En Attendant La Nuit (For The Night Will Come)
En Attendant La Nuit follows a family moving into a suffocatingly uniform suburban area to support their son, who the audience knows from the first scene is sick in a very unusual way — he drinks blood. An undeniable standout from the festival, La Nuit shifts during its runtime from an offbeat coming-of-age comedy-drama that happens to involve the supernatural to a devastating tragedy about conformity, violence, and family.
La Nuit has one of the strongest openings of any film I’ve ever seen. The strengths of the film can be seen within these first few minutes, in which we are introduced to our protagonist as a bloodsucking newborn: it is sentimental, disturbing, and visually stunning, supported by an arresting score by Jean-Benoît Dunckel. After this incredibly high-energy beginning, the film has a lull that drags on a bit, mostly centering around Philémon (our protagonist) having normal coming-of-age experiences heightened by his urges to drink blood. There is a lot of interesting material in this portion of the movie, but it overstays its welcome slightly, especially after the excitement of the beginning. Once the tone changes, the film shines. It is a harrowing and difficult watch, featuring heavy and emotional scenes as well as moments of intense anxiety and horror.
Both capture the intense inner conflict of their respective characters, driven by different but equally powerful urges toward something unfamiliar and terrifying.
There is not a single weak link in the cast, but Mathias Legout Hammond as Philémon and Céleste Brunnquell as Camilla, a girl with whom Philémon forms a troubled romance, deliver particularly strong performances. Both capture the intense inner conflict of their respective characters, driven by different but equally powerful urges toward something unfamiliar and terrifying. The film manages to juggle a rich milieu of themes ranging from sexual repression to collective violence without becoming overwrought, supported by the gripping emotional underpinnings of every moment.
Le Successeur (The Successor)
Le Successeur is about Ellias, a rising star of the fashion world, as he begrudgingly manages the affairs of his estranged and recently-deceased father — this task turns out to be much more complicated than he expected. Le Successeur opens with a gorgeous and heavily stylized fashion show, demonstrating director Xavier Legrand’s clear aesthetic sense — it is a shame we see so little of that ability later in this film. Shortly after this invigorating opening, the film decreases in energy significantly and becomes a smaller and sadder drama about grief until the major twist. This twist delivers a scene so terrifying that it supports the rest of the film purely through viewers’ residual fear. The suspenseful portion only lasts for around 20 minutes, and the rest of the movie captures Ellias’ downward spiral as he grapples with and tries to hide truths about his father and himself.
The premise of the movie has the potential for a tragedy of Ancient-Greek-Epic proportions, and Xavier Legrand knows it. In the Q&A after the screening, he mentioned his use of Greco-Roman architecture to evoke this tradition. The source material, L’Ascendant, a novel by Alexandre Postel, gives Legrand a fantastic story to work with. It has the epic fall from grace; a curse figuratively inherited from birth; guilt, sin, and mortality — it could have been one of the great dramas of the year, if not the decade. Because of this potential, it makes for a frustrating watch. The film is great at points, but never consistently. Le Successeur wavers between artful cinematography and dreariness. The writing sets up certain plot points brilliantly, but at times relies on the characters’ acting in a way that is so implausible that it makes them feel like placeholders for a larger allegory. The protagonist is at times beautifully emotionally evocative and sometimes so opaque that the movie alienates its viewer completely. There is a reason why great tragedies often have monologues — for this kind of story to work we must understand our protagonist’s undoing. Ultimately, Le Successeur is a good film that could have been a great one.
Le Ravissement (The Rapture)
Lydia (Hafsia Herzi), a midwife, finds out that her boyfriend cheated on her. They break up. The same day, her best friend, Salomé (Nina Meurisse), tells her that she’s pregnant. From this moment forward, the movie tracks the women as they navigate their respective life changes and the way these lines get blurred. When Lydia tells a desperate lie to get the attention of a one-night-stand (Alexis Manenti) she runs into at the hospital she works at, the film takes a shocking turn.
Social attitudes about mothers are comprised mostly of tacit cultural beliefs so widely accepted that they are almost invisible. The unspoken nature of this subject is amplified by how understated the film’s exploration of it is.
Le Ravissement manages to cover colossal ground in a tight 97 minutes, and in the competent hands of director Iris Kaltënback, it never once feels overambitious. Kaltënback has an impressive knack for subtlety, a virtue particularly valuable in a drama. With this gift, she is able to make a film that quietly explores themes from the existential to the socio-political. The structure of the film, retrospective narration by the aforementioned one-night-stand Milos, raises interesting ideas about temporality and subjectivity. Motherhood — and the value it gives women societally — is also central to the film. Here, Kaltënback’s subtlety provides even more. Social attitudes about mothers are comprised mostly of tacit cultural beliefs so widely accepted that they are almost invisible. The unspoken nature of this subject is amplified by how understated the film’s exploration of it is. Le Ravissement works on every level and warrants several rewatches to appreciate just how thoughtful the movie really is.
Le Vourdalak (The Vourdalak)
This is a shorter review, because there is really only one thing to say about it: if you are the kind of person who would enjoy a campy, queer, absurdist movie based on a short story by A. K. Tolstoy, this will be your favorite movie ever. It’s funny, it looks great, and there is something special about seeing a movie so clearly driven by love for art. The world would be a better place if there were more movies like Le Vourdalak. I put my notebook away during this movie and let the spectacle wash over me, and I encourage you to do the same.
