a playful rereading of “Peter Pan”

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

Benh Zeitlin’s first feature film, Beasts of the Wild South, had obtained the Golden Camera at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012. Wendy, the second film by the young New York director, arrives almost ten years later, and confirms the singular nature of a cinema turned towards childhood, an experience sensory rather than naturalistic chronicle, with a luxuriant and readily baroque pantheism.

Special experience

Wendy, a little girl whose mother works in a restaurant for truck drivers, at the edge of a railroad tracks, flees by jumping in a freight car, to escape a fate that we imagine dull and without relief, in company of his two brothers. She meets a mischievous kid, Peter, who will take the children on a journey that takes on the appearance of an initiatory journey on an island where you never get old.

We quickly recognize the frame of the Peter Pan by James Matthew Barrie, transformed into a special experience where the sensation counts more than the story (never lost sight of however). The viewer is plunged into the heart of an odyssey that is both playful and cognitive. Immersion, in a work where water becomes a major element, is the central formal requirement of a film which has all the qualities of its faults. The filmmaker’s biases are both original and not devoid of a certain afféterie.