2023-10-11 00:02:00
Yolande Moreau fails to give an identity to her film, always between two waters.
Having not signed any films herself for ten years (Henri dates from 2013), Yolande Moreau devotes herself in The Poet’s Bride to a sort of self-portrait as an out-of-phase woman revising her past downwards and finding herself almost none future, the word “ruin” emerging from just about every sentence she utters. The whole film is constantly (and let’s say it, strangely) weighed down by the morose mood of Mireille, played by the author of the film, who may tell herself that she can emerge by welcoming her into her house on the banks of the Meuse a few fanciful individuals, nonetheless continues to utter with a haggard air poems attributed to a certain “André Pierre de Mandiarguès”, a youthful love which sent him spiraling and which we very unlikely see return in the end for one more disenchantment: in this case, a graying and not super shrewd Catalan plumber (played by Sergi López).
The film suffers terribly from being thus tossed between two waters, neither truly utopian and warm fiction about the constitution of a community or an alternative family, nor a potentially ferocious comedy about a very selfish desire to escape solitude to the detriment of all those she accepts and then criticizes. The very form is also the fruit of an indecision, between a shot-shot story with all the characterization of the characters and twists and turns supposed to entertain us, and more uncertain and weightless moments where we guess a film which would have could have been more free.
#Poets #Bride #life #gloom #Libération