THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
To speak of fashion would be excessive. Let’s say that the theme is increasingly approached in the cinema: stories of love or simple desire where – for a change – the woman happens to be older than her partner. We quote, recently, The Young Lovers (2022), by Carine Tardieu, My Dates with Leo (2022), by Sophie Hyde, and, soon, the new film by Catherine Breillat, which should tackle the subject head-on.
Due to feminist issues, the cinema makes fragile incursions on this side of desire, in an attempt to compensate for a history of cinema that is rarely inspired when it comes to imagining love for heroines over 45 years old.
We can now add to the list the Passenger, first feature film by Héloïse Pelloquet, who returns to film a familiar landscape, Noirmoutier (Vendée), the setting for her three previous short films. The passenger is Chiara (Cécile de France), in her forties, a sailor woman who has worked for twenty years with her husband, Antoine, a fisherman. The couple – solid, fulfilled and childless – is preparing to welcome a new apprentice, Maxence (Félix Lefebvre, whom we have already met, in 2020, in Summer 85, of François Ozon), a young man from a privileged background. He will have to convert to the harshness of work at sea, under the circumspect gaze of Chiara, who hopes that this internship will be something other than a “petty-bourgeois whim”.
Maxence turns out to be up to it and, thanks to Antoine’s absences, he and Chiara get dangerously close, taking advantage of a sudden intoxication to throw themselves on each other. Not really a surprise, so The Passenger pretends to slowly disseminate the signs of a budding romance, when everything is already heard from the first minutes.
Mechanical scenario
After a first misbehavior, Chiara tries to overcome the temptation before giving herself up to it completely, reborn under the caresses of Maxence while titillating the curiosity of a neighbor, who will end up denouncing them. Disapproving glances, gentle lynching of the local kids, sermon on the mode “it’s only a kid!” »… The Passenger sins on two counts: the well-known one, which consists in opting for a naturalism by default, a carried camera which alone solves all the questions of staging; then, a concomitant problem of incarnation, since the actors are struggling within a mechanical scenario and a film centered solely on its subject – without however managing to make the violence of the dilemma that is imposed on us felt. Chiara nor the burn of social shame.
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