2023-10-25 07:41:25
♦ The Old Oak ****
Ken Loach
British, French and Belgian film, 1h53
This is undoubtedly the final feature film by Ken Loach, who suffers from vision problems at the age of 87. But he lands in style, by tackling the question of welcoming refugees on the scale of an English village undermined by unemployment. The owner of the local pub, The Old Oak, with the build of a lumberjack and a split soul, helps the new arrivals. Which doesn’t please everyone…
Never Manichean, the scenario clearly shows everyone’s reasons for rejecting or supporting the refugees. We laugh and we cry with these characters whose humanity is put to the test. A salutary film, which provides concrete answers to burning news, on the other side of the Channel as well as on ours.
» READ THE REVIEW: “The Old Oak”, Ken Loach and all humanity in the world
♦ The Pod Generation **
by Sophie Barthes
Franco-American film, 1h50
In a future near ours, Rachel, a young executive in a relationship with Alvy, has registered on the long waiting list of Pegasus, a company which offers artificial wombs created to give birth to babies. Mothers are freed from the enslavement of pregnancy with its attendant nausea and fatigue.
Far from advocating this process, the film examines all aspects of this “progress”: a discourse of feminist emancipation which hides the lucrative commodification of a natural function.
» READ THE REVIEW: “The Pod Generation”, by Sophie Barthes: the future in the making
♦ Second tour**
Albert Dupontel
French film, 1h37
On the eve of the second round of a presidential election, victory seems promised to Pierre-Henry Mercier, a brilliant economist and scion of a rich industrial family. Behind this smooth-looking providential man hides a dark secret that Miss Pove, a political journalist in a 24-hour news channel, wants to unmask, put on the shelf in the sports department.
No doubt less inventive and less successful than‘Goodbye idiotsalso less desperate, this subversive fable takes great pleasure in dynamiting the democratic game to restore our faith in the future of humanity.
» READ THE REVIEW: “Second round”, imagination in power with Albert Dupontel
♦ Past Love Syndrome **
by Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni
film belge, 1 h 28
For years, Sandra and Rémy have tried in vain to have a baby. Their gynecologist offers them a solution: that they each have sexual relations with all their former partners to overcome this “physical blockage”.
The film by Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni goes beyond the scabrous dimensions of its scenario through the freshness and spontaneity of the interpretations, in particular those of Lucie Debay and Lazare Gousseau, irresistibly natural, with the help of a production that draws the story towards lightness and burlesque.
» READ THE REVIEW: “Past Love Syndrome”, prescription infidelity
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