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Our review of the Good Stars: two men and a bassinet

2022-12-06T12:09:38.260Z


REVIEW – Film in the form of a road-movie, Kore-eda's new feature film once again focuses on the family. With a strong empathy for his characters.


A palme d'or is the best passport.

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, winner of the supreme award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 with

A Family Affair

, is packing his bags in Paris for his next film.

He shoots

La Vérité

, with Catherine Deneuve as an unfiltered movie star and Juliette Binoche in the role of her daughter, a scriptwriter exiled in the United States who has returned to France to settle scores with an outrageous mother.

With

Les Bonnes Étoiles

, the Japanese director travels less far since he sets his story in South Korea.

Above all, he returns to his best, reconnecting with a finesse of line and an empathy for his characters without equal.

Kore-eda puts his favorite themes back on the job: filiation, transmission, parent-child relationships.

Children left to fend for themselves in

Nobody Knows

.

The family reunites each summer to commemorate the tragic death of the eldest son in

Still Walking

.

The discovery of the exchange of two infants at birth in

Tel père, tel fils

(jury prize at Cannes in 2013).

The three generations of misfits keeping warm in the house of

A Family Affair

… Kore-eda only films the family, united by blood ties or not.

He films it with the grace and harshness that constitute his cinema, since his transition from documentary to fiction in the mid-1990s.

The virtues of sobriety

Les Bonnes Étoiles

takes the opposite path to

A Family Affair

.

Kore-eda this time shows a family in the making.

Its nucleus is a baby, deposited one rainy evening by a young woman in front of a "baby box", a box intended to collect abandoned children.

The two men from the association who recover it decide to keep it.

Sang-huyn (Song Kang-ho), baby carrier on her stomach and tender smile glued to her face, does not have the profile of a child trafficker.

Yet that's what he is, boss of an indebted and cunning laundry.

He is watched by two policewomen who want to arrest him in flagrante delicto.

Things get complicated when the baby's mother comes back to pick him up.

The two kidnappers take him on board by offering him a slice of the cake.

Along the way, they take a kid and his ball from an orphanage.

The whole troop boards a van in search of customers.

Kore-eda hits the road, having taken the train in

I Wish

, where two brothers separated after their parents' divorce attempt to find each other.

There's even a corpse somewhere in a hotel room, goons looking for the child thieves.

But Kore-eda is not Park Chan-wook.

He prefers chronicle to film noir.

The road-movie here gives everyone time to reveal their secrets and their suffering.

Kore-eda does not judge anyone.

Neither the prostitute who abandons her baby, nor the inflexible police captain, nor the greedy child thief.

Song Kang-ho, playing expressionist to say the least with Bong Joon-ho, discovers the virtues of sobriety and naturalness and learns delicacy.

A scene shows him at the cafe in Seoul with his teenage daughter.

The last time they saw each other, he was drunk.

Without grimaces or raised eyebrows, Song Kang-ho squeezes his heart.

Source: lefigaro

All life articles on 2022-12-06

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