It’s one of the best French action films of recent years and it’s finally coming to Netflix. If you haven’t seen it yet, we advise you to catch up with Le Chant du Loup with François Civil, Omar Sy, Mathieu Kassovitz and Reda Kateb.
A surprise success of 2019 which brought together more than one and a half million admissions to cinemas, Le Chant du Loup arrives today on Netflix. With an impressive cast, bringing together François Civil, Omar Sy, Mathieu Kassovitz and Reda Kateb, this first feature film by Antonin Baudry proved that France had nothing to envy the Americans in terms of action films.
Nourished by his years spent as a diplomat in the ministry and at the various French embassies, Antonin Baudry put his experiences on paper under the pen name Abel Lanzac in comics. Quai d’Orsayadapted to the cinema in a film of the same name by Bertrand Tavernier in 2013.
A thriller that plays on anxiety and sound
Six years later, Antonin Baudry struck hard with his first feature film Le Chant du Loup, which broke all the codes and left its mark on the French action thriller genre. This film enthusiast has achieved a real tour de force by literally immersing us in the environment of the French Navy through the story of Chanteraide (François Civil).
The latter is a Golden Ear, a submariner specializing in acoustic analysis, who makes an analysis error endangering the entire crew of the Titane, a (fictitious) nuclear attack submarine of the forces. French submarines. While seeking to repair her fault, Chanteraide finds herself caught in a major conflict which could escalate the situation.
Thanks to a neat and suffocating staging, we find ourselves caught in the gears of this underwater trap which quickly closes on these men, bathing in the world of nuclear deterrence and disinformation. In addition to the total involvement of the cast, which carried out intense preparation and a day of immersion, the realistic sets make the whole thing even more impressive.
Julien Panie
The team rotated with real submarines during their practice times. For the interiors, she recreated the control rooms of the two submarines in the studio, thanks to the work of production designer Benoît Barouh. And for the plans that cannot be filmed under water, the team used digital technologies, here very well mastered.
Finally, who says submarine and Oreille d’or, says sound. And it is the icing on the cake of this geopolitical thriller thanks to the precise and breathtaking sound work on this film by George Lucas’ studio, which also won him the César for Best Sound in 2020.
If the press was rather glowing, speaking of a “new breath for French cinema”of a “remarkable submarine film” and a “first hyperrealistic and mysterious film”, the audience of AlloCiné praised the feature film since according to the notes of the spectators, Le Chant du Loup is THE best action film of the decade 2010-2019. So if Le Chant du Loup has passed under your radar, it’s high time to catch it today on Netflix.