2024-04-13 17:16:17
Under a scorching sun, 17-year-old Purdey and his 15-year-old brother Makenzy are left to fend for themselves and try to make it on their own. While Purdey cleans at a hotel complex, Makenzy makes some money robbing tourists. Between carefree adolescence and the harshness of adulthood, they will have to support each other on this bittersweet journey, which seems to be the last summer of their youth.
Who puts us in this realistic and extremely Belgian environment is Paloma Sermon-Daï, a young director who was born in Namur, Belgium, and where she filmed all her work.
Graduated in image at the Haute École libre de Bruxelles, her first feature film, “Little Saturday” received its world premiere at the Berlinale Forum 2020 and won several awards: Bayard d’Or at FIFF Namur, Prix diagonales at the Premiers Plans Angers Festival, Best Documentary Award at the Athens International Film Festival and Magritte for Best Documentary.
Paloma Sermon-Daï enjoys filming her homeland and surroundings, but also using family and friends in the works she creates.
Em “It’s raining in the house”, Purdey is the daughter of the filmmaker’s half-brother and Makenzy is Purdey’s half-brother. “It’s our way of being”, explained Paloma Sermon-Daï: “That’s also why I kept the names of the actors. Originally, the characters were supposed to have another name, but they were always making mistakes because they are very spontaneous. So, a little after filming began, I decided that this element would be the small part of the documentary in this fiction.”
“It’s raining in the house” shows precarious and truly dramatic lives of the main characters, but that is not why the work plunges into melancholy or sadness, much less into a state of ‘pathos‘ heavy.
A precarious situation determines neither the character nor the mood of individuals. This is, in a way, the main idea of a film that moves away from the social dramas that fill festivals.
After all, “It’s raining in the house” does not deviate from certain typical passages of the genre, and cannot fail to produce a narrative discourse that is sometimes strong about a muted social violence that is slightly guessed throughout most of the film, but which only perforates on specific occasions. These moments were conceived as true negative spaces: they are post-its scattered throughout the film, as if to explicitly signify that the underlying theme is social inequality.
These moments happen every time money issues are mentioned by the story or the characters, first indirectly, when the brave Makenzy goes through his pockets to collect some coins to give to a homeless woman. It’s a falsely moving scene that, above all, conveys a feeling of honesty that borders on naivety and that completely contrasts with the scenes of bicycle theft, a sport that Makenzy practices without wasting time to reflect.
But the big moments of “It’s raining in the house” appear in two moments of long dialogues. In one of them, Purdey receives a lecture from her boyfriend, who criticizes her for wanting to work and earn a pittance, instead of studying and investing to, later, obtain a stable situation. Purdey neither listens nor accepts this precarious speech that is the situation in which she finds herself. But, curiously, and taking into account what is happening to the young woman, the viewer is by now so familiar with Purdey’s daily life that she understands that what her boyfriend suggests is simply unthinkable.
The other great scene demonstrating that “It’s raining in the house” is a strange film, which never assumes just one genre, it is a conversation between Makenzy and a young teenager from Brussels who is on holiday at the lake and who we quickly identify as being a milk cup or a mama’s boy.
When Makenzy realizes that his interlocutor has a much more relaxed and casual relationship with money than he does, Makenzy becomes tense and forces the son from a good family to pay the bill, before literally putting his head in the water because of the kid. not wanting to pay. Fortunately, the scene cuts to the beginning of Makenzy’s violent outburst. But was this ultimately a good idea? “It’s raining in the house” is full of everything and its opposites.
“It’s raining in the house” by Paloma Sermon-Daï, com Makenzy Lombet, Purdey Lombet, Donovan Nizet, Amine Hamidou and Louise Manteau.
2024-04-13 17:16:17