THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
If, on the occasion of his seventh feature film as a director, the urge to turn around for a minute, we would be comforted in the feeling that Mathieu Amalric is one of the most original figures of French auteur cinema. A flagship actor of the new generation in the 1990s alongside director Arnaud Desplechin, whose taste for hallucinatory romance he delighted in, Amalric was able to avoid the mortal danger of freezing there so much was powerful, and first of all on himself as the author’s alter ego, this desplechinesque impregnation. By first diversifying his acting services with a taste for risk (at Damien Odoul, Vincent Dieutre or Eugène Green). Then he went on to direct in 1997, with Eat your soup.
This second activity is unique and remarkable in that it avoids the two pitfalls into which the impetuous director could easily have fallen. To stand out from the universe of Desplechin (even if an obvious cousinism exists). And stick to this holy horror that we call, a little nastily, the films of actor. No. Amalric instead invents crazy stories, very different from each other, but where one way or the other, very powerfully, enters the melancholy expression of a being or a reality whose disappearance has not canceled the presence. And the formal implosion that this diffraction of reality produces on a story which itself is duplicated, to the point of no longer knowing which is the ghost of the other. All his films, from Eat your soup (1997) to Barbara (2017), through The Public Thing (2003) and Tour (2010), are built on this model.
Möbius tape
Amalric delivers with Hug me tight a sort of radical sketch of that troubled and throbbing inclination which is his. The film is a Möbius tape that it is difficult to unroll without making revelations likely to spoil the discovery for the viewer. Its two faces are one, forming a non-orientable surface. Face A: a woman (Vicky Krieps) leaves her family in the early morning. No reason. She throws pictures on a bed, as if to soak them up one last time, then slams the door softly. And cut the road behind the wheel of an old AMC Pacer, a sublime seventies design object that has never been sold. Outdoors. Gas station. Some girlfriends. Interior monologue. Direction the sea. A husband (Arieh Worthalter), two children, a boy and a girl, are left stranded in the family home. They are preparing breakfast. They will soon understand. And they will be excruciatingly sad. Excruciatingly empty. And they will never get over it, although a smile could always be reborn on their lips.
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