THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
Pulp and friction. The filmmaker and director Jean-Christophe Meurisse, founder of the Les Chiens de Navarre collective, likes to draw inspiration from current events for his films. Doesn’t the bubbling of the French pot augur well for a very spicy stew? But the idea ofBlood oranges, his second feature film after Apnea (2016), was born from reading an American news item: after being raped, a teenage girl cut off the genitals of her attacker and made him eat his testicles, after having put them in the microwave. A popular jury acquitted her, says the director.
It’s one of the three stories in the film, a chainsaw massacre against a backdrop of disco music, pure Tarantino, and the scene owes its success to the talent of the young actress (Lilith Grasmug) who plays Louise. His attacker (Fred Blin), who lives in seclusion in a house in the Paris suburbs, is presented as a pervert with an anti-capitalist class consciousness. Also, when he sees the Minister of the Economy in person (Christophe Paou) arrive at his home one evening, whose car has just broken down, he decides to settle his account with the representative of the Left Caviar, and c is the second story. The third follows Laurence (Lorella Cravotta) and Olivier (Olivier Saladin), a couple of provincial retirees, in debt. Passionate about rock, they are betting on a dance competition to earn money and reassure the bankers. They do not find it useful to share their concerns with their children. One of them, Alexandre (Alexandre Steiger), is a young Parisian lawyer, distant and arrogant.
Virtuosity of the scenario
Alexander is the character connecting the three stories. He becomes Louise’s lawyer, and works alongside a tenor of the bar (Denis Podalydès) in order to extinguish a tax scandal targeting the Minister of the Economy – an allusion to the Jérôme Cahuzac affair, named after the former budget minister of François Hollande, forced to resign in 2013 for acts of tax fraud.
The three stories overlap and answer each other with fluidity, the dialogues are carefully written or improvised
Meurisse signs a portrait of France bleeding at will, often outrageous. Blood oranges scrutinize the missteps of the left, the blurring of landmarks. The picture may seem expeditious or caricatural: thus, the character of Alexander is doing too much, in machismo or class contempt, the minister is a hypocrite to the core, etc. But we must recognize a certain virtuosity in the scenario and in the acting of the actors: the three stories overlap and answer each other with fluidity, the dialogues are carefully written or improvised.
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