For his first feature film, “La Morsure”, presented at the Locarno Festival, director Romain de Saint-Blanquat has already imposed his identity.
“Will I ever be normal?“Françoise is like all teenagers. She wants to please, asks questions about herself and waits for her dull life to make sense. A boarder in a Catholic school, she always relies on her pendulum. This ritual allows her to see more clearly, she who feels so lost.
One night, she dreams of her approaching death. Premonitory vision or simple nightmare? For her last day to live, she decides, accompanied by her friend Delphine, to hide and go to a costume party in an isolated house.
Thus begins La Bite by Romain de Saint-Blanquat, presented in the Filmmakers of the Present section at the Locarno Festival. For his first feature film, this young director imposes a real identity. The action takes place in the countryside, at the end of the sixties, and everything is gloomy. The storm, the forest, the boarding school and its disturbing nuns… In just a few minutes, the viewer is already in the mood.
Easy Tiger
Léonie Dahan-Lamort in “La Bite”.
You never know where the film is going and that is its quality. The director has fun blurring the tracks. It oscillates between the initiatory narrative, the drama and, as the title predicts, the fantastic. He also evokes, on a few occasions, But do not deliver us from evil by Joël Séria, before choosing his own path.
Thanks to beautiful dreamlike sequences – in a forest, for example, where the trees seem more alive than ever – Romain de Saint-Blanquat stands out. He can count on the talent of his two main actresses, Léonie Dahan-Lamort and Lilith Grasmug, to carry this film made for those who cultivate a taste for the strange and the singular.
La Bite, soon in the cinema.