“The Choice” with Vincent Lindon, burnt concrete – Libération

Gilles Bourdos locks the actor, a site manager caught up in an extra-marital affair, in the passenger compartment of his car for a petty-bourgeois closed session without much interest.

If you decide to build your film on a principle of unity of place, we can assume that you have an idea behind your head, that this unity serves a perceptual objective, issues that are worth staying locked in somewhere. It is relatively difficult, therefore, to understand what was the idea behind the development of the choice, first by the screenwriter (Michel Spinosa, himself a director) then by the one who brings it to the screen (Gilles Bourdos, of which it is the sixth feature film).

The argument is simple: Joseph Cross, a renowned site manager, takes his car and drives towards Paris, leaving his team stranded on the eve of a major delivery of cement for the foundations of a tower. A phone call warned him that a woman with whom he had slept nine months earlier without a follow-up, had become pregnant, and was going to give birth. For an hour and a quarter, at night, under the sophisticated lighting of the highways magnified by the great Taiwanese cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing (the man behind Hou Hsiao-hsien’s images), we will watch this man talking on the phone with his right arm, his mistress in panic at the maternity ward, and his legitimate wife collapsed. Fired from his job, fired by his wife, soliloquizing with the rearview mirror when he speaks with his deceased father who never really recognized him, Cross is having a bad time.