THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Somewhere in Ile-de-France, at a contemporary time which is not precisely dated, Lucie, 15 years old (Justine Lacroix), lying on her bed, opens her private diary closed with a small padlock. Accompanying the gesture, the teenager’s voiceover warns: “This is a true story from the small town of Chelles. It is a story of pain, despair, unease and shame. It’s about sex, death, humiliation and catastrophe. »
The following sequence shows a man driving a convertible, speeding through the middle of the fields. Arrived in town, the man parks, enters a sandwich shop behind the window of which we discover Lucie. Her voice-over, using the third person and the conditional, explains that Lucie could be employed on the black market as a saleswoman, and the man, a director who has come to film in the area. He would watch the teenager’s face carefully, not find her ugly and wonder if she is a good actress.
But no. The scene is not real, only the fruit of a fertile imagination, fueled by numerous novels. Because Lucie – bitten by literature – makes her own cinema, re-enchants her life, hers being less glorious than the one she invents. But also less dark than what it states at the start. It is (almost) banally between the two that balance the existence of Lucie and the fourth feature film by Olivier Babinet, the exhibition of which immediately puts us in the scent of a story that thwarts, reshapes genres, to better blend them into a dense and deeply realistic material.
Poetry
Two of the director’s previous films (fish sex2020; Swagger, 2016) proceeded from the same abolition of borders, mixing the real and the fantastic, weight and lightness, the weight of the social environment and the dreams it motivates without disruptive effect. Adaptation of the room Tea Monster in the Hallby David Greig, normal is no exception, which, in passing, reduces the dictates of conformity to dust. What the title suggests, the film materializes through the crossing of genres: everything here is normal. Lucie and her visions, her father William (Benoît Poelvoorde) and his addictions, the young Etienne with made-up eyes that the students make fun of. In fact, all these characters, however whimsical they may be at times, are well and truly anchored, forced to come to terms with an existence that Babinet approaches with the humanity and sense of realism of the Dardenne brothers.
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