Retirement home 2
- To see
Comedy by Claude Zidi Jr, 1h42
In the distance, the music of the abyss accompanied by a dolphin's whistle resonates.
In slow motion, Lorenzo (Jean Reno) enters, his back to the Mediterranean.
Thirty-six years after the release of The
Big Blue
, we are amused to see this patriarch, star of the 1990s. On the screen, a little girl asks him what he does for a living.
Like the other children in the movie theater, she doesn't know who he is.
“I've been a hitman, I've free-dived, I've even traveled in time, but you can't understand that.
I’m talking to you about a time that those under 75 cannot know,”
he says.
Retirement Home 2
plays with the spectators.
Adults will smile at the nods to
Léon
, the
Big Blue
and the
Visitors
.
After the first
retirement home
, we find our young orphans who live with our seniors.
For the summer, this large blended family is moving to a retirement home nestled among cedars and pines, in the Var.
This paradise quickly turns into hell because the new residents (Firmine Richard, Liliane Rovère, Daniel Prévost, Michel Jonasz) and the old ones (Amanda Lear, Chantal Ladesou, Jean Reno, Enrico Macias) hate each other.
They organize secret meetings.
The seniors' war is declared.
This family comedy is sunny and very friendly.
The careful lighting makes the characters beautiful despite their wrinkles.
They are funny, free to do what they want with a touch of madness.
They don't care about everything.
With her AC/DC t-shirt and her wild white hair, Liliane Rovère stands out.
Amanda Lear, known as “Barbie”, is a blonde tornado who smokes joints in a silk negligee.
Behind the camera, Claude Zidi Jr. signs a modern production, in a “cartoon” and pop style.
LL
Also read: Reno, Ladesou, Bourdon, Balasko... To laugh and make people laugh, the grandpas and grandmas of cinema are putting up resistance
Without ever knowing us
- To see
Drama by Andrew Haigh, 1h45
This Valentine's Day, you won't find a film more poetic, haunting and heartbreaking than
Without Knowing Us
, a delicate and sensual adaptation in today's London of the short story
Presences of a Summer
by Japanese director Taichi Yamada.
An unclassifiable tale of romance, transcendence and ghosts.
A screenwriter in search of inspiration, Adam lives in a modern tower with unoccupied apartments.
One night, he meets Harry in the elevator, a neighbor who invites him to his house.
The two men like each other but Adam doesn't dare take the plunge.
Shaken by this encounter which breaks the monotony, Adam returns to the suburbs where he grew up before a car accident took his parents away, three decades ago.
There, he discovers, astounded, that his parents are alive and well, still in their thirties.
In their presence, and that of Harry, Adam finds unprecedented comfort.
To the horror that infused Yamada's tale, British director Andrew Haigh, already noticed with
45 Years
, prefers surrealism.
He transforms this odyssey into a waking and disjointed dream which sometimes turns into a nightmare during club trips, where the senses are overwhelmed.
Inspired by the paintings of Francis Bacon, he makes his characters evolve in confined and nocturnal spaces, as if suspended in time and space.
Another adjustment that reflects Andrew Haigh's journey and his sensibilities, the original heterosexual couple becomes a queer duo.
In the family home, Adam is pampered like the kid he was.
Like all parents, theirs want to know if their son is happy.
But how do you explain to adults in the 1980s that he's gay?
Reduce
Without knowing ourselves
about this militant dimension would be an erroneous shortcut.
Through the skin-deep sincerity of his actors, Andrew Scott and the mustachioed Paul Mescal, respectively interpreters of Adam and Harry, Andrew Haigh explores the trap of loneliness, a universal scourge.
C.J.
Also readOur review of Without ever knowing us: the absent are always strong
Bob Marley.
One Love
-
To see
Reinaldo Marcus Green biopic, 1h47
It took forty-three years for Bob Marley, one of the most charismatic figures of the 20th century, to be the subject of a biopic.
Directors as experienced as Martin Scorsese or Oliver Stone (apologies) have broken their teeth there.
Bob Marley.
One Love
is on screens thanks to the determination of American director Reinaldo Marcus Green.
We will be grateful to him for not having covered the thirty-six years of the singer's life - which plagues the majority of biopics - to concentrate on a few decisive years of his life and his career: the sequence which goes from 1976 to 1978 The British Kingsley Ben-Adir plays the role very well.
Without ever playing clones, he is credible in the skin of this hero who is by turns volcanic and introspective.
The musical scenes are particularly successful, although they are often missed in this type of film.
The success of
Bob Marley.
One Love
is also due to the dive it offers into Jamaica at the end of the 1970s, with its explosive political context.
We are more reserved about the grandiloquent flashbacks which place Marley as a kid facing the father figure, an intimidating male figure on horseback.
WE
Also readOur review of Bob Marley: One Love, at eye level
Dog and Cat
- To see
Comedy by Reem Kherici, 1h26
The Anglo-Saxons shone with Paddington, Ted and Garfield.
The Italian-Tunisian, born in Neuilly on the banks of the Seine, Reem Kherici responds with Chichi de la street, the labrador gansgta and Diva, the Maine Coon to Beyoncé's
“booty shake”
.
These two who were not meant to meet will have to join forces to connect Montreal to New York.
They are pursued by a thief (Franck Dubosc) and an Instagrammer (Reem Kherici), themselves chased by a sheriff with dubious intentions (Philippe Lacheau).
In French cinema, director, screenwriter and actress Reem Kherici is the first to dare to try mixing real images and animals in 3D computer-generated images.
On arrival, Reem Kherici succeeded in her bet.
She was able to hold the largest budget ever entrusted to a French director, i.e. 21 million euros.
His film is funny and rhythmic.
And what is rare in comedy: he is handsome.
Like Tim Burton with
Dumbo
, Reem Kherici enlarged the eyes of her animals to better convey their human emotions.
They also talk.
“It was my childhood dream to make animals talk
,” says this great cat lover.
Like her in life, the tone switches in the blink of an eye from thunderous laughter to emotion.
LL
Also read: A Dog and Cat full of good surprises
Alive
- We can see
Drama by Alix Delaporte, 1h23
Maybe we should never leave Montauban.
On this, the gunslingers are categorical.
Leaving Grenoble is something else.
We don't know what Lautner's gangsters would have thought of this.
So Gabrielle (Alice Isaaz) arrives in Paris with her illusions and her backpack.
She dreams of becoming a journalist (don't add: poor thing).
Intern for a prestigious reporting program, these were his first steps in his career.
There is a start for everything.
In the offices, things are agitated.
Telephones are ringing left and right.
The teams are on alert.
Pascale Arbillot, with her serious glasses, welcomes the recruit with sharp tenderness.
The editor-in-chief shakes up his troops.
The news follows suit.
She must learn to take apart a camera in two steps.
She observes.
She learns.
Obviously, the prospect makes blunders.
That, she talks too much.
But she thought she was doing the right thing.
It’s the job that comes in.
The channel manager has requirements.
From the audience, always from the audience.
“International doesn’t work anymore
,” asserts Louis Leprince-Ringuet in his gray suit.
And Africa?
That’s where it’s happening, though.
Too dangerous.
In addition, credits are tight.
What if they were going to film a fashion show?
The old folks grumble and obey while dragging their feet.
The atmosphere is no longer good.
Gabrielle witnesses the disintegration of an environment.
The audiovisual press is no longer what it used to be.
Alix Delaporte shows a profession in decline, with its economic imperatives, the censorship that does not speak its name, the blues and moments of fraternity.
Family life takes its toll.
Not even time to have a child.
Divorces and failures loom over these correspondents with microphones in their hands.
The film, modest, solid, involved, would undoubtedly have benefited from focusing on one plot (the triads).
No need to be choosy.
As it is,
Vivants
describes people at work, examining an old-fashioned passion.
It's already that.
IN.
Also read: Our review of Vivants: journalists in search of meaning
The imaginary Molière
–
To
avoid
Olivier Py biopic, 1h34
"What is it? What do you have?”
Philinte asked Alceste.
Well, a little headache and a slight retching, the viewer might respond as they leave the screening of Olivier Py's film on the last hours of Molière.
Was this a working copy?
A joke?
February 17, 1673, Théâtre du Palais-Royal: in his dressing room, Molière prepares to go on stage, where he will play Argan, imaginary patient.
For the last time.
Molière, abandoned by the king, looks at his dead face in the mirror.
He coughs like a turd, he spits blood.
He's going to die.
Laurent Lafitte is Molière.
We have nothing to reproach the actor, only for finding himself in front of Olivier Py's camera, who here makes a film of exemplary nullity.
Filmed by candlelight in order to give a twilight sfumato to Molière's last moments, this film had some aesthetic ambitions, like all great failures.
Let’s move on to the subject, the thesis, of the film.
Molière, about whom we know practically nothing, is the ideal object of fantasies.
Those of the Philistine Py are hardly original.
He makes him a sodomite in a world of sodomites.
Everyone is more or less gay in the land of precious ridicule.
Molière is in love with little Michel Baron, a young and handsome actor in the troupe who was the lover of Armande Béjart and the giton of the Duke of Bellegarde.
In this moth-eaten decor, powdered faces parade in pretentiously cheesy close-ups.
Ah, you need elegance to film decadence!
AP
Also readOur review of Olivier Py's imaginary Molière: new Diafoirus