Gaël Lépingle features a group of teenagers entrenched in a farm to flee the disaster.
by
If nuclear anxiety has largely nourished the imagination of cinema, it is still associated with American B series, thrillers, spy films or science fiction, which proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s. A guy of narrative which, curiously, has not experienced real transplantation in France, whose primary membership in the atom and the territory dotted with plants seemed to be conducive to welcoming such fictions. However, hexagonal cinema has left the nuclear question in wasteland, at the stadium of the unthinky, and even of the uncigger, apart from a few rare exceptions (Grand Central, by Rebecca Zlotowski, in 2013).
It is in this breach that, judiciously, came to rush the third feature film of the filmmaker and director Gaël Lépingle (a pretty valley, 2019), reconnecting with certain principles of the B series: Concision, Concision, Concision, Concision, Concision, Concision, Concision, Concision concentration, suggestion, economy. And a classic postulate, a small group of isolated characters and surrounded by an invisible evil, in the disturbing mute of the outside world.
tension lines
Victor (Shaïn Boumedine, discovered in Mektoub My Love, of Abdellatif Kechiche, in 2018) practices the race with big strides, helmet on the ears, in the vast plains of champagne and the units of Nogent-sur-Seine ( Dawn), when the alert system of the nuclear power plant begins to sound. Back on his steps, he comes across a bunch of friends, two girls and two boys, whose car fell into the ditch: order was given to evacuate the premises, following an accident in the power station of corner. In the absence of an alternative and the threatening storm, they return to the village confine themselves in the first farm. As recommended by a preventive government spot, they start by caulking all air arrivals. But the time suspended, isolation, the latent threat of radioactivity, the impossibility of communicating with the outside because of a saturated network put the small group to the test and bring up to it various lines of tension.
Although written and produced before the health crisis, the nuclear summer works a material that coincides remarkably with some of the experiments and representations that it has printed: assignment at home, the domestic space that has become a world in itself, cities and agglomerations emptied of all human presence, the spectrum of contamination floating in the air, the exterior experienced as a threat, adolescence put under bell …
You have 45.06% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.