The opinion of the World – To see
There is Greek tragedy in the second film as the director of thriller writer and screenwriter Jérémie Guez. After Bluebird (2019), located in Belgium, the director whose fifth book, Souls under the neon lights (La Tengo Editions), just published, confirms his taste for a stylistic dryness close to the purity and all the shades of black. By setting up his new feature film in Philadelphia, where the mafia is considered the cruelest in the United States, he lets his heroes slide on the rails of a destiny they hardly control. Until the worst.
There is James Gray, Cornelian filmmaker of fate and family relationships marked with the seal of debt and broken oaths. And then there is a lot of nerve on the part of a young director to grapple with this story of cousins that we take for brothers, like Abel and Cain. The scenario is adapted from‘Brotherly love, from the American novelist Pete Dexter (Points), in which the director felt he could slip his world and his obsessions, filming Philadelphia, its charmless neighborhoods on the outskirts, its violence, between a boxing hall and a café, its semi-deserted streets with great privacy, as if it were Les Sables-d’Olonne, where Jérémie Guez was born thirty-three years ago.
As in all tragedies, the story is both simple and complicated. Simple because the human feelings that underlie it – honor, loyalty, loyalty – are immediately understandable. Complicated because a tangle of betrayals has blurred the lines, erased the contours that blood ties had drawn between good and evil.
Peter (Matthias Schoenaerts) and Michael (Joel Kinnaman) are two cousins, raised together after the brutal death of Peter’s father and his mother’s internment. Family tradition: they belong to the Irish underworld, which holds several districts of the city and comes up against the rising power of the malavita Italian. As much as Peter is silent and cautious to the point of appearing cowardly, Michael is brave, talkative, sanguine, eruptive, anxious to multiply the external signs of his power to better delimit his territory.
Blood relationship
Peter, of whom we do not know if he is part of the system or just a spectator, does what he can to calm him down, but more often than not, he is satisfied with a pout of discontent, a shrug of his. ‘shoulders before following, against his will, Michael’s whims: buy a crack that will turn out to be a carne, have a talented young boxer challenged by one of his henchmen, liquidate a lawyer… Blood ties rule and guide him where he does not want to go until, discovering that they are not as pure as he believed, Peter sees the path to his freedom and emancipation.
You have 35.38% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.