FILMMAKERS’ FORTIGHT
In the small lab of the free radicals of the Fortnight, a film with a very large cast arrives, Saturday May 18! We named The Prisoner of Bordeaux, by Patricia Mazuy, with Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi. The Cannes community should not prevent us from clarifying, quickly, the Mazuy case. Born in Dijon, born in 1960. Daughter of bakers then student at HEC Paris before taking a career in cinema.
Seven feature films in a thirty-five year career, it’s a slow process. In counterpoint: very high intensity and combat feminism, libertarian version. Register: very, very black (Cowhides1989; Bowling Saturn, 2022); crazy fantasy (Lower Normandy2004 ; Paul Sanchez is back!, 2018); of conscious romance (Saint-Cyr2000; Girls sport, 2011).
The Prisoner of Bordeaux – an entire program ! – organizes the meeting of extremes. That of Alma (Isabelle Huppert), a wealthy Bordeaux woman, and Mina (Hafsia Herzi), a young city mother. They meet in the visiting room of a surrounding prison, to discover each other without their husbands. The first, a wealthy neurologist from a private clinic and fickle husband, hit two people in a car one evening while drunk. The second robbed a jewelry store at gunpoint. A lightning friendship, barely holding up as a plot argument, nonetheless forms. Patricia Mazuy never disdains force.
Existential nothingness
Alma invites Mina and her two children, who live far from the prison, to her mansion where loneliness weighs on her, she also finds her a job at her husband’s clinic. The awareness of her existential nothingness caused by her husband’s imprisonment awakens her, sincerely, to attention to others. Mina, for her part, responds to this offer with the pragmatism and urgency of necessity. Pressed by Yacine, the brother of one of her husband’s associates killed during the burglary, who demands his share of the loot, she sails as quickly and as accurately as possible.
The film is, essentially, the story of this singular friendship. The two actresses are certainly not unrecognizable, but they renew something of their image. Huppert, whose character is as if chloroformed by comfort and sadness, moves in slow motion. Herzi, here braided and proletarianized, loses her charming languor and is as if hardened and revived. Beginning under the contemporary sign of sorority, the dynamic of the film leads us imperceptibly towards the old social front, which a falsely enchanted parenthesis had made us lose sight of. Alma will emerge bruised but awake. This is good and good, but still a little short.
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