakup with her own mother, with whom she can no longer speak, a father whose evil influence she perhaps does not see. . This is the strength of Philippe Van Leeuw’s film, in the unfathomable part of a protagonist with whom it is both impossible to identify and for whom a form of empathy is triggered. The film thus skillfully and cruelly plays with the emotions of a spectator faced with a character who defies conventions and sweeping opinions.
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