2023-07-05 00:35:00
No welcome side compared to the other films shot during confinement, the cozy film by Arnaud Viard nevertheless ends up tiring.
As in a famous children’s show from the 70s and its orange foam dinosaur, Arnaud Viard’s film is a kind monster, in a benevolent world of semi-precarious Germanopratin artists. For children, we were warned elsewhere: his daughter Cléo and his son Melvil are in the title and in the film. Cléo, Melvil et moi, shot in the time of the Covid, however has the particularity of not being another “confinement” film, tense on the fourth wall of a camera, but the film “from the nose to the window “, applause to the nursing staff, subtitled comments from Macron on TV, and deserted Paris, which the filmmaker-actor invests in an unexpected setting of sketches chronicled – him, his life, his film, his ex, her future, her children and her kindness. Summoning Marianne Denicourt is a good idea, the actress with the radiant smile masked as a pharmacist behind Plexiglas. Romane Bohringer, between two doors and two lively explanations of separated parents, offers herself the best written, funny and spirited scenes.
But Viard is not Woody Allen refilming Love on the Run in the shades of a Philippe Garrel, possible general horizon of the series of self-portraits he has been making for twenty years – the most candidly imperious was entitled Arnaud is making his second film. His world is realistic and faithful to the nonchalant laziness that the filmmaker brings to inhabit it. Problem, we quickly made the rounds. In a way, its perfect banality constitutes its originality. The little Time.news unfolds, with moments close to childhood Super 8s, a family film that is as gentle as possible, in a beautiful stripped black and white.
Cléo, Melvil et moi somehow challenges its spectator to be mean to him, the nice object, and no one really wants to. Nothing is treated of the deserted world of the pandemic – at most we deplore the death of Christophe, before launching a shortened song of his – nothing of fear, of illness, except to flirt with the pharmacist without gel, without mask. We touch on daily worries, a musical comedy takes shape, a brief bubble. Viard and his cuddly toy film, his job, his hobby. The ego trip is more generous than that of many more frisky and even more inconsistent films.
Cléo, Melvil et moi by Arnaud Viard, with Marianne Denicourt, Romane Bohringer… 1h13.
#Cléo #Melvil #candid #Covid #Liberation