Far from being divine…
All for one puts you in an uncomfortable position. At the simple announcement of his pitch (a feminine rereading of Three musketeers), we could already see the imaginary card of wokism coming, brandished to attack the only feminist approach of the project, and at the same time judge the entire film through this prism. What is most problematic about this conservative view, whatever the object concerned, is that it never ultimately looks at the cinema behind the subject, although it pretends to hide its misogyny behind two or three arguments of writing or directing (and more).
Obviously, such a discrepancy makes others want to defend the work more than necessary, even if it means doing the opposite extreme: promoting the sole theme of a film in relation to its treatment. We can never say enough to what extent feminine and feminist perspectives are essential to renewing the seventh art, and diverting literary classics in this sense is certainly not a problem. However, there is a problem with director Houda Benyamina: the absence of cinema behind the posture.
In 2016, the phenomenon Divines (awarded the Caméra d'Or at Cannes) had nevertheless brought a good part of the press into agreement, despite its story of suburbs and drug trafficking which awkwardly rehashed De Palma and Scorsese. By wanting to divert the male figures from his models, Benyamina only reproduced their profound toxicity, and transformed a story about patriarchy and social determinism into a vaguely tragic fable about an egocentric and unbearable character.
We could say that therein lay the filmmaker's postulate, but her speech on female emancipation hit a wall: it seemed that it could only be done by rearming the tools of men's domination, only reexploited by the other sex.
Rather every man for himself
Inevitably, All for one tells exactly the same thing, and at least has the merit of establishing itself in logical continuity. In a 17th century where Spanish Muslims (the Moriscos) were expelled from France by Louis XIII, Sara (Oulaya Amamra, the revelation of Divines) joins the Queen's musketeers, who turn out to be women in disguise.
-On paper, the feature film does not seem without challenges. The action of the main characters puts them at risk of hanging, and their quest to find Anne of Austria, fleeing to Spain, invokes the eternal distrust that she arouses at court, both as a woman and as a foreigner. But this protest dimension is once again defused by the backhoe subtlety of the director.
Armed with fake penises and their swords, the four heroines only seek to take on the phallic symbols of the male gender, without ever questioning the weight of these same symbols on their initial oppression. It's just a matter of turning these attributes back on themselves, or at least Benyamina's idea of asserted masculinity (carrier's language, unwelcome pride, taste for violence). This inversion of the balance of power finds its worst expression during a particularly embarrassing scene, where the musketeers rob a carriage and indicate to the noble coward inside that he has the right to cry.
From there, it would be possible to defend this virilist vulgarity by taking the film for what it is supposed to be: an assumed parody of Alexandre Dumas. But the film still needs to be funny. If we save the histrionics of Déborah Lukumuena (the only one who seems to be having fun), All for one suffers in the first place from horrible dialogues, played with an embarrassing first degree. This backbone turns out to be little helped by the stylistic breaks in tone desired by the director, who seeks to compensate for the flatness of her imagery with hip-hop or spaghetti western music.
The question deserves to be asked: in this accumulation of nagging bad taste, where is the cinema? To make such a project a rereading of the adventure story, it seems essential to understand the basis of the cloak and dagger film. Unfortunately, Houda Benyamina proves incapable of filming the rare bursts of choreography, and even less the few lyrical passages of his pachydermic scenario. Everything stinks of a cheap TV movieand editor Loïc Lallemand seems to make do with the few usable images at his disposal (we warn you, the introductory scene in the barn is without a doubt one of the ugliest things we've seen recently) .
So yes, we laugh at All for onebut not with the film. This shows that catastrophic manufacturing can never save an intention. That that of Houda Benyamina annoys some is one thing, but in all cases, the big loser remains cinema.
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