THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
To entrust Isabelle Huppert with the role of a woman reminiscing about her life is to immediately introduce an enigma that makes the salt ofAbout Joan, Laurent Larivière’s second feature film: throughout the film, viewers cannot help but glimpse, through the character, glimpses of the actress in the strongest roles of her career. It should be noted that Isabelle Huppert embodies Joan at different times of adulthood, and that another actress, the British Freya Mavor, interprets the heroine at the age of 20, her round cheeks reminiscent of Huppert in The Valseuses (1974), by Bertrand Blier.
The documentary haze sets in from the foreground, Joan at the wheel of her car speaking to the camera to say a few words about herself, insisting in particular on the fact that her first name is pronounced in English – neither John nor Joanne. Joan, therefore, is a publisher and lives in Paris. One day, she crosses in the street her love of youth, Doug, a somewhat hooligan boy whom she had met in Ireland, and from whom she had had to separate abruptly. They have a coffee together but Joan does not reveal to him that she had a child by him.
This fortuitous encounter leads Joan to dive back into her memories, a risky exercise in the cinema, but which the film goes through with a certain subtlety thanks to the editing and the screenplay: the rocking moments cling to the mental thread of the character (his feelings, his traumas) while avoiding giving a simple explanatory value to the past.
Nice cast
In other words, Joan’s groping memories are more like sketches whose colors contradict each other: we discover Nathan, the son she raised alone – played by three actors, including Dimitri Doré (discovered in Bruno Reidal, confession of a murderer, by Vincent Le Port) and Swann Arlaud – but also his new companion, Tim, a whimsical and madly in love writer – a tailor-made role for Lars Eidinger, German actor and director from the theater scene and from the Schaubühne in Berlin . Through these two characters, the life of Joan emerges, a woman who copes with the accidents of life and relies on her creative memory to resist the void.
Laurent Larivière, director of I am a soldier (2015), selected at Cannes (Un certain regard), screenwriter of Pearl (2019), by Elsa Amiel, and Continental Drift (to the South), by Lionel Baier, recently released in theatres, offers a fine cast here. In About Joan, the supporting roles operate like ghosts, all in all comforting, although part of a tragedy: let’s add Joan’s mother (Florence Loiret-Caille) who is trying to reinvent her life, and will have told herself stories, too. The spectacle of Isabelle Huppert skipping eras, a rock blonde with the false air of Debbie Harry, a middle-aged woman on the arm of Tim, her eternal lover, is not the least charm of this romantic film, certainly classic, but where every picture counts.
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