In Laurent Larivière’s film, the actress embodies with infinite variations a woman who recalls her youth.
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entrust to Isabelle Huppert the role of a woman recalling her life is immediately introducing an enigma that makes the salt about Joan, second feature film by Laurent Larivière: throughout the film , the spectator cannot help but see, through the character, the actress’s shards in the strongest roles of his career. It should be noted that Isabelle Huppert embodies Joan at different times in adulthood, and another actress, the British Freya Mavor, interpreted the heroine at 20, her round cheeks reminiscent of Huppert in the Valseuses (1974), by Bertrand Blier.
Documentary disorder sets up from the foreground, Joan driving his car addressing the camera to say a few words about her, insisting in particular on the fact that her first name is pronounced to the English – nor John nor Joanne. Joan, therefore, is a editor and lives in Paris. One day, she meets her youthful love in the street, Doug, a slightly thug that she had met in Ireland, and from which she had to separate suddenly. They have a coffee together but Joan does not reveal to him that she had a child of him.
This fortuitous meeting brings Joan to plunge back into his memories, a risky exercise in the cinema, but that the film crosses with a certain subtlety thanks to the editing and the script: the moments of the rocking cling to the mental thread of the character (his Sensations, its traumas) while avoiding giving simple explanatory value to the past. 2>
beautiful casting
In other words, Joan’s groping memories are more like sketches whose colors contradict each other: we discover Nathan, the son she raised alone – interpreted by three actors, including Dimitri Doré (discovered in Bruno Reidal, confession of a murderer, Vincent Le Port) and Swann Arlaud -, but also his new companion, Tim, a whimsical and madly in love writer – a tailor -made role for Lars Eidinger, actor and German director from the Theatrical scene and the Schaubühne of Berlin. Through these two characters, Joan’s life, a woman who does with life accidents and counts on her creative memory to resist a vacuum.
Laurent Larivière, director of I am a soldier (2015), selected in Cannes (Un Certain Regard), screenwriter of Pearl (2019), Elsa Amiel, and the drift of the continents (south), Lionel Baier, recently released indoors, here is a beautiful casting. In About Joan, the supporting roles operate as ghosts, after all comforting, although inscribed in a tragedy: let’s add Joan’s mother (Florence Loiret-Caille) who tries to reinvent her life, and will be told stories , her too. Isabelle Huppert’s spectacle jumping the eras, blonde rock with the false tunes of Debbie Harry, mature wife with Tim’s arm, his eternal lover, is not the slightest charm of this romantic film, certainly classic, but where Each image counts.
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