First film already noticed in Venice, The man of Argile dAnaïs Tellenne now arrives in physical format. Some sort of The Beauty and the Beast version provincial castle, wielding a subtle taste for the absurd and a certain love of contrast, which susurreures the promise of a career to follow for her young director.
Romance at the castle
Raphael (incarnate by the film mouth Raphael Thiéry) guard an uninhabited provincial castle. Sharing with his mother the wing of servants, he leads the hunt for moles who gangrene the grass, tries to keep the old walls of the building standing and takes care of between his passion for the bagpipe and his intriguing leg-in-the-air parts with the local post office (the awesome Marie-Christine Orry). Without shouting guard arrives the heiress of the castle, Garance (the vaporizer Emmanuelle Devos), which will sow the trouble in Raphael's well-ordered daily life...
This summary condenses well the scenario of Man of clay seems cliché to wish and little inventive. A bourgeois romance like we saw a thousand in the movies... Yet, as soon as the plan opens, it is understandable that Anaïs Tellenne ambitions far more than that. This opening corresponds to a back zoom on a watercolor painting of the castle that will be the frame of history. Naif, colorful, a real fairytale castle. Yet the rear movement of the camera will soon reveal a completely different reality. And this is only the first contrast of a cinema that seems constantly to feed it, to make beautiful with ugly, new with old, touching and grotesque.
Uncertainties
Even better, if the summary suggested a romance tinted with drama, snoring, pontifying, Tellanne offers us the opposite. By infusing his story with a resolutely absurd hue (the mole hunt, the escapades with the post office, the passage to the museum...), his story offers regular tone breaks that break the expected rhythm of the feature film and infuses a welcome freshness.
If the story does not dazzle in the background, the shape and bends that Anaïs Tellanne takes are sufficient to illuminate this feature film and to break the wait of such a romance's classic unfolding. And if the contrasts are everywhere – from the opening scene to the closing of the film, in the actors, in the accents and the speech, in the art forms – Man of clay In its scenario, the desire to place art as the ultimate means of expression has emerged.
In short, you will understand, do not rely on synopsis to assume your interest in this unclassifiable feature. A particularly daring first long, which surprises by its form and puts in the foreground Raphaël Thiéry, a real film trick so far rather relegated to the second roles (especially in the great Poor creatures). A film that is now possible to (re)see in physical format!
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 90 min
Release date: 16 July 2024
Video format : 576p/25 – 1.50
Soundtrack : French Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
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