OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
We are informed in 2017 of the presence of Léonor Serraille in the corpus of French cinema. Training at Femis. The first feature film that hit bingo right away with a Camera d’or at Cannes, carried by a boosted Laetitia Dosch performing a desocialized and transformist heroine (Young woman). Here is a cinema of social realism transcended by the actoral fever, inherited as much from Cassavetes as from Pialat, and which could recall, at your choice, Rosetta of the Dardenne brothers, dodging (2003) by Abdellatif Kechiche, Louise Wimmer (2011) by Cyril Mennegun, many others indeed. That some persist in finding, in the wrong part of the qualifier, ” French “. Never mind. Let’s assume the label, since it denotes intelligence, sensitivity, the accuracy of both analysis and feelings. Especially since we leave with A little brother the treble of individual slaughter for the more discreet charms of a family fresco chronicled over the long term.
Léonor Serraille distils thirty years of a precarious life in a triptych of exemplary sobriety and finesse.
A little brother evokes the destiny of a family from the Ivory Coast who settled in France in 1989, until today. A family fragment would be a better term. Rose, the mother, thirty years old. And her two children, Jean, the eldest, and Ernest, the youngest. Two other brothers remained in Africa. Of the father, we hear no more. It is, from the outset, to situate the dilemma of Rose, the mother, superbly interpreted by Annabelle Lengronne. Aspire to become an independent woman, socially, emotionally and sexually, who firmly leads her destiny. And raise two children with dignity in very difficult social conditions. It is on this funambulistic thread that Léonor Serraille advances the film, distills thirty years of a fierce and precarious life in a triptych of exemplary sobriety and finesse. Rose, Jean, Ernest, will name the paintings, focusing on the fate of each character.
Rose – princess and maid – so beautiful, so unstable, so unlucky in love. And at the same time priestly in her vocation as a mother who sacrifices herself for the success of her children. The men march past: Jules Cesar, the choice of his community, going, coming, arguing, the proposal which seems to impose itself but which for this very reason it resolutely flees; a Tunisian worker met on the roofs of Paris, himself too precarious in France to assure him the stability of a love; finally a Frenchman, already in the household, and who will offer him the unacceptable fate of a vestal virgin installed for him in Rouen, before getting tired of her.
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