After Mayenne, Indonesia.
Five years after the surprise and phenomenal success of “In the Name of the Earth”, in which he featured a farmer cornered by debt (this feature film with Guillaume Canet had attracted two million spectators), Édouard Bergeon signed an ultra-gripping ecological thriller.
This time, it is the palm oil business that the 41-year-old son of a farmer and filmmaker is interested in.
When “The Green Promise” begins, Martin Landreau (played by Félix Moati), a young 28-year-old Frenchman, arrives on the island of Borneo to work in a care center managed by an NGO.
As he gets closer to a pretty activist, he discovers the ravages of palm oil cultivation.
Not only are loggers massively deforesting the country – which has disastrous ecological consequences – but they are also violently expropriating indigenous populations.
An ecological and political message
One day, Martin witnesses a massacre of villagers.
Because he witnessed it, he was arrested and incarcerated in an Indonesian jail.
Carole, his mother (played by Alexandra Lamy), will then try everything to free him.
But she finds herself faced with a dilemma: save her son's life or denounce an environmental and human scandal?
Some scenes are a bit cartoonish or clumsy.
Like the one where Carole empties her cupboards of all the products that contain palm oil or the one in which a cynical lobbyist blackmails this desperate mother.
But we tremble for Martin, this idealist ready to sacrifice himself for the planet, who finds himself threatened with death in an unsanitary prison.
And we hold our breath with this mother, torn between the interests of her son and that of a planet “which is digging its own grave”.
Through this captivating fiction, Édouard Bergeon effectively conveys his ecological and political message.
In the end, “The Green Promise” is a feature film carried by inhabited actors.
A committed and moving film, in the name of (planet) Earth.
Editor's note:
3.5/5
“The Green Promise”,
French thriller by Édouard Bergeon.
With Alexandra Lamy, Félix Moati, Sofian Khammes... 2h04.