Screenwriting Jewellery, Snapshot Beauty, The Ravisation is a real surprise that just landed in our rooms. Cross of wood, cross of iron, if I lie, I was in hell...
Frozen Loves
At the turn of a night troubled by neon, Lydia (Hafsia Herzi) cross the silent Milos (Alexis Manenti). Escape look. Smile shy. Then the discussion simmers, the night stretches and the ephemeral couple abandons for a time the timidity of the facade to indulge in the bestiality that a reciprocal attraction convokes. Then Milos disappeared... Failing to respond to her messages, fleeing her from the street, Lydia regained her anonymous balk at the tides she carried away and looted at her work as a midwife. When his best friend (Nina MeurisseA terrible lie was born in Lydia's mind...
Tricoted from a short fact-various that the young director Iris Kaltenbäck heard, The Ravisation is also its first long. A film emanating from a seminal scene of childbirth (bel and very real, whose documentary aspect echoes another French film in the feminine: Huge, of Sophie Letourneur), built in mirror in relation to its final scene that we will hardly reveal. And in the middle, the pivot of the feature: a damn lie!
Birth of the lie
Because if The Ravisation obviously searches the feminine and alienating act of giving life, he also explores precisely the mechanics of lies. And this narrative hinge is played in an elevator, when Lydia, carrying the infant of her best friend, stumbles upon her former love Milos. Enclosed in this box both, the lie comes to it in successive waves. Worse, it is inserted into its own lips when it is complimented on the beauty of its baby, which is not its own. She has nothing to say, lies are spoken in her place. It's covered. I have to. And then remain only the omission.
And this scene, central, chiseled with goldsmith precision, dialogue perfectly with the suffocating staging of this crowded elevator, stopping from level to level. On each floor, Lydia could escape. On each floor, she could stop the lie she feels born in her own lips. The door opens, salvation is at hand, but irreparably it remains passive. Bury in this box more and more invigorating a coffin, until the nails finally close the lid.
And all The Ravisation Thus, a constant exchange between the status of the characters and the accuracy of a line staging will be built. Let's note some magnificent maternity scenes, an exploration of the work of an exciting midwife and the fantasy romance born between our two protagonists, as well as night scenes where Lydia rents in these deserted streets, the reanimated eye of the only burst of neon that pierce the night. Solitude defiles everything. The night is over. Solitude is growing. And this lie, constantly lying in a corner of the head, which leaves no respite.
From drama to thriller
Then gradually, The Ravisation manages to create without artifice any tension that suintera despite the apparent routine depicted in the film. Plan after plan, he magnified, and carried away in the wake of Lydia as a terrible accomplice, the spectator felt his throat clinging to face the inevitable. The drama then seems to thrill, the melancholy of the plans gives way to suffocating electricity, notably thanks to the writing of the characters with rare accuracy. But writing would be nothing without interpretation, and God knows if Iris Kaltenbäck just aimed with his head trio.
We will indeed notice the nuances of Alexis Manenti, the sad funnyness of Nina Meurisse, both perfect in their role. But it would be a pleonasm to boast the quality of the actress of Hafsia Herzi, always as great regardless of the film she lives in (especially at Kechiche, in France). Grain and Mulet or Mektoub My Love).
Female movie
As for references, we were talking about the great comedy. Huge, yet The Ravisation makes you think of another film by another young director: Saint Omer dAlice Diop. The winner of the César for the best first film and The Ravisation share many common themes: inevitably destabilizing otherness of pregnancy, the use of various facts, analysis of the relationship of genders to conception... Two films that find the conclusion of their narrative in a hotel, by the sea. Yet where Saint Omer is a pure trial film – there will be nothing but a brief sound extract at the beginning of the film – The Ravisation makes the diametrically opposite choice: show everything except the trial.
In short, the thesis and the antithesis, the two facets of the same medal, together forming the promise of a plural, feminine and deep cinema. The Ravisation – in addition to its perfectly well-chosen polysemic title – will no doubt be what we will see best in terms of French drama this year. A unique proposal, to support in theaters!
[...] Chabrol, Haneke, Bellocchio, Skolimowski, Hong Sang-soo or Rithy Panh, Isabelle Huppert rolls her bump through world cinema, and it must be said that a role fits her skin, that of the great bourgeois (we wonder why...). With La Prisonenière de Bordeaux, Huppert did not get rid of this moulting, but put himself at the service of a small French-language film alongside the great Hafsia Herzi whom we had already loved in Le Ravissement. [...]