THE “WORLD” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Unclassifiable, Julie Delpy has, since the 1980s, pursued an eclectic and ubiquitous acting career between France and the United States, two countries between which her life and career are distributed. Added to this, since 2002 (Looking for Jimmy), a vocation as a director that allows her to explore relentlessly, with a welcome freshness, sense of humor and directness, the intimate crises of couples or extended families.
Even very broad, as is the case in his eighth feature film, The Barbarianswhich puts a quiet little Breton town called Paimpont (Ille-et-Vilaine) to the test of immigration and living together. Even if its acid humor leaves us wondering quite quickly whether we should hear “pin-pon”, the firefighters, the asylum and the racket.
It starts off very strongly, with the entire welcoming committee gathered on the main square for the arrival of a family of Ukrainian refugees. At the last minute, the instigator of this great operation explains to the mayor that, due to the shortage of Ukrainians on the refugee aid market, the prefecture has taken it upon itself to send them a Syrian family. A decision by which suddenly everything changes and everything starts a fable that will sting strongly, international solidarity being, despite everything, of variable geometry.
Great Moliere tradition
In the great Moliere tradition, The Barbarians turns out to be a comedy of character. The characters command the plot rather than emanating from it. This shows the importance of a cast that turns out to be perfectly measured here.
Jean-Charles Clichet (already magnificent in Come I’ll take youby Alain Guiraudie, in 2022) plays Sébastien Lejeune, the nice opportunistic mayor who only uses politically correct clichés as a language. Julie Delpy herself is Joëlle, a school teacher and left-wing activist who has definitively banished the words “gentleness” and “humor” from her psycholinguistic horizon. Sandrine Kiberlain is Anne Poudoulec, a friend of the former and the shallow manager of the local supermarket, while her husband, Philippe (Mathieu Demy), regularly gets lost in the voluptuous curves of the charcuterie, Marylin Legall. Laurent Lafitte plays the Alsatian plumber Hervé Riou, an exceptional Breton, an honorary Frenchman, a far-right activist, whose obtuse xenophobic obsession exhausts even his wife, Géraldine (India Hair).
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