“Stillwater”, a thriller from Marseille with Matt Damon and Camille Cottin

Official selection – Out of competition

The cinematographic journeys between old and new world are perilous – testify to it as well My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-waï, 2007) that The Ladybug in Monte Carlo (Vincent McEveety, 1977). We will therefore salute the success of the passage for Marseille (to borrow the title of a film in which Michael Curtiz directed Humphrey Bogart) by Tom McCarthy.

A director as unprolific as he is eclectic (eight feature films since the turn of the century, from the bittersweet romance of the Station master in the quasi-documentary style of Spotlight), McCarthy has built a solid yet bewildering film, a hybridization of French blackness and American bad conscience, which we expected as little as a movie romance between Matt Damon and Camille Cottin.

Read the review: “Spotlight” or the superpowers of the fourth power

The first plays Bill Baker, roughneck (oil well worker) from Oklahoma, who has no reason to find himself between Bonne Mère and Panier. But her daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin, formerly Little Miss Sunshine) left to study in Aix-en-Provence, and – just like Amanda Knox did in real life and in Italy in a high-profile criminal case in 2007. – was accused and convicted of the murder of her roommate. Every now and then Bill goes to Les Baumettes. The journey that opens Stillwater comes after the last chance one. Allison, who claims her innocence, has exhausted all recourse and her lawyer (Anne Le Ny) urges the visitor to resign. At the same time that he decides to take up the investigation on behalf of an author, the roughneck meets a neoPhocean, Virginie (Camille Cottin), a theater actress who left Paris to try her luck in Marseille.

A real rusty scent

What follows – the clash of cultures and the friction of desires, the pursuit of truth and its collateral damage – could fall within the program script of a film which would once have stared Charles Bronson and which today rounds off the endings. month by Liam Neeson. But Tom McCarthy is too smart, and arguably too sensitive, to settle for old recipes. Unhappy with his original screenplay, he called on Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, French screenwriters (and director, in the case of the first) who gave this new recipe for fish out of water (“Fish out of the water”, a phrase that designates stories of diving in an unknown environment) a real scent of rust.

Resolutely turning his back on his past as a good boy, Matt Damon settles comfortably in the physical mass of his character of taciturn bad father, who tries to redeem his past faults by dint of blessing at each meal and military politeness. Around him, the French actors, starting with Camille Cottin, often seem to act as if Bill Baker (and especially Matt Damon) were not there, as if they were playing in an indigenous thriller. This shift could be a calamity, it is here the fuel of a fiction which skilfully plays with the expectations which the genre arouses. Without wanting to reveal anything about the outcome, we will warn fans of Taken that this American father will have to rub shoulders for real with the complexity of the vast world, and that Stillwater will find a deeper resonance than what the entertainment cinema from Hollywood has to offer these days.

You have 3.89% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.