OCTOBER
THE SUBSTANCE by Coralie Fargeat
It’s about the most divisive film of the year. Already at the first screening at Cannes (where it won the award for best screenplay) the clear pros and equally clear cons were evident. The story of the diva who is announced to be ‘quitting’ the fitness program she runs and who adheres to an experimental protocol that promises to make her more beautiful and perfect has sparked discussions. The overabundance of cinephile quotes as well as the crossing over into splatter and horror (particularly on the female body) have caused discussion. Is this a real accusation against chauvinist pretensions or does the director end up adhering to them by applying a magnifying glass to the imperfections? There are also those who read everything as a parody of a fundamentally misogynistic society. When a film causes so much discussion it has already achieved an important merit.
PARTHENOPE by Paolo Sorrentino
Sorrentino returns to express his ambivalent feeling for Naples. This time it does so through a female character who, like the city, gets lost and finds herself, never ceasing to attract the most diverse personalities. The quote from Céline “How enormous life is, we get lost everywhere” guides us throughout the vision to a falling in love which is underlined by Paoli and Vanoni’s song “Che cosa c’è”. Parthenope moves between contradictory elements but always remains an element of attraction for a director who discovers himself a little less baroque and a little more inclined to the observation of an eternal and multifaceted feminine by which he is fascinated and that Celeste Dalla Porta manages to bring it to the screen with extraordinary adhesion.
THE STORY OF SOULEYMANE by Boris Lojkine
It is not the first film about riders but it is the one that has most deeply captured the experience of those who find themselves waiting for their presence in a European country to be regularised. Lojkine took his protagonist on a journey About Sangare (winner of the EFA award for best actor), far and wide and always quickly, the streets of a Paris seen as a stranger if not an enemy. The camera follows him as if we were in a Dardenne film and then stops when he arrives at the longed-for interview. There, in that long sequence, the need for security and the sense of being at the mercy of the judgment of others who are looking for a truth that must correspond to already established criteria emerge. If the comparison were not too risky, Antoine Doinel’s scene in front of the psychologist would come to mind. The four hundred shots by François Truffaut. Even though it uses a different cinematographic language, it feels the same sense of participation towards a suffering humanity.
NOVEMBER
JUROR NUMBER 2 by Clint Eastwood
Old Clint strikes again with a film that goes beyond the judicial genre to address a moral dilemma which, incidentally, is that of the United States today. Where is the line between lies and truth? Justin Kemp who finds himself judging someone who is suspected of a crime of which he is, albeit involuntarily, guilty, how much must he take into account what a moral conduct worthy of the name would impose? How much value does ‘your particular’ have? All this in a context in which what appears most in the light turns out to be less seen. Clint has cinema in his blood just as the need to make a film that immediately becomes an independent classic runs through his veins even when it refers to another classic like The word to the jurors however changing its sign. Whoever tries to avoid the conviction of the accused here is not moved by an ethical principle but by an internal and very personal torment. In a movie with an ending that will be remembered.
DECEMBER
THE OPPORTUNITIES OF LOVE by Stéphane Brizé
We were risking classification Broken as a director committed to the dynamics of work thanks to the films that have followed one another in recent years (The law of the market, At war, Another world albeit with the parenthesis of A life) and instead surprises us with a film in which he, an actor in crisis, meets completely by chance the woman with whom he had had a relationship in the past. Conceived in the period in which Covid was raging, it is a film about precariousnessset in a seaside town in an off-season period. Just as they end up being out of season, Mathieu and Alice, in a film that goes by the tones of refined comedy and to those in which the loss of what one was and what one has become emerges little by little. With the possibility of returning to understanding each other if there were not, as an obstacle, a detachment and many years of distance.
