THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
If, by chance, at the place of your vacation, or on a spree in Paris, you were looking for a family show of good quality to attend with young teenagers, a small strip film worthy of the “Green Library”, if ever this reference says something to someone again, friendly, scary and green, it seems that Pierre Salvadori’s new film ticks all the boxes for this summer release. Author of intelligent and well-turned comedies, Salvadori went to realize this youthful adventure in Corsica, thus returning to a place of his childhood.
Four friends – 11 years of average age – occupy the center of the painting, or, to be more precise, two tandems, Antoine and Sami, Cat and Fouad, whom nothing predestined to weld together, if not a factory without faith or law who have been polluting the waters and the environment of their beautiful village for years. Constitutive weakness of this young assembly: the votes never make it possible to decide between the opinions on the conduct of the policy to come.
The group is forced to recruit a fifth thief in the person of Aimé, a little curly redhead, a piper at school, who would never have dreamed of ever having a friend and whose membership in the group – who, in reality, chooses him more as a fifth than as a friend – is therefore immediately marked by ambiguity.
monstrous totem
Moreover, it is indeed in the verbal escalation and the intoxication of a brilliant action to come that the mad project to set fire to this lair of Satan is tied, the affair being, in reality, at the bottom of each, redoubled by a much more intimate reason. Antoine, the leader, whose father is imprisoned, dreams, for example, of being arrested to join him. Sami, meanwhile, is head over heels for the beautiful Cat, whom he tries to seduce without ever daring to act. An ambitious plan is nevertheless concocted, which is assembled by dint of ingenuity and theft. Its failure, personified by the unexpected nocturnal appearance of the factory manager – Laurent Capelluto, so delicate with Arnaud Desplechin, here erected as a monstrous totem of malevolence and mediocrity – leads the band to improvise.
Kidnapping of the ugly, fleeing into the forest, taking to the maquis, artisanal animal masks so as not to reveal themselves… Entry into the savagery of childhood is envisaged as a social crossroads (communion with nature, law clan, war on society). Thereupon, Salvadori fires all wood. Childhood memories, no doubt, but still a string of references, of the cruelty of His Majesty of the Fliesby Peter Brook, to the horror of the series Stranger Thingsthe Duffer brothers, passing by the delicious getaway of Moonrise Kingdom, by Wes Anderson. But all this put in a Salvadori sauce, as above all a tribute to pure fantasy.
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