The actor and director Clovis Cornillac takes a beautiful troop of actors in the adaptation of the second novel of the trilogy of Pierre Lemaitre, who signs the scenario.
by Véronique Cauhapé
As an actor or director, Clovis Cornillac has always claimed his attachment to the popular French cinema which knows how to offer, in his words, spectacle and intelligence. No doubt this is one of the reasons that led him to accept Pierre Lemaitre’s proposal to adapt colors of the fire (Albin Michel, 2018), second novel in the author’s trilogy on -Aux-war. The first part, goodbye up there (Goncourt 2013 Prize), brought to the screen by Albert Dupontel in 2017, had been very successful in theaters.
Colors of the fire presented all the material necessary for the realization of a large historical, political and romantic fresco. Enough to seduce Clovis Cornillac, who took all of this on the brim to make a leaflet, classic and yet allegre feature, faithful to the spirit of the book. While Albert Dupontel had smothered the characters under a bubbling aesthetic, Clovis Cornillac, conversely, place his Majesty, giving everyone the same attention, without preference or judgment, thus making their greatness and their mediocrity, the ‘Ambition, revenge, the necessity that drives them. It is by focusing on them that the film provokes emotion and reaches this human comedy, so dear to Pierre Lemaitre, the only signatory here of the scenario.
victim of a machination
The color structure of the fire is that of the Count of Monte-Cristo (1844-1846), by Alexandre Dumas. We followed, from 1927 to 1933, the fall of a woman victim of a machination which led her to ruin, then her revenge against all those who caused her loss. This woman is called Madeleine Péricourt (Léa Drucker), Sister of Edouard, the hero disfigured to see up there, and Marcel’s daughter, whose funeral opens the film. Ceremony which is coupled with another drama: the suicide attempt by Madeleine’s son, Paul (Octave Bossuet), 10, which the defenestration does not kill but makes hemiplegic.
Forted and now at the head of the banking empire left by his father, Madeleine is an easy prey for Gustave Joubert (Benoît Poelvoorde), former adviser to the deceased and notorious upwards, to whom the post-war period gives wings . Business is going well, he intends to take advantage of it. Madeleine is alone, he hopes to seduce her. Watches, he does not hesitate to lead the lady to her loss. She will spend a few years in a modest apartment with her son and nanny, before a little stroke of fate gives him the opportunity to glimpse the possibility of revenge. Supported by his former driver (Clovis Cornillac), Madeleine sets her plan. Which has the effect of emancipating it, then revealing it. In this world of men, she becomes a warrior in velvet gloves who, gradually, will capsize and then decompose those who ruined her.
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