Working on a different kind of realism is what Héloïse Pelloquet is working on in her first feature film, after having followed a course as an editor at La Femis, worked on the editing of various films (in particularOn board by Guillaume Brac or Petite Solange by Axelle Ropert) and signed some remarkable short films (Heart side in 2018, public prize in Pantin and special mention of the jury in Clermont-Ferrand). Realism, we are not going to play the old game again, is never more than the probable imagination that an author gives as truthful and informed, with the aim, for the best of them, of adding to the common experience. the singularity of a fiction, of a character. And change reality or the way we look at it. In this regard the Passenger is not revolutionary but it operates an interesting displacement. The young filmmaker indeed chooses to tell how in Noirmoutier Chiara, a 45-year-old fisherwoman, leading her life alongside her husband, Antoine, recruits on his boat an apprentice in his twenties, Maxence, and how they feel one for the other an attraction to which they end up yielding, even when well the social environment, the prospect of the amorous disorder of the adultery or the established morality, cries to them to do nothing about it.
The filmmaker wrote the screenplay with Rémi Brachet (same promo Femis 2014) and the dramatic springs activated are so unusual that a first reflex may be to say to themselves that they are not completely logical. Thus the apprentice comes from a bourgeois background, he plays the oboe and lives in a vast residence filled with works of art and books. Chiara and Antoine seem in perfect harmony, although childless. No couple crisis, no psychological flaw somehow justifies the woman, already mature, a priori tidy, taking the risk of an affair with a lover twenty years younger than her. A trip by her husband to England to negotiate post-Brexit fishing zone agreements throws the boss and her apprentice into a bubble of carnal euphoria and soon to be in love. The reprobation will come from the community yesterday still warm and suddenly full of suspicion and jealousy, in particular by the voice of children who call her a “bitch”.
Cécile de France, a woman at sea?
The upset sociology of the film – with this somewhat prolo fisherwoman but mistress on board, and this educated young bourgeois whom the internship places in a position of subordination – reshuffles the cards, brings back play where there is above all ideology or dead ideas.
The film, however, is only half-convincing even though its story is attractive. To embody it (and probably finance the project), the choice of Cécile de France seemed, according to the declarations of the filmmaker in an interview, a fulfilled hope. However, without her talent being in question here, it is never really possible for her to make people forget the actress behind a woman supposed to have spent the last ten years going out to sea at dawn every morning, whatever the weather report. The distribution of roles and the presence of non-professional actors serve as a reminder of an established order that the film, in a liberating filiation that evokes DH Lawrence, nevertheless works so courageously to undo.