THE MORNING LIST
Sensuality, in all its states and in all its forms, clearly dominates this new film week. To avert mourning, a troubled teenager throws himself headlong into it in Paris (The high school student). To deceive their loneliness, two men indulge in it with furious melancholy in a room in Bangkok (Days). While, in another bedroom, this one in London, a sixty-year-old frustrated by decades of marital indifference offers herself the services of a delicate escort boy (My dates with Leo).
“Le Lycéen”: the ultra-sensory mourning of a young orphan
It all begins in the mountains, in the confusion of a post-traumatic story, told in front of the camera by the main character, Lucas (Paul Kircher), which will punctuate the entire film. A mother (Juliette Binoche) teacher; a father (Christophe Honoré) dental technician. And their son, who has just learned that he will now have to live without it. Ultimate memory of a stroll, darkly heralding, with him. By car on the road. The worried solicitude of the father, the laughing carelessness of the son. A lot of reciprocal tenderness in the tone, in the looks. The father who suddenly confides, about his own life, about the different choices that could have been his if he hadn’t let himself go in high school.
And then a sedan that overtakes them without visibility, forcing the father to leave the road. This gesture of protection with the arm on the chest of his son. We hug each other tight because we haven’t gone far. So little moreover that, two shots later, Lucas is woken up in the middle of the night at the boarding school to announce the death of his father in a car accident. Beautiful ellipsis which suggests that death, this decisive nothingness, can never be filmed face to face. As for Lucas, he will now have to live, become an adult, without him. Thus begins this beautiful autobiographical training film by Christophe Honoré, who has admirably managed to restore the complex alchemy of this passage that is adolescence. He owes it, of course, to his talent, but also to his young actor, Paul Kircher, who possesses, without forcing himself and to a supremely cinematic degree, these virtues. Jacques Mandelbaum
French film by Christophe Honoré. With Paul Kircher, Vincent Lacoste, Juliette Binoche, Erwan Kepoa Falé (2 h 02).
“Days”: cosmic encounter of two solitudes in a room in Bangkok
The Taiwanese Tsai Ming-liang belongs to a sort of “Zen” cinematographic international resisting the generalized acceleration of images through performative work over the duration of the shots. Days, which comes to us two years late after the whirlwind of the health crisis, marks a further step in the blueprint. As is often the case with Tsai, it is a question of paving the way for an encounter: here, between two orphan presences evolving on separate trajectories. In one, we recognize Lee Kang-sheng, the filmmaker’s favorite actor and alter ego appearing in all his films. He plays a man crippled with neck pain, living alone in a house with large bay windows.
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