Babylon
- What to see
Historical drama by Damien Chazelle, 3h09
Subject: cinema.
Its beginnings, its underside, its vagaries.
There is plenty to do.
In the 1920s, Hollywood believed that everything was permitted.
The director learned the lesson.
babylon
starts with forty minutes of unbridled orgy in a castle à la Xanadu.
Tubs of alcohol, Himalayas of cocaine, ladies more or less priced, orchestras in tuxedos, the session makes you dizzy.
Damien Chazelle makes us relive an era as few have existed in history.
The mute has never made so much noise.
These turpitudes, the American director underlines them with a thick black line.
So here is the gossip aware of the slightest gossip, creating them as needed.
Here are suicides, hangovers.
This slime turns to gold on screen.
Such is the law of the genre.
She is cruel.
Brad Pitt radiates, staggering and ironic star.
Margot Robbie throws herself headlong into the role of the starlet with her fingers in the grip.
The Great Virtue of
Babylon
is not to smell mothballs.
The scandal is that we can lodge beauty in this quagmire.
Paradoxical and Fitzgeraldian.
Stop.
We come out KO, delighted, washed out.
Stop.
IN
Read alsoOur review of Babylon, by Damien Chazelle: a cinematographic fresco
Youssef Salem is successful
- We can see
Comedy by Baya Kasmi, 1h37
They were only missing that.
Already, Youssef didn't want his parents to know that he had written a book about them.
Plus,
Toxic Shock
obtains the Goncourt.
The author no longer knows where to go.
Here he is forced to juggle with the truth, multiplying the stratagems to prevent the persons concerned from obtaining the incriminated object.
This son of immigrants hides his break with his fiancée, turns off the television when it broadcasts a program of which he is the guest, grabs all the copies of his masterpiece from the local bookstore.
Ramzy Bedia plays this vaguely alcoholic novelist to perfection, having distant relations with reality and who shows kindness at all times.
Baya Kasmi opts for the tone of light comedy.
She spins an air of her own, flees downtime, describes a family between two cultures, accurately shows the underside of the literary world.
As a crazy and outdated editor, Noémie Lvovsky is unleashed.
This is the best surprise of this beginning of the year.
We should give it a price.
ES
and
EN
Read alsoRamzy Bedia, the champion of humor at Goncourt
Our suns
- We can see
Drama by Carla Simón, 2h00
We are on his land, in Catalonia, in the region of Algarràs, where a large family of farmers has been cultivating peaches for several generations.
Family chronicle on the last harvest of an exploitation doomed to disappear, the film by Carla Simón won the golden bear at the Berlinale 2022. Directed before the Covid with non-professional actors, this choral portrait plays a lot on the conflicts intergenerational.
Carla Simón carries here a personal, intimate message, and wants to pay homage with a touch of nostalgia, and without any sentimentality, to the last families of farmers who cling to traditions in the face of the galloping modernity which is gaining Spain today. today.
And she films this Catalan peasantry with a realism that commands respect.
But this film, which would like to be
As bestas
by Rodrigo Sorogoyen.
A film that simply lacks a bit of breadth.
And that's a shame.
OD
Read alsoOur review of Our suns: the last fires of the Catalan peasantry
Goodbye
- We can see
Animated film by Atsuko Ishizuka, 1h35
Two lifelong friends reunite one summer in the depths of their rural Japan.
One decided to stay;
the other went to school in Tokyo.
They reconnect with their fireworks club, joined by a third fellow.
The small group finds itself accused of having caused a fire.
Only their drone can exculpate them, but the small machine, blown away by the winds, got lost in a nearby forest.
On the threshold of adulthood, the troop then embarks on an expedition - by paths and caves - to find the machine and reconnect with each other.
The director Atsuko Ishizuka signs here a farewell to childhood punctuated by a few frank laughs, between bear attacks and adolescent bullying.
A spirited road-trip, numbed in its fall by a cascade of melodrama.
CS