It is interesting to discover a director by chronologically browsing his filmography, it can be just as exciting to have the revelation of a first film at the same time as everything that was done afterwards. This may be your case with The Battle of Solferino, the first fictional feature of a certain Justine Triet, and the echoes that are found there with her Palme dor Anatomy of a fall are particularly interesting.
Anatomy of a couple
Laetitia (Lætitia Dosch) tries to get around between her new boyfriend, her two children who scream and a babysitter decidedly little numb. In only a few minutes she will have to be on Rue Solferino to cover the presidential election on the socialist side as journalist I-Télé. As she finally gets ready to leave her apartment, the bell rings. Vincent (Vincent Macaigne) disembarks. And his former companion is determined to see his little girls...
Justine Triet makes the confusing choice at first glance to mix ultra-intimate (the crisis of a past couple crystallizing around the issue of access to children) with collective experience in the broad sense (the election of a new president). And if The Battle of Solferino begins and ends in the carcan of a Parisian apartment, all of its intermediate segment will take place in the street, close to the socialist fief, while François Hollande's accession to power is imminent.
Irritant heating
The film shook from its first scenes, yet still partitioned inside Laetitia's apartment. The children scream, the soloque boyfriend, the toys and ringtones adjust to form a suffocating concerto giving the movie a film that will never stop irritating its spectator. A use of the sister sound of what Triet will develop with music I.M.P., 50 Cents recovery by Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band, in Anatomy of a fall. And in this brief anarchic insert, where the bonhomy of a baby-sitter boudeur and the urgency of a professional situation that calls him, comes to simmer an extra layer of agitation: Vincent. Former husband, former father, returning from a psychiatric hospital, he wants to see his children at all costs and will not turn around.
Laetitia is thus placed in the center of an emotional dryer, skillful and stressful illustration of the notion of "mental charge", crushed by both her family situation and her environment as she moves Street Solferino by abandoning her children in the hands of the babysitter. The carcan of the crowded street drowns it in a ballet of amassed bodies, where frequent directs force to display a smile of hard facade to make-up. She shouts to make herself heard by the microphone, gets shaken by the moving masses, navigates between the militants to collect their testimonies taken as it is in the feature film. The raw aspect of the images, documentaries, disappears and places a little more The Battle of Solferino in a revival of the cinema free of rules, to the direction far less framed than in its subsequent films.
However, where the feature film becomes really exciting, it is when he orchestrates the emulsion between his first part (fictional and irritating) and his second part (documentary and suffocating): Vincent disembarked Rue Solferino, in the middle of the euphoric crowd who had just learned of Hollande's victory and was taking his ex-wife who was trying to work until then. Triet thus makes in the middle of the street dialogue the intimate regime of his narrative with the collective of this socialist victory, disturbing a little more the boundaries between documentary and fiction. The confused looks of the involuntary "figurants", a scene of crêpage of buns in the street, one can well guess the practical nightmare that had to be the shooting of these scenes...
Prefiguring a Palm
Another interesting point is the echoes of Triet's films. We find, as in the great Victoria and Sibyl, an apparition of aurélien Bellanger adept of smoking theories (surely as in real life, seen his books), but also dArthur Harari. Companion of Triet, co-writerAnatomy of a fall and director of the sumptuous Onoda, he already plays in The Battle of Solferino for a dubious pseudo-lawyer role. In addition to these actors' echoes, Triet is once again manipulating the creation of a disorder between reality and fiction by systematically taking back the real names of the actors to name his fiction characters, exactly what she will do in Anatomy of a fall.
In addition to the thematic links and a main character of a woman under pressure who inevitably dialogues from one work to another, the two films close in the same way. An Asian restaurant, an avinate meal, and this painful feeling of facing an unfortunately happy resolution, the fruit of fortuitous, evanescent, uncertain happiness. In short, a first superpowerful film that augurs an explosive filmography, a banner of a strong female, that should be discovered in full... All that remains is to wish Triet a good continuation in his successful reaping of rewards whileAnatomy of a fall is now available in physical format at Le Pacte!
Subscribe
Connection
0 Remarks
oldest
