“Les Bonnes Etoiles”, the baby blues of Hirokazu Kore-eda

OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION

If there is one work that has extensively explored the upset paths of ancestry and filiation, it is that of the Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda, 59 years old and already recipient of the Palme d’or for the aptly named A family matter (2018), a title that sums it up perfectly.

His last feature film, The Good Starsagain in competition, renews its most famous elements of its cinema, relating to family recompositions, but, this time, by moving them to South Korea, where the phenomenon of “baby boxes” has retained it, these chests secure places devoted to the anonymous deposit of infants, following the tightening of local legislation on adoption.

However, this fact of society, demonstrating a drift of social action, serves only as a starting postulate for this film which opens under the auspices of the thriller: one night, under pouring rain, in a deserted street in Busan, a young woman in distress abandons her baby on the sidewalk of a parish, without even bothering to slip it into the “baby box”. Two traffickers infiltrated in the church recover him and intend to sell him on the clandestine adoption market. All these characters are, without knowing it, observed by two female cops…

traveling family

For the rest, the film follows in the footsteps of the petty crooks, who team up with the mother to get the baby back, starting a race across the country. Unbeknownst to them, it is an itinerant family that they reconstitute together, depending on the circumstances. In doing so, Kore-eda retraces his steps, revisiting this question of adoption which he has already explored from all angles in his previous films, both as a wound and as a response to the too endogamous conceptions of the links of the blood.

Here, the filmmaker studies more precisely the painful motive of abandonment. But his consensual approach pushes back off-screen the harsh dimension of the gesture, like the dark side of the characters, and intends to keep only the best of them. Thus he constantly gives the impression of rounding off the edges. With its cute children, its “resilient” adults, its soothing guitar and reconciliatory piano notes, the film gives in to the cutesy inclination that sometimes plagues Kore-eda cinema.