Résumé : The 1980s, in the north of France. Jackie and Clotaire grew up between the high school benches and the port docks. She studies, he hangs out. And then their destinies intersect and it’s mad love. Life will try to separate them but nothing works, these two are like the two ventricles of the same heart…
- © Cannes Film Festival 2024. All rights reserved.
Critique : Gilles Lellouche has long been known more as an actor than a director. After Narco (co-directed by Tristan Aurouet in 2004), he participated in the sketch film The infidels (2012). We have good memories of his feature film The Great Bathpresented out of competition at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, a subtle feel good movie which revealed a true talent as a filmmaker, and enjoyed a deserved triumph in theaters. The disappointment caused by phew love is only greater. Adapted from a novel by Neville Thompson, the screenplay was co-written by Lellouche, Audrey Diwan, Ahmed Hamidien and Julien Lambroschini. How could these combined talents be able to concoct such a grotesque story? Because, and we regret to write it, nothing is to be saved in this story accumulating all the clichés of the discount romance and the thriller with effects.
- © Trésor Films – Chi-Fou-Mi Productions – StudioCanal / Credit: Cédric Bertrand
Clotaire and Jackie are two teenagers with strong temperaments but who do not come from the same social background. The first is a little boss, son of a brutal worker (Karim Lemlou) and a caring mother (Élodie Bouchez). The second, from the middle class, lives alone with her father (Alain Chabat), a brave man who tries as best he can to manage the young girl’s teenage crisis. Clotaire and Jackie experience intense love but a robbery that goes wrong lands the young man in prison for twelve years. When he emerges, he has the features of François Civil, when his ex-lover, with the face of Axèle Exarchoupoulos, started a new life with an arrogant young executive (Vincent Lacoste). The reunion will not be easy… The romantic side, underWest Side Storyis of a rare indigence, against a backdrop of sunsets, kisses on the beach and evenings in eclipse, giving the impression of watching an endless advertisement for dairy products. The detective sequences, edited with a trowel, with Benoît Poelvoorde as an operetta kingpin, bring out a thrilling gratuitous violence, with a deafening soundtrack and characters losing their tempers, between vociferations and sobs.
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- © Trésor Films – StudioCanal / credit: Cédric Bertrand
The staging, sometimes limp, sometimes garish, is dizzying, with its grandiloquent slow motion, like in the worst cinema of the 70s, or its music video aesthetic. In short, we are dismayed, and sincerely embarrassed for the actors, who do what they can to give meaning to dialogues sometimes relating to a parody which would have been proposed by the Unknowns. We also remain doubtful about the presence of this film in the official competition of the first World Cinema Festival. Is the composition of an attractive cast for a glamorous climb of the stairs enough to explain it? This failed and superficial feature film would have had a better place on Netflix or another VOD platform. However, we remain confident in Gilles Lellouche’s ability to bounce back, because, let us repeat, his Great Bath had shown that he was capable of creating a film denoting both finesse of writing and an elegant style, both popular and demanding.
