“The Daughter of a Great Love”: a cinema couple

The Daughter of a Great Love **

by Agnès de Sacy

French film, 1h34

This is probably the dream of many children of divorced parents. Bring them together in a work. Bring back their dead love. A film student, Cécile embarks on a film that gives voice to her long-separated mother and father; she superimposes their gazes on their meeting. A silent love at first sight in the Parisian antiques store where Ana worked and where Yves happened to enter. Little gray suit or blue bodice? Memories diverge. But the main thing remains: the birth of a love.

Agnès de Sacy signs a film largely inspired by her story and that of her parents. A student at Femis, she brought them together on film, which had an impact on their common trajectory. His big screen alter ego quickly fades away to focus on Ana and Yves. The girl is only the trigger, but not the subject of the film. It is nevertheless through her that Yves' crucial confidence about his homosexuality, experienced in his youth as an illness, will come.

Isabelle Carré and François Damiens, a painful and fair duo

A chronicle stretched over several years with astonishing ellipses, this bittersweet feature film is marked by a melancholy which is adorned with laughter to mask the sadness. With modesty, he draws the forces contrary to the work: a real love which springs from the first sight, but desires which always carry Yves towards somewhere else. Despite the common promises of freedom, the couple was shattered. But everyone begins to hope that the rapprochement made by Cécile's film will erase misunderstandings and past suffering. Unless, inexorably, he revives them.

The actors in this painful duo impress with their accuracy. Isabelle Carré moves people as a wounded woman who hides her wounds behind bravado, displayed sensuality and scathing behavior. François Damiens continues to prove his ease in the register of drama, with a character imprisoned by a difficulty in living, an esthete lost in a profession which suffocates him, always prey to contradictory impulses which tear him apart. Initially centered on Paris, the film multiplies the back and forth between the capital and the luminous Pyrenees where it ends up finding its balance and its breathing.