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How beautiful are unexpected movies.
Unexpected because you don't know what you're going to see.
And unexpected because when they end you don't really know what you've seen either.
The innocent,
by Louis Garrel, as was
A small plan... how to save the planet
(2021), his previous work, is one of them.
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Louis Garrel: "I'm a bit of a fool, a reactionary who doesn't realize he is"
In Garrel's latest films, what happens in other films never happens: neither in general nor within each sequence or in the dialogues.
His creatures never say what the characters in other people's stories usually say.
And that's not only fascinating, but also very difficult to figure out because it's not just about being original.
It is about being genuine, complex, transcendent, lewd, foolish (in the best sense of the word, which is true for art and cinema) and intelligent.
And few recent titles are as intelligent in their structure and as unique in their changes in tone as
The Innocent.
A story about loss and (des)hopelessness, eccentric for good, made up of four charming characters: an ex-convict;
the theater teacher with whom he has caught air and love during his five years in jail;
her son, a widower at an age when it is not fair to be one;
and his best friend, secretly in love with the man who does not come out of his memories and his pain.
A film with a dramatic background that is fundamentally moved by comedy, which sometimes borders on parody in a very brave way, and which has powerful flashes of polar, the French film noir of robberies, tobacco, whiskey and physical and personal darkness.
The poetics of strangeness practiced by Garrel, which plunges the viewer into a marvelous constant bewilderment, is also developed with the forms and the mise-en-scène: zooms
that
would instantly ruin other people's films;
screen partitions into another two or three mini-screens;
rough photo texture.
In certain shots,
The Innocent
it looks like a work by Jean-Pierre Melville, to immediately veer towards the cinema of François Truffaut, but always being Garrel: the daring, the peculiar.
A daring that also fits perfectly with the one that, in one way or another, is also practiced by the four characters throughout the story, always unfolding around love, thus forming a story of exacerbated romanticism that hurts you at the same time. and it amuses you
And four magnificent interpreters, each one in an exact register for his role: Roschdy Zem, tough, noble and disturbing;
Anouk Grinberg, graceful, charming and sincere;
Garrel himself, elusive, insecure and clueless;
and the great comic revelation, Noémie Merlant, funny as ever.
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The recent César Awards in France ended up winning another excellent work,
La noche del 12,
by Dominik Moll, in the presence of the superb
Pacificion,
by Albert Serra, but
The Innocent,
nominated for 11 awards, won two of the main ones: the Best Screenplay and Supporting Actress for Merlant.
Play it, go to the movies with the same courage as the director;
to not expect anything, or to look for something new and special.
Garrel's lyric of the unsuspected deserves it.
The innocent
Directed by:
Louis Garrell.
Cast:
Louis Garrel, Noemi Merlant, Roschdy Zem, Anouk Grinberg.
Genre:
comedy.
France, 2022.
Duration:
100 minutes.
Premiere: April 5.
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