Louise’s dialogue beyond the ages

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE

In a young French cinema generally wise as an image, you must always be careful of lame ducks, those who, despite their efforts, do not manage to fall into line. Like for example Hubert Viel, born in Caen in 1980, came to the cinema in the bosom of the Brive Medium-length Festival and who has developed into a small handful of films (Artemis, artichoke heart in 2013, Girls in the Middle Ages in 2015) a poetry in minor mode, paving a naturalism of bits of string of unexpected paths to the imagination.

Louloute, his third and last feature film to date, which has long awaited a release window, further attests to this with his memorial fable orchestrating a return to the roots of childhood, with a modesty and candor that twist the temptation of the nostalgic withdrawal.

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The story shares a little bit of road with Louise (Erika Sainte), a history teacher who is somewhat losing control. Her meeting with a replacement and former classmate plunges her back into her childhood memories, between the blessed walls of the Norman farm that her parents had bought in the mid-1980s, when the effects of the common agricultural policy were beginning to be felt. feel.

If “Louloute”, as it was called then, lived with his big brother and his little sister this period like a golden age, the warning signs of its expiration floated everywhere. And more particularly in the exacerbation of tensions between their mother, Isabelle (Laure Calamy), and their father, Jean-Jacques (Bruno Clairefond), against the backdrop of milk quotas which suppressed many small farmers.

Temporal paradox

Bringing back a past embellished by the eyes of childhood, making one feel the yawning gulf that separates tender age from adulthood, is not easy in cinema, which is too often resolved by an overload of ‘fireworks. There was reason to fear that the restitution of the 1980s, the decade which was also that of the director’s childhood, would turn into the anecdote of the small generational museum or of vintage fetishism.

Less complacent than one could imagine, the film more skillfully installs a kind of temporal paradox: by giving to the past the flavor of the present and to the present the patina of the past – this was already the principle of a magnificent cartoon from Studio Ghibli, Drip memories (1991), Isao Takahata. In doing so, he opens in each scene a breach in the emotion that rushes between the two ages of Louise, responding to each other and dialoguing across the ages.

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