THE MORNING LIST
A father and his daughter (After sun), a mother and her two sons (A little brother) brings us this week two delicate films on the strength and complexity of filial ties. An engineer venturing on the white peaks of the summits shares with us his encounter with the spirit of the place. Flush on the crests of The mountain, the fantastic, elsewhere, comes in a different way. Rocking to horror in Knock at the Cabin, or flirting with the undead in Ghost Therapy.
“The Mountain”: a man seized by the call of the heights
Awarded at the Gérardmer Fantastic Film Festival (Vosges), the second feature film by Thomas Salvador, The mountain, features Pierre, a robotics engineer, who has come to present an articulated arm to potential investors, in a town at the foot of the Alps. During the presentation, he sees, in the distance, the white peaks of the peaks. While his colleagues return to Paris, the scientist remains. He equips himself with mountaineering equipment and ventures into the foothills, surveying the glacier, attacking the slopes, planting his bivouac above the clouds. As the days go by, man walks, climbs, explores, experiencing this steep and remote landscape, whose nature is revealed.
This alone could be enough for the beauty of the film, which finds all its poetry in this appeal from the heights. But Thomas Salvador manages a fantastic shift that propels the whole into imaginary regions. At the height of his solitude, the climber encounters the spirit of the place, thanks to an artisanal effect, reconnecting with the primary capacity for enchantment of cinema. I. Mt
French film by and with Thomas Salvador. With Louise Bourgoin, Martine Chevallier, Laurent Poitrenaux (1 h 52).
“Aftersun”: behind the veiled sun of memory
After sun open a scrapbook of memories. The last ones that Sophie shared with her father, during a week’s vacation in a hotel-club on the Turkish coast. She was 11 years old, the father in his thirties. Twenty years have passed and Sophie returns to these images, which we suspect she never stopped questioning. In the hope of finding a clue that can help to better understand the disappearance of the father that occurred after this famous summer.
The bewitching charm ofAfter sun is due to fragility, to this secret sensitivity that the director makes palpable. Thanks in particular to the two characters and their interpreters. The father, Calum – solid body, tender and childish smile, look of an abyssal sadness –, to whom Paul Mescal lends a magnetic grace. And Sophie (magnificent Frankie Corio), a little woman in the making, as light as serious. These two together absorb us in the contemplation of their complicit exchanges, their unambiguous embraces, their first disagreements. Everything that might have seemed banal to us becomes After sun captivating and deeply moving. V. Close.
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