VIDEO – Every week, our film critics comment on a film released in theaters. Today, it is “Playing with Fire”, by Delphine and Muriel Coulin, which divides Marie Sauvion and Samuel Douhaire.
By Samuel Douhaire, Marie Sauvion
Published on January 25, 2025 at 11:00 a.m.
Aclose Seventeen Girls (2011) et See the country (2016), this is the third film by the Coulin sisters, presented at the Venice Film Festival last September, and which won Vincent Lindon the acting prize. Vincent Lindon plays Pierre, a railway worker, anchored on the left, withdrawn from unionism with age, who raises his two sons alone. One pursues brilliant studies (Stefan Crepon), the other (Benjamin Voisin) hangs out more and more with far-right activists, sharing fights and ideas with them.
Discover the rating and review
-“Playing with fire”: intimate chronicle of a family in the process of dislocation in the face of extremism
“Would we love our kids if they became fascists? »questions Marie Sauvion. This is the question at the center of this film (and “it’s a really good question about cinema”). The film provides an answer that leaves her wondering, because it “the painting of a perfect father, who takes good care of his sons, and who is at the same time totally overwhelmed and who sees nothing coming”, points out Marie Sauvion. Who, moreover, has a “little problem” with the main actor: Vincent Lindon. “He’s a very good actor but he still cannibalizes the film”she regrets. On the contrary, for Samuel Douhaire: “ When he plays prole, I believe in it”. And to highlight the interpretation, in the role of the two sons, of Stefan Crepon and Benjamin Voisin (“truly a great actor of his generation”).
