“La Bella Estate” and “Animale” – Libération

«La Bella Estate» by Laura Luchetti

Adapted from Beautiful Summer de Cesare Pavese, the Beautiful Summer recounts a few months of Ginia's life in Turin in 1938: a reserved young seamstress, she will gradually awaken thanks to the company of a handful of bohemian artists, and fall in love with a model. The nerve and style of Pavese are unfortunately completely absent from this adaptation by Laura Luchetti which exudes encaustic academicism. Costumes too well ironed and worn, general seriousness of tone, silences at the end of sequences which signal the absence of any imagination apart from well-learned lines, the Beautiful Summer suffers cruelly from having no other horizon than the academic reconstruction of a past which probably never existed as it was. Among the ghosts that populate the film, note the presence of the diaphanous Yile Yara Vianello, already seen in the Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher, the only one who seems to carry with her something like the breath of life. L.Tu.

The Beautiful Summer de Laura Luchetti with Yile Yara Vianello, Deva Cassel… 1h53.

“Animal” by Emma Benestan

It's all there, and could be in a PowerPoint presentation. The trendy promise of a new school of French genre cinema, carried by a thirty-year-old director. A fictional territory loaded with myths (the Camargue, its wild bulls, its closed world of breeders and local cowboys), the allegorical initiation story, the metamorphosis of an outsider heroine who dangerously tests her animality. We see the key words flashing in neon: initiation story, ecofeminism, fantasy, denunciation of toxic masculinity. Or the new academicism of the very conscientiously “singular” feature film: it nevertheless looks like a festival formula that we will soon no longer be able to see in painting, and that we imagine can be adapted for a long time to the point of absurdity: in the virile environment of dog breeding / viticulture / heavy goods vehicle drivers / nuclear engineering, a fierce beginner transformed at nightfall into a werewolf / donkey of the Poitou/giant tire/Godzilla… S.O

animated by Emma Benestan with Oulaya Amamra, Damien Rebattel… 1h40.