THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
On paper, there was much to be feared Stillwater, new feature film from actor and director Tom McCarthy after the box full of Spotlight (Oscars for best film and best screenplay in 2016), American fiction relocated to Marseille, where a father from Oklahoma comes to extricate his daughter from the clutches of the French penitentiary system. A type of canvas on which bad omen are piling up: exoticization of the fantasized foreign country from the west coast of the United States, an American star who has come to survey a postcard setting as a tourist, the benefit of the local color reduced in a panel of clichés … It is not so : Stillwater avoids most of the pitfalls that lay in its path, tracing its path on a thread of accuracy and rectitude, linearity and finesse.
Place of crossings assumed (of crossovers, one would say in English), the film brings together the good transatlantic energies: that of the French screenwriters Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, who extirpated Marseille from the expected folklore, of Tom McCarthy, who approaches this story without overhang, but with a classicism of the most honest, and the unsinkable Matt Damon, who does not hesitate to play on his image of ordinary hero, to rub it with the abrasive forms of the Phocaean city.
Relaunch the survey
The story is also that of clichés which, little by little, fade like fog to give way to more complexity. An American father named Bill Baker (Damon), an unemployed oil driller, leaves to save his daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin), incarcerated in Baumettes for having stabbed, when she was a student, his roommate and girlfriend. With his heavy step and chewy accent, Bill takes it upon himself to relaunch the investigation, trying to bring new elements to the file. For this, he finds the help of Virginie (Camille Cottin), theater actress and single mother, who lodges him at her place as his approach tends towards the long stay. They will reveal themselves to each other more profound than the stereotypes they return: either that of the Trumpist redneck, representative of rural white America, or that of the “bodybuilder” with disheveled manners, the embodiment of good. – left thinking. Likewise, between the two ferments a less obvious relationship than at first glance: neither are completely innocent.
The beauty of the film is in the image of its characters and their ability to slowly change skin, deepen, evolve without providing ready-made answers to the situations they go through. We thought the thing was engaged like a thriller, taking on the air of stalking in the northern districts, and suddenly the scenario goes off the rails, offers itself the luxury of parenthesis, of oblivion. It is everyday life that takes over, when Bill ends up finding work there, settles down permanently with Virginie, founds a new home with her and with her invents a new tacit language in the air of a Frenglish. tinkered with.
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