2023-11-02 12:05:28
With this seventh posed and artificial film, Mélanie Laurent’s first foray into big-budget action with “girl power” sauce, the actress-director gets lost in the ruptures of tone specific to the comic strip she is adapting.
The heist film has served for several years as a poster child for the feminist surge in Hollywood: Ocean’s 8, 355, and other female variations of a genre generally dominated by male heroes, sprinkled with penetrating monologues, showcased by the promotion in girl power manifestos. Equality undoubtedly deserves better, but the formula is flawed. Thieves, adapted for Netflix and by Cédric Anger (Next time I will aim for the heart) from a comic strip (La Grande Odalisque by Bastien Vivès, Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot, ed. Dupuis, 2012) is quite openly an echo of this hexagonal. Its construction obviously predates the controversies surrounding the authors of the album: Vivès’ carte blanche canceled in Angoulême last year, under pressure from activist groups who accused him of trivializing incest and child pornography, and the indictment of Florent Ruppert for acts of sexual assault in investigation published by Mediapart.
Irreconcilable misunderstanding
The film immediately comes up against a genetic problem, as the adapted work, a variation on the Funny Ladies oscillating between parody, soft eroticism, majesty of style, is rooted in fantastical imagery, making its heroines untouchable apparitions and lascivious, too distant to call for the slightest identification, and therefore hardly lend themselves to an emancipatory program. Hence we don’t really have the impression of finding the characters here, namely Carole, Alex and Sam (the names echo another, more trivial variation on the same model: the animated series Totally Spies ), burglars who are both bloodthirsty and disillusioned, eager to hang up their gloves after one last big blow imposed on them by their “godmother” (Isabelle Adjani).
The whole thing suffers from an irreconcilable misunderstanding between a comic strip which by nature can get away with anything, slipping from the realistic comedy of a group of friends (“Damn, I got dumped by text!”) to an action ballet with evanescent stylization, without ever running the risk of a break in tone or loss of adhesion, and a film which, in attempting to embrace the same freedom takes on the air of a shapeless patchwork of scenes which we say, according to moments, that they should have been directed by Robert Rodriguez, or by Steven Soderbergh, or by Sophie Letourneurbut not by all three at once, and especially not by Mélanie Laurent.
False female complicity
The actress, the object of a bashing that has become a rather pernicious national sport, is exposed to seeing it resurrected in the light of this seventh production (all the same!) which sees her for the first time take on a film of big budget action. This is because his Voleuses is unfortunately charged with a certain infatuated attitude: a very borrowed way of striking a pose while feigning nonchalance, of wanting to be badass while remaining very chic, and of capriciously claiming all the registers – comedy, but without really trying to be funny, the thriller, but without creating suspense… Of these pretensions only remains a imitation Ocean’s… oozing with false feminine complicity, set in a dated setting all in lens flares and grazing lights, and that It will take a lot of will or blindness to accept seeing it as – it’s the director who says it, obviously – a “film about women’s freedom”.
Thieves by Mélanie Laurent, with Mélanie Laurent, Adèle Exarchopoulos… 1h54
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