In Venice, three films that owe a lot to the immense talent of their actors: “Babygirl” by Halina Rejin, “Trois amies” by Emmanuel Mouret, and “Leurs enfants après eux” by the Boukherma brothers.
Babygirl d’Halina Reijn
First actress (in secondary roles, with Peter Greenaway and Paul Verhoeven, like Black Book2006), the Dutch Halina Reijn saw her second film (the first, a horror film, had gone unnoticed), Babygirlto be selected in competition this year in Venice. The greatest interest of the film lies in the presence of Nicole Kidman in the leading role.
She plays a formidable businesswoman, CEO of a renowned artificial intelligence company. However – and we discover this in the opening scene – she is not sexually fulfilled. Her husband (the still very handsome Antonio Banderas, in a role that was intended to be comical) does not satisfy her. Little by little, the truth emerges (oh scandal! – I’m joking, but this discovery made the audience shudder, and sometimes laugh): she likes to be submissive to her partner, but that’s not Banderas’ thing at all…
But then she meets an intern (Harris Dickinson), who she discovered, in the street, has a gift: he immediately knows what someone wants, and he satisfies them. As soon as he sees his boss, he guesses her fantasies and goes to satisfy them, but without any apparent affect on him, even if we assume that he also takes advantage of it. At first reluctant, she slowly lets herself go and enjoys herself (the room still laughing, without us really knowing why). As if the Nicole Kidman ofEyes Wide ShutKubrick’s last film – which ended with the famous line: “Let’s fuck!” from Kidman to Tom Cruise – was finally fully enjoying Babygirl.
Okay. Reijn is not Kubrick, and the story sometimes relies on big clichés like “these people in power who are ruthless in their jobs and who are big masochists in their sex lives”. But it does include a few rather inflated passages, where Kidman doesn’t hesitate to make fun of herself, notably this scene where her teenage daughter asks her when she’s going to stop getting botox… There, yes, we laugh. The film therefore remains a comedy and does not (unfortunately) venture into more extreme, radical sexual regions. It all remains very nice and “funny” (as if the laughing spectators at the Mostra all had a very “straight” sexuality…).
Three friends by Emmanuel Mouret
This is one of Emmanuel Mouret’s greatest successes, who, on a quasi-arithmetical canvas (A loves B, but B no longer loves A, C cheats on D with their girlfriend E, but suddenly F appears, and everything changes, but in fact…), draws human beings who are ultimately timeless, uncertain of their feelings, always: “Undecided as dead leaves, their eyes are fires that have not been extinguished, their hearts move like their doors”, as Apollinaire wrote in Marizibill.
With, at the top of an admirable cast (Camille Cottin, Éric Caravaca in a small role, Damien Bonnard, Sara Forestier, etc.), the great India Hair in her most beautiful role. We have known India Hair for a long time. But, as I was telling friends recently, when I know she is in a film that I am going to see, I am reassured. Not because she always plays roles of reassuring women, but because her presence alone, even if the film is bad, is always exciting and can save it from disaster. This actress is miraculous. And in this new Mouret, her immense talent explodes. Sometimes, just watching India Hair say nothing, do nothing, is enough to make you want to cry. Hats off to you, Madam!
Their children after them by Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma
Free adaptation (in the sense that Nicolas Mathieu did not participate in the screenplay at all) of the eponymous novel – winner of the 2018 Prix Goncourt –, Their children after them was born from the initiative of actor and producer Gilles Lellouche, who plays a secondary but important role in the film, with impressive conviction, something heartbreaking.
The story: teenagers, in the early 1990s, in a coalfield that is already dead. There are the bourgeois, the semi-bourgeois, the poor and the Arabs. Everyone knows each other, hangs out with each other, hangs around each other, fights, grows up for better or for worse, reconciles, loses sight of each other. There is violence, social, political, moral and physical, in this story. The fundamental element of the Boukherma brothers’ staging (Teddy, The Year of the Shark), it’s the energy. An energy that they breathe into every scene, every character. The cast is perfect.
But the originality, the incongruity, the madness that sometimes takes over the film is due to the completely crazy presence of Paul Kircher, this actor who is unlike any other. We cannot say that he plays well according to the most conventional idea of “playing well”, but what he produces is much stronger, because his charisma, his face, his extremely intense presence radiate and illuminate everything around him. It is very impressive.
