MORNING LIST
A two-sided story about the disappearance of a loved one, portrait of a “courageous mayor” in Syria, meeting with an earthy community of farmers in central Greece, stories of a thousand and one nights in an African prison : the cinema, this week, recounts the sufferings and the strength of men and women in the face of adversity.
“Hold me tight”: the mysterious flight of a mother
When he directs, Mathieu Amalric invents crazy stories, very different from each other, but in which always enters, in one way or another, very powerfully, the melancholy expression of a being or a reality whose disappearance did not cancel attendance. And the formal implosion that this diffraction of reality produces on a story which itself is duplicated. All of his films are built on this model.
With Hug me tight, he delivers a sort of radical sketch of this troubled and throbbing inclination which is his. Its two faces are one, forming a non-orientable surface. Face A: a woman (Vicky Krieps) leaves her family in the early hours of the morning and cuts the road. Gas station. Some girlfriends. Interior monologue. Direction the sea. A husband (Arieh Worthalter), two children, a boy and a girl, are left stranded in the family home. They are preparing breakfast. They will soon understand. And they will never get over it.
Side B: the woman never left. His departure, his flight, his journey are pure mental projection. In fact, her whole family, victim of a fatal mountain accident, brutally left her, and it was she who remained. So, to ward off her distress, to face the impossible, she imagines that it was she who left them, so that she can think of them as the living who would have made their life without her.
Which of these versions is more or less tragic? What truth emerges from their interwoven narratives? The film, mounted to the point of dizziness, combines the two versions, works with such a porosity between the two narrative tapes that one begins to think that they form only one and the same modality of fatality. Jacques Mandelbaum
French film by Mathieu Amalric. With Vicky Krieps, Arieh Worthalter (1 h 37).
“Nine Days in Raqqa”: portrait of a woman in the ruined city
Barely 30 years old, the Kurdish Leila Mustapha, a civil engineer, became the mayor of Rakka after the city, the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State organization, was liberated by the Syrian Democratic Forces. The young woman manages a city destroyed 80% by the war, and where absolutely everything is to be rebuilt, while the shadow of the Islamic State organization still looms in the surrounding cities. Nine Days in Raqqa, by Xavier de Lauzanne, is meant to be a sober documentary, without affeteries, mixes apocalyptic archives that recall the tragedies that have known the city and the present, loaded with uncertain hopes and fatigue, but where life returns, seeps into the interstices of the ruins.
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