Presented out of competition, Morse signs the birth of a new French director, Romain de Saint-Blanquat, whom we met at the Grand Hotel, Mecca of the Gérardmer festival. « In the direction of a watch, I live; in the opposite direction, I die » prophesy Françoise, heroine and adolescent taciturne of a boarding school where religion still reigns with an iron hand. Swan singing a year before spring 1968. In the straight line of this edition placed under the sign of vampire, Morse convoke the Hammer's spectre with this ephemeral teenage runaway. One flight line: transgression!
Criticism of Morse
Remember that you are dust and will return to dust
There are films where we know very quickly where we set foot. In just a few minutes, the color is announced with an opening nightmare in which the young Françoise is burned alive in a dream, like Joan of Arc or the witches of Salem. The photograph and format chosen immediately hit the spectator: ratio 1.66, slight silver emulsion and millimetre composition that leave nothing to chance. Successful nostalgic patina with these straight cut outfits of young high school girls caught up by an omnipotent religion.
It is during the Mass that the noise runs that a night is planned in the forest (for who does not fear to brave the forbidden). And what a ban while the barely completed procession is that of Ash Wednesday, a Christian celebration that imposes (in theory) the young as penance! This rejection of the sin of greed is in perfect contrast with the aspirations of youth, far from the vow of abstinence promoted by the establishment. In religion, the date of the Ash Wednesday follows the fat Tuesday, day of all excesses before the Lent period. So it is with a certain irony that the last day of the rest of Françoise's life begins... at the beginning of the renunciation of pleasures!
Persuaded to be a pythonisse, Françoise was obsessed with her pendulum, which she constantly consulted. She managed to encasing her friend Delphine for a great escape with the same project: making the wall between girls to become women! Morse always cultivates a symmetry of the possibilities and their opposites with this evening which is as much a mourning as a becoming. A symbol that will find a replica in the theme of depuration as a horizon, a project to the antipodes of Christian discipline. Morse is a matter of rites with painful moulting from adolescence to adulthood. Romain de Saint-Blanquat has chosen a rigorist (and minimalist) framework from which to escape: that of a suffocating religion first but very quickly caught up with its negative, the social pressure imposed by the refractories on dogma between and against them. Françoise goes through the opposite states: anger, hope, jealousy, resignation: the four movements of the teenage symphony.
Destroy Your Hearts
During this night run, we are as close to their psyche, the emese and the pivotal questions so characteristic of this crisis. There's one side of Bartleby, this silent Melville character with the famous formula « I would prefer not to ». These words come back between the lips of one of the young people of the film, also between childhood and adulthood. The will is in fact systematically confronted with flight. Weared by Léonie Dahan-Lamort in the role of Françoise, a girl disturbed but determined to go towards her destiny, Morse Fairness. The very theatrical dialogues fly, while constantly making sure to leave the figure of the vampire whose shadow will not leave the film. The evening lends itself perfectly to the carnival side, to the masks that one wears to become someone else.
At the same time, it is the myth of Cassandre that comes up against the bustle of youth where the transition to adulthood arises from intimate violence from inside and outside. Even at the margin, for example, « abnormal » seek to control the bodies of women, like this arrogant biker who imposes sexual favors in exchange for a cigarette. Are they so different from the good sisters? The youthful fantasy explodes in the face of a much worse reality. Despite a slight floating in the middle of the film, Morse We were seduced by his sincerity and a speech less anticipated than what this inaugural nightmare prefigures. One Teen movie sensitive and metaphorical, and the sign of a promising director.
Interview with Romain de Saint-Blanquat
Trailer of Morse
Convoking a whole section of the vampiric cinema, this ten-movie which seeks with intelligence (initiatory narrative, drama or fantastic horror?) is a first work with marked identity (a onirico-lugubra photograph cultivating a taste for the Hammer) and to the indie soundtrack (from the rock garage) carried by a Léonie Dahan-Lamort Magnetic. "I would prefer not to."