THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
Ten million soldiers died at the end of the First World War, to say nothing of the civilians. Among them, hundreds of thousands of disappeared, whose bodies were never found. One could imagine, during the unexpected reappearance of these undead in an altered state of consciousness (confusion, amnesia), that desperate families, deprived of burial and therefore of mourning, would claim them, sometimes in a competitive way, as their own.
This kind of case happened in particular in Italy and France in the 1920s, and it is from this painful situation – so rich however in romantic development – that Guillaume Bureau’s film is inspired.
A man (Karim Leklou) of unknown identity, back from the front with amnesia and interned under medical supervision, is thus recognized by his wife, Julie Delauney (Leïla Bekhti), who runs the family photographic studio in his absence. Claiming her status as a wife when the man does not recognize her, the doctor in charge decides to proceed, subject to confirmation by the courts of her identity, with a gradual acclimatization of the man in the marital home. , in the hope that his memory will come back to him. The object of his wife’s constant affection and care, the man gradually enters into the skin of the character and into the identity that the latter, overjoyed, assigns to him.
Welcome uncertainty
In the meantime, however, another wife declares herself, antithetical to the first. This is Rose-Marie Brunet (Louise Bourgoin), alias Frimousse, dancer in a frivolous cabaret whose husband would have been the bartender and knife throwing partner.
This claim, whose proof of authenticity seems as convincing as the previous one, leads the doctor to immediately suspend his experiment and to rely on the conclusions of the court, in the expectation of which the two women do everything they can. is possible to do to attract the graces of their supposed husband. A conclusion will indeed be made, we will say no more, but the man will not agree to it.
However, it remains to be wondered how, starting from such fascinating and conducive to trouble, the director manages to make a film so devoid of asperities. Undoubtedly, the refusal to confer an objective truth to one or the other of the claims maintains the film in a welcome uncertainty. No doubt, again to his credit, the director takes care to scramble the moral cards between the dancer and the bourgeois.
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