THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
Presented this year at the Directors’ Fortnight, Magnetics by Vincent Maël Cardonna reconstructs a blessed era, the early 1980s and its cultural turmoil mixed with post-68 disenchantment: Mitterrand comes to power, while a counter-culture emerges made up of new musical trends, fanzines and free radio . In a small provincial town, two brothers run a pirate radio station: Philippe, the youngest, lives in the shadow of the eldest, Jérôme. Both are inseparable, until the day when Philippe is called to do his military service in Berlin, leaving behind his family and Marianne, his brother’s girlfriend with whom he is secretly in love.
Emancipation story
Their first meeting also gives rise to the best scene of the young French director’s film: after observing her getting dressed while scrutinizing her in the reflection of a doorknob, Philippe timidly asks her to do him a service: to lend his voice for the new radio jingle. She accepts the exercise, while he modulates his voice over his heap of cumbersome and tangled machines. From the use of period objects emerges a trembling moment, an idea of staging, which accounts for the way in which Philippe’s relationship to the world is always mediated by technology and sound.
If, in the first part of the film, Vincent Maël Cardonna manages to skilfully circumvent the pitfalls of historical reconstruction and keep it alive, he ends up being caught by the academicism of the script. Magnetics embarks on the path of a predictable and very wise emancipation story, which would have gained by letting itself be contaminated to the end by the energy of the time and of the generation it invokes.
French film by Vincent Maël Cardona. With Thimotée Robart, Marie Colomb, Joseph Olivennes (1 h 38). On the Web : paname-distribution.com.