Résumé : Two cousins with diametrically opposed characters, David and Benji, meet during a trip to Poland to honor the memory of their beloved grandmother. Their odyssey will take an unexpected turn when the old tensions of this unlikely duo resurface with, in the background, the history of their family…
Critique : This is Jesse Eisenberg’s second feature film as director, following When You Finish Saving the Worldpresented at Critics’ Week in 2022, but which only had a VOD release. Distributed theatrically by The Walt Disney Company Pictures, A Rail Pain was successfully screened at several festivals, including La-Roche-sur-Yon and Sundance. The film confirms the filmmaker sensitivity of Jesse Eisenberg, who has already been appreciated as an actor in works by David Fincher (The Social Network) ou Kelly Reichardt (Night Moves). At the same time producer, screenwriter and director, Eisenberg is totally invested in this second feature whose synopsis could nevertheless suggest the less good: blackmail of feelings, alibi of the great subject with historical memory, clichés on family ties. This is not the case, and despite some drops in pace, the story is really endearing.
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The narration focuses a lot on the contrast between the two cousins. David (Jesse Eisenberg) is calm and introverted, not to say stuck, and leads a bourgeois New York existence with his wife and their child. Benji (Kieran Culkin, excellent) appears talkative, prankster and unstable emotionally as well as professionally. Equally complicit as distant, close as distant, the two friends, of Jewish faith, meet for a week’s stay in Poland, in order to find traces of the suffering of their peers, and the places where their grandmother, recently deceased. Joining them are a kindly tour guide (Will Sharpe), a retired couple whose family has lived in the United States for more than a century, a fifty-year-old woman whose mother was a survivor of the camps, and a Rwandan convert to Judaism. The film begins with a tone of (almost) schoolboy comedy which might seem out of place, but in fact reveals the uneasiness of the character of Benji, the most seemingly relaxed, but in fact the most disturbed of the group.
- © 2024 Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved.
The tourist stay on memory then becomes the place of family semi-settling of scores, where the exchanges between the two cousins sometimes reach the intensity of Bergmanian psychological confrontations. And Eisenberg, a filmmaker, films with great sobriety the places of tragedy of the deported Jewish people, while finding the right balance between didactic dialogues (through the words of the guide) and silences revealing disturbing unsaid things. We will just regret certain redundant passages, like the escapades of David and Benji on hotel roofs to secretly smoke a joint, and reveal their confidences. This is a detail considering the harmony of a feature film which combines emotion and reflection, and has the merit of conveying its message in ninety minutes, where so many films stretch in vain for two hours or more. In the end, A Rail Pain is an independent film like we would like to see more often, sincere and human, and whose writing does not obscure the filmic talent.
