Back to Kinzler’s Global News Blog
Le Figaro, January 19
Marion Cotillard, une mère pleine de mystère dans le nouveau film de Nicole Garcia : le récit de son dernier jour de tournage
REPORTAGE – Dix ans après Mal de pierres, la réalisatrice confie à l’actrice le rôle d’une femme au passé trouble dans Milo. Le Figaro a assisté à ses ultimes scènes.
Full Text:
Aucun risque de voir Marion Cotillard rouler sous la table. Elle a beau écluser plusieurs verres de vin (un « Château quelque chose », selon le dialogue), elle reste d’une sobriété exemplaire au fil des prises. Il faut dire que ceci n’est pas du vin. C’est une eau rougie par du colorant alimentaire. À boire sans modération. Hippolyte, l’assistant de l’accessoiriste, se glisse entre les deux perchmen pour vider les verres et remplir les bouteilles à chaque clap de fin. Magie du cinéma.
La séquence se déroule dans la cuisine d’un « manoir » qui ressemble à un château. D’ailleurs, il est sis rue du Château, 77240 Saint-Leu, commune de Cesson. À environ une heure de Paris. Sur la feuille de service, le chef déco a mis une note à l’attention de l’équipe : « C’est la vie de château , ou presque… soyons précautionneux avec le mobilier, objets, œuvres et vaisselles de location. » Et ce vendredi 12 décembre, le château a des airs de ruche. De nombreux figurants, déjà présents la veille, ont été rappelés.
C’est le dernier jour de tournage pour Marion Cotillard. L’actrice interprète Alice, le personnage principal de Milo, le dixième long-métrage de Nicole Garcia, actrice passée derrière la caméra quand ce n’était pas à la mode, avec succès (Le Fils préféré, Place Vendôme, L’Adversaire, Selon Charlie…). En 1990, son premier long, Un week-end sur deux, mettait en scène Nathalie Baye en comédienne divorcée en fuite avec ses deux enfants.
Alice est une autre figure de mère désireuse de renouer avec sa progéniture. Son fils Milo avait 4 ans quand elle l’a fait adopter. Elle débarque dans sa vie vingt ans après, sous un faux nom, une histoire inventée loin de la France, sur la pointe des pieds. Le scénario, écrit avec le fidèle Jacques Fieschi, ne donne d’abord que des bribes d’informations sur cette femme mystérieuse. Son secret se dévoile peu à peu : un passé d’activiste gauchiste, une condamnation à vingt ans de réclusion criminelle à la fin des années 1980. Le groupe fictif s’appelle COLLECTIF 217, il a des similitudes avec Action Directe.
Le rapport de classe, l’autre grand thème du cinéma de Nicole Garcia
Ce serait idiot de dire que la politique n’est qu’un prétexte. Un personnage de professeur de fac, intellectuel pousse au crime, mauvais génie aux mains propres, joué par Éric Elmosnino, incarne les illusions perdues de la lutte armée née sur les braises de Mai 68. Mais ce serait tout aussi bête de ne pas voir que quelque chose de plus intime se joue entre Alice et Milo, ce fils abandonné. Alice retrouve un jeune homme. Il est mécanicien, rêve d’ouvrir son propre garage, flirte avec les embrouilles à cause d’un ami d’enfance, Joseph, fils de notable aux activités louches.
C’est l’enjeu des séquences au château, où le patriarche (Charles Berling) donne une fête. Alice s’est fait engager comme extra pour servir tout ce beau monde. Et approcher Milo, qui ne la connaît que comme la nouvelle serveuse du bar où il a ses habitudes. Il est à la fois un familier et un factotum dans cette famille bourgeoise qui le fascine – le rapport de classe est l’autre grand thème du cinéma de Garcia. Milo est joué par Théodore Pellerin, acteur québécois révélé cette année dans Nino, le beau premier long-métrage de Pauline Loquès. D’ailleurs, Milo, trop proche de Nino, ne donnera plus son titre au film de Nicole Garcia.
Milo n’est pas dans la séquence de la cuisine où Alice rapporte des plats avant de déboucher une bouteille de « Château quelque chose » pour s’enivrer, lasse et triste. Yves Cape sert pour l’instant de doublure à Marion Cotillard pour régler le cadre et les lumières. Dans une pièce voisine, des membres de l’équipe l’observent sur le combo et plaisantent : « Il a un faux air de Tony Curtis. Ou de Jamel Debbouze. »
Le directeur de la photographie belge a surtout plus de trente ans de métier. Il a travaillé avec Bruno Dumont, Michel Franco, Cédric Kahn, Martin Provost, Guillaume Nicloux. En attendant, il fait ce qu’il peut dans un décor compliqué. Même les cuisines d’un château sont exiguës pour accueillir une équipe de film. On n’est pas loin de la fameuse scène de la cabine de bateau pleine à craquer dans Une nuit à l’opéra des Marx Brothers. Hubert Engammare, assistant à la mise en scène et maître des horloges (« Passons à la suite » est sa meilleure réplique) propose au stagiaire de 3e d’aller voir ailleurs s’il y est : « Moi, quand j’ai commencé, je bloquais des voitures à 100 mètres du décor. »
Nicole Garcia est au four et au château. Elle choisit avec la costumière les vestes que porteront les serveuses rhabillées en civil, décoiffe une actrice trop bien coiffée (c’est la fin de soirée, une mèche peut se rebeller), discute avec Yves Cape qui lui propose un cadre : « Je trouve cette image-là intéressante, il y a plus de monde dans le plan. » Marion Cotillard arrive sur le plateau pour une répétition. La première prise se tourne sans qu’on ait entendu « moteur » ni « action ». Nicole Garcia a une autre façon d’accompagner les acteurs dans le jeu. Elle dit : « Oui, Marion, oui… », et ces simples mots indiquent l’intention qu’elle voudrait la voir mettre dans la scène. Elle est très attentive au corps, à la position de départ qui exprime déjà beaucoup de l’état psychologique et émotionnel du personnage. Elle n’est pas derrière le combo mais près des acteurs. Charles Berling, arrivé plus tôt dans l’après-midi sans avoir la certitude de jouer ce jour-là, vient, lui, jeter un œil au combo.
Marion Cotillard ne semble pas perturbée par la méthode Garcia. Elle a déjà tourné avec elle Mal de pierres, en 2015, lui aussi produit par Alain Attal (Trésor Films). Et le tournage de Milo est dans sa dernière ligne droite. Après des semaines à Valence, dans la Drôme, où se situe une grande partie de l’action, l’équipe est de retour à Paris. Comme une colonie de vacances qui touche à sa fin, il y a déjà un peu de nostalgie, de la tendresse, de la fatigue aussi. Mais personne ne chôme sur le plateau. Il y aura plusieurs changements de plan, sans Marion. Un plan de coupe sur la bouteille. Un contrechamp sur Joséphine, l’autre « extra », avant que le gros de la troupe ne parte dîner à l’heure du goûter.
Dans une équipe très masculine – la plupart des chefs de poste sont des hommes -, la scripte Diane Brasseur est l’une des rares femmes aux côtés de Nicole Garcia. Elle ne quitte pas sa tablette des mains. L’outil numérique a remplacé le papier, les Polaroid et même les appareils photos numériques. Elle a longtemps résisté, avant de céder sur L’Événement, d’Audrey Diwan. « Aujourd’hui, il faut aller beaucoup plus vite, regrette-t-elle. On a moins de jours de tournage et plus de changements de dernière minute. » Diane annote directement le scénario, filme des bouts de prises qu’elle se repasse sur le combo, peut signaler immédiatement à Nicole Garcia un problème de raccord. « Nicole sent au tournage la prise qu’elle préfère », dit celle qui a travaillé avec Stéphane Demoustier sur L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche .
Aujourd’hui, il faut aller beaucoup plus vite. On a moins de jours de tournage et plus de changements de dernière minute
Diane Brasseur, scripte
La séquence de la cuisine n’est qu’un amuse-bouche. Le plat de résistance consiste en un dialogue entre Alice et Milo, à la porte du château, alors que la fête s’achève. Un échange a priori anodin qui dit tout de l’inquiétude d’une mère pour son fils. Extérieur nuit. La température est tombée. Un froid de gueux glace les os. De retour de la cantine, l’équipe a enfilé parkas et doudounes, bonnets et gants. Nicole répète le dialogue avec Théodore Pellerin. Son accent québécois disparaît dès qu’il joue. Entre deux prises, Marion Cotillard chante du Scorpion. Ou bien elle imite la voix de Dark Vador : « Je suis ta mèèère. » Tout est bon pour se réchauffer. Surtout une bouillotte sur la nuque dès que la caméra est coupée. Théodore Pellerin, lui, fait quelques pas de danse, une sorte de moonwalk sur le gravier. Le gravier est l’ennemi de la prise de son. Jean-Pierre Druet s’inquiète des pas qui crissent et risquent de couvrir les dialogues. On déplace le combo dans l’herbe humide.
« Marion, essaye d’aller un peu plus vite », demande la réalisatrice. Cinq prises sont nécessaires. C’est peu pour une séquence de quatre minutes. Alexis Manenti, costume et col roulé noir, cheveux plaqués en arrière, attend de savoir si on a besoin de lui dans la scène. Il joue Joseph, le bourgeois voyou, celui par qui les ennuis de Milo arrivent. Il propose à la réalisatrice une brève apparition derrière la porte vitrée. Une silhouette qui observe de loin Alice et Milo. Elle acquiesce : « Plus c’est furtif, plus c’est menaçant. » Yves Cape, patient et taquin, suggère ensuite un plan large. « Regardez Nicole, on dirait un film américain ! » Et un autre, tout aussi bien éclairé : « Comme c’est vendredi soir, vous avez gagné un plan bonus ! » Jean-Pierre Druet est partant : « C’est fait en dix secondes. » Nicole Garcia : « Mais rien ne se fait en dix secondes ! » Ils se disputent comme un vieux couple. Ou comme deux collaborateurs de longue date.
Milo se monte en même temps qu’il se tourne. Nicole Garcia travaille pour la première fois avec François Gédigier, monteur chevronné (Patrice Chéreau, Claude Berri, Mathieu Amalric, Walter Salles). Elle le rejoindra en salle de montage à l’issue du tournage. Et choisira alors quelle fin elle préfère. Elle sera dans les temps pour soumettre le film au comité de sélection du Festival de Cannes. Un film « du milieu », au budget moyen, ni art et essai ni superproduction (entre 5 et 10 millions d’euros), d’auteur mais avec des têtes d’affiche (Artus et Laure Calamy sont aussi du casting). Une catégorie qui a fait les beaux jours du cinéma français, mais aujourd’hui fragile et menacée, malgré de belles exceptions (L’Étranger, de François Ozon, La Femme la plus riche du monde, de Thierry Klifa, Dossier 137, de Dominique Moll).
En attendant, Nicole Garcia, infatigable malgré ses 79 ans, donne le tempo : « Allez, on enchaîne ! » Il est presque 23 heures et il reste des séquences à tourner dans le château. Charles Berling a enfilé un manteau pour passer une tête dehors. Fin de journée pour lui. Il a fini avant d’avoir commencé. Mais il revient lundi et mardi. « Il a été formidable hier, pour son discours lors du cocktail », nous rassure Diane Brasseur. Les risques du métier.
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 19
Hört auf mit diesen Heldinnen, die es so gar nie gab
Die Filmindustrie liebt es, historische Frauenfiguren stärker zu machen, als sie unter den damaligen Umständen jemals hätten sein können. Das neuste Beispiel für diesen fragwürdigen Trend ist der Golden-Globe-Gewinner «Hamnet».
Full text:
Man weiss so gut wie nichts über die Frau von William Shakespeare, ausser dass sie Anne oder Agnes Hathaway hiess. Trotzdem wird ihre Geschichte erzählt. Zuerst tat das die britische Autorin Maggie O’Farrell mit ihrem Roman «Hamnet». Jetzt hat Chloé Zhao, die chinesischstämmige amerikanische Filmemacherin, den Roman verfilmt. Sie wurde dafür bei den Golden Globes in der Kategorie «bestes Drama» ausgezeichnet, ebenso Jessie Buckley für ihre Rolle als Agnes.
Im Roman von 2020 entwirft Maggie O’Farrell in ihrer fabelhaft plastischen Sprache ein ergreifendes Bild der Lebensrealität im südlichen England des 16. Jahrhunderts, der Zeit der Pest. O’Farrell stellt sich vor, dass Hamnet der Krankheit mit elf Jahren erliegt, während seine Zwillingsschwester dank Agnes’ Wissen über Naturheilkunst überlebt. Sie stellt sich vor, dass der junge Vater William Shakespeare in seinem Stück «Hamlet» die Trauer über den Verlust des Kindes verarbeitet.
Nichts davon ist belegt, ausser dass Hamlet und Hamnet Variationen desselben Namens sind. Je weniger belegt ist, desto mehr sind Erzählungen über historische Figuren zwangsläufig vom Geist ihrer Interpreten geprägt.
«Hamnet» entstand in den Jahren, als das Interesse an sogenannten «starken» Frauenfiguren im Nachgang von #MeToo stark wuchs. Prompt wurde der Roman zum Bestseller. Sehr zeitgeistig ist nun auch die Verfilmung von Zhao. Sie inszeniert Agnes als eine eigenwillige und «starke» Frau, die im Einklang mit der Natur und so unabhängig lebt, dass man sich bald fragt: Kann das sein für eine nicht hochwohlgeborene Frau im 16. Jahrhundert? Wahrscheinlich nicht.
Wäre diese Überhöhung ein Einzelfall, man könnte darüber hinwegsehen und sich der von Jessie Buckley herzzerreissend gespielten Trauer über Hamnets Tod hingeben. Stattdessen gerät man ins Grübeln über die merkwürdige Entwicklung der «starken Frauenfigur» im Film und in Serien.
Entweder überhöht oder hohl
Ein kurzer Blick zurück: In den Jahren, als die #MeToo-Bewegung entsteht, wird die «starke weibliche Hauptrolle» zum neuen Verkaufsargument. Detektivinnen und sich prügelnde (Super-)Heldinnen werden populär. Auch Wissenschafterinnen, Mörderinnen, Chefinnen, US-Präsidentinnen. Zuerst ist das wie ein Dammbruch. Endlich spielen nicht mehr ständig Männer die Hauptrollen. «Empowerment» ist das grosse Wort. Eigentlich eine Entwicklung, gegen die man als Zuschauerin, gierig nach neuen Identifikationsfiguren, nichts einwenden kann.
Aber dann fangen Stars wie Natalie Portman an, diese neuen Rollen zu kritisieren. Sie spielten ja bloss, was früher Männer gespielt hätten (ohne dass diese dafür «stark» genannt worden wären). Und bald mahnt Emily Blunt: Finger weg von Drehbüchern mit einem «strong female lead». Da wisse man schon im Voraus, dass die Figur schlecht geschrieben und darum hohl sei.
War’s das schon mit dem Versuch des «Empowerment»? Noch nicht. Denn da sind noch all die interessanten historischen Frauenfiguren, die im Lauf der Jahrhunderte einfach vergessen worden sind. Da liegt guter Stoff brach für die Filmindustrie.
«Hidden Figures» (2016) beispielsweise würdigte vergessene Nasa-Mathematikerinnen, viele davon Afroamerikanerinnen, ohne deren Berechnungen Neil Armstrong den Mond niemals betreten hätte. Es ist ein Drama in knallbunten Farben; es ist triste Vergangenheit, aufbereitet zur Unterhaltung des heutigen Massenpublikums. Und aufbereitet muss es sein, denn das Leben damals ist nicht attraktiv fürs heutige Publikum. Von Diskriminierung, Krankheit, Elend oder Armut im Alltag der Frauen zu erzählen, ist nicht «empowernd», sondern deprimierend. Und deprimierend soll der Kinobesuch oder der Netflix-Abend ja nicht sein.
Der Ausweg ist die Überhöhung. Ryan Murphy, König des Serien-Kitschs, machte 2020 mit «Hollywood» vor, wie das geht: Man erzähle eine Geschichte, basierend auf realen Figuren, und biege die historischen Tatsachen zum Idyll zurecht. In seiner Serie über das Hollywood der vierziger Jahre muss niemand verzweifeln über das Leid, das Sexismus, Homophobie und Rassismus verursachen, weil Murphys Figuren solche Ungerechtigkeiten kraft des gesunden Menschenverstandes einfach mal eben hinter sich lassen.
So zu tun, als ob es Ungerechtigkeiten nie gegeben hätte, hat aber nichts mit Selbstermächtigung zu tun. Sein hübsch inszenierter Geschichtsrevisionismus wischt jahrzehntelang gefochtene Kämpfe für mehr Gerechtigkeit weg. Was bleibt, ist unglaubwürdiger Kitsch.
Das Aufhübschen vergangener Verhältnisse zum Zweck der schmerzfreien Unterhaltung ist auch im Schweizer Film angekommen. In «Stiller» von Stefan Haupt haben die Frauen nichts mit den schwächlichen Figürchen zu tun, wie Max Frisch sie im Roman entwarf. In «Hallo Betty» von Pierre Monnard ist der erdrückende Mief der fünfziger Jahre die hübsche Kulisse für eine herzige Pseudo-Emanzipationsgeschichte.
Das ist zynisch
Es geht auch anders. «Mother» von Teona Strugar Mitevska zeigt Mutter Teresa nicht etwa als selbstlose Retterin der Armen, sondern als strenge Mutter Oberin, die ehrgeizig alles daransetzt, ihren eigenen Orden zu gründen. Sie ist hart, nicht gütig. Bei Mitevska gibt’s statt verklärten Blicken und Geigenmusik einen Metal-Soundtrack.
Oder im Drama «Silent Rebellion» von Marie-Elsa Sgualdo wird die Bedienstete Emma, die während des Zweiten Weltkriegs in einem Lausanner Pfarrhaushalt lebt, von ihrem Vergewaltiger geschwängert. Sie akzeptiert nicht, dass ihr Leben deshalb ruiniert sein soll. Ähnlich wie Sisi in «Corsage» von Marie Kreutzer würde auch Emma sagen: «Das ist scheisse, ich will hier raus, aber ich kann nicht.» Also rebellieren beide so, wie es innerhalb der herrschenden Zwänge möglich ist. Zwischen Kaiserin und Dienstmädchen gibt es da gar keinen so grossen Unterschied.
Weil die Regisseurinnen ihre Figuren nicht zu Heldinnen überhöhen, ihnen keine Freiheiten andichten, die sie zu ihren Lebzeiten unmöglich besessen haben können, sind sie glaubwürdig. Sie wecken Empathie, nicht Misstrauen wie die allwissende Agnes in «Hamnet».
Jetzt, vor dem Hintergrund des gesellschaftlichen Backlash, wirkt die Idealisierung von historischen Frauenfiguren besonders fragwürdig, sogar zynisch. Diskriminierung und Misogynie lösen sich nicht auf, nur weil Filme so tun, als ob sie längst überwunden wären.
«Mother» und «Silent Rebellion» laufen ab 29. Januar im Kino.
https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/hoert-auf-mit-diesen-heldinnen-die-es-so-gar-nie-gab-ld.1919777
New York Times, January 19
‘Sentimental Value’ Dominates the European Film Awards
The Norwegian drama collected six awards at the event, which was moved to January this year in hopes of increasing its visibility for Oscar voters.
Full text:
The Norwegian drama “Sentimental Value” won best film at the European Film Awards, the continent’s equivalent to the Academy Awards, in Berlin on Saturday.
The film, which focuses on the tumultuous relationship between an actress and her film-director father, dominated the ceremony, coming away with six awards, including best director for Joachim Trier, best actress for Renate Reinsve and best actor for Stellan Skarsgard, who last weekend won the Golden Globe for best supporting actor for his performance.
The European Film Awards were created in 1988 with the aim of drawing attention to European film. Film professionals across the continent vote on the awards.
Although the ceremony remains less well known than other European film events, like the BAFTA Awards in Britain and prominent festivals in Venice and Cannes, France, it has raised its profile in recent years through popular screening events across Europe. This year, organizers moved the event to January from December in the hopes of increasing its visibility for Oscar voters.
The European Film Awards have not historically been predictive of the Oscars. “Sentimental Value” and two of its competitors for best European film — the French-Spanish film “Sirat” and “It Was Just an Accident,” from the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi — are considered long-shot contenders for best picture at the Academy Awards, whose nominations will be announced Jan. 22.
In winning best director, Trier, whose previous film, “The Worst Person in the World,” was nominated for two Oscars in 2022, beat out Panahi, Yorgos Lanthimos for “Bugonia,” Oliver Laxe for “Sirat” and Mascha Schilinski for “Sound of Falling.”
In his acceptance speech, Trier said the experiences of his grandfather, a filmmaker who was imprisoned during World War II as a member of the Norwegian resistance, had led him to value the “infrastructure” now supporting European film. Trier also won for the film’s screenplay, which he wrote with his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt.
In accepting the award for best European actress, Reinsve, who is from Norway, said her character, an actress who shares a deep bond with her younger sister, was “heavy to carry.” She thanked her two sisters who, she said, were “the ones taking care of me when we grew up.”
“Sirat,” a harrowing film set in the Moroccan desert, won five awards, including for cinematography, sound design and editing. “Sound of Falling,” from Germany, won for best costume design. The best documentary award went to “Fiume O Morte!,” about the 1919 occupation of the Croatian city of Rijeka.
The ceremony was more sprawling and high-minded than many of its U.S. counterparts. Amid homages to European film history and a playful bit in which the daughter of the French filmmaker Agnès Varda handed out potatoes to attendees, it included several pointed mentions of geopolitics.
In accepting a lifetime achievement award, the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann criticized the recent decision by the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado to give her Nobel Peace Prize to President Trump.
“I know that in Norway we have laws that say if you misuse a Nobel Prize, we take it away from you,” she said from the stage.
In remarks that opened the ceremony, Panahi addressed the current unrest in Iran, which he described as “one of the most bitter and history-making periods in its history.”
“The entire world is at risk when violence, left unanswered, becomes normalized,” he said.
In December, Iran sentenced Panahi in absentia to a year in jail for “propaganda activities.” He has said that he plans to return to the country despite the verdict.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/movies/european-film-awards-sentimental-value.html
New York Times, January 17
‘A Useful Ghost’ Review: Machine Yearning
A grieving widower finds his problems are just beginning when his wife returns in the form of a household appliance in this gloriously funny, shape-shifting debut feature.
Full text:
Fearlessly original and frequently hilarious, “A Useful Ghost” almost beggars description. Beginning as one thing and ending as quite another, this dazzling first feature from the Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke uses the frame of a sad-sweet sex comedy to weave together political allegory, supernatural mystery and more than one tender love story. And he does this with such skill and bravado that you never see the seams.
What you do see are motes of dust dancing in the air, their danger a pervasive narrative concern. To banish them from his apartment, the self-described Academic Ladyboy (Wisarut Homhuan) purchases a vacuum cleaner, only to be awakened one night by persistent coughing as the belching machine regurgitates its contents. Alarmed, Ladyboy summons an unsettlingly sexy repairman (Wanlop Rungkumjad), who informs him that haunted appliances are a growing problem in Thailand’s dust-plagued factories. Deceased workers, activated by the grief of their loved ones, have been returning to sabotage the equipment they believe caused their deaths.
Yet the spirit of Nat (Davika Hoorne), who also died from respiratory disease, is neither seeking revenge nor wishing to cause trouble. Missed to distraction by her husband, March (Witsarut Himmarat), Nat returns in the form of an especially slinky vacuum cleaner (created by the award-winning industrial designer Sim Hao Jie), the pulsing lights in its handle attuned to Nat’s changing emotions. And to the horror of March’s widowed mother, Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon) — already distracted by an infestation of malevolent ghosts in the factory she inherited from her husband — neither the police nor a Buddhist ritual nor a gaggle of disapproving relatives can dissuade the reunited couple from resuming marital relations.
This is all as bonkers as it sounds — you may never look at your vacuum cleaner’s attachments the same way again — with earthly and unearthly romances playing out side-by-side and deadpan comedy bumping up against tragedy. Yet the movie’s exuberant silliness proves a perfect vehicle for the ambitions and intelligence of a screenplay (by the director, who also teaches film theory) that gradually broadens and darkens to comment on Thailand’s turbulent political history. And when Nat learns she has the ability to discern the dreams of dissidents, and hence become the government’s useful ghost, the movie’s imagery grows more potent and its spirits’ intentions more menacing.
Chockablock with ideas and touching on themes of collaboration and appeasement, “A Useful Ghost” remains wonderfully buoyant in the face of weighty concerns. In the press notes, Boonbunchachoke tells us that Thailand is “full of ghosts,” people whose unsolved murders and disappearances linger in the public consciousness. In large part, his shape-shifting movie is an ode to these and other memories inconvenient to rulers who wish to erase them.
A bawdy metaphor for democracy under threat, “A Useful Ghost” has a delightful, frisky energy that coexists peacefully with the beautiful melancholy of its central love affair as March comes to terms with his wife’s new job.
“There were lots of dreamers today,” Nat reports to her government handler after a particularly stressful shift. In an authoritarian society, aren’t there always?
A Useful Ghost
Not rated. In Thai, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/movies/a-useful-ghost-review.html
New York Times, January 17
‘A Private Life’ Review: Jodie Foster Uncovers a Twisty Plot in Paris
Speaking in French (but cursing in English), the actress plays an American psychiatrist abroad who stumbles into unexpected intrigue.
Full text:
Watching the immaculately controlled Jodie Foster muss up her hair and a character’s inner being is one of the low-key pleasures of the twisty French puzzler, “A Private Life.” She plays Lilian Steiner, a psychiatrist in Paris who could use some me-time on the couch. She gets some, in a way, after a patient unexpectedly dies. The death rocks Lilian, an American who switches effortlessly between French and English, and has lived in France long enough to have married there, had a son, divorced and become a grandmother. Hers is an outwardly enviable life, if more of a heavily barricaded fortress than a cultivated garden.
The French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski has a gift for creating intriguingly complex female characters, women whose lives are at once specific to them and recognizably commonplace. In her tender drama about women, love and mothering, “Other People’s Children,” the life of a teacher, played by Virginie Efira, grows increasingly complicated after she falls for a man and develops an equally fierce bond with his young daughter. Efira has a small, pivotal role in “A Private Life” as Lilian’s dead patient, Paula, an elusive yet seductive presence who appears in slyly teasing, fragmented flashbacks. Her death might be shrouded in mystery, but there was nothing enigmatic about her effect when she was alive.
Zlotowski, working from a script that she wrote with Anne Berest, persuasively establishes the coordinates of Lilian’s cosseted, oh-so-proper haute bourgeois life with illuminating details. Everything gleams in this woman’s world, from her smart, perfect bob to the luxurious surfaces in her spacious apartment and the leather chair where she sits as her patients share their deepest and most banal concerns. Her nice, organized world begins to fall to pieces, though, when she learns that Paula has died, perhaps by suicide. Lilian is shaken by the death; she also takes it personally. “I never detected the slightest suicidal thought,” she tells her ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), before confiding she suspects foul play.
One of Zlotowski’s strengths as a filmmaker is her casting, and she’s filled “A Private Life” with some valuable supporting players, notably Auteuil. He and Foster fit together seamlessly, his soft, yielding presence working contrapuntally with her sharp edges. They appear together for the first time not long after Lilian flees the shiva for Paula where the dead woman’s husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric), berates her. Amalric’s Simon, his voice rising and protuberant eyes flashing, adds a menacing shiver to the story. Soon after, Lilian discovers that her eyes won’t stop watering and she seeks treatment from Gabriel, who, conveniently, is an ophthalmologist. (Like every patient in denial, she insists that she’s fine.)
These ocular details as well as several striking overhead shots of vertigo-inducing staircases — along with Lilian’s abrupt transformation into an amateur detective — suggest that Zlotowski watched a couple of Hitchcock movies at some stage in the making of “A Private Life.” There’s a touch of “Spellbound” here, Hitchcock’s 1945 psychological thriller with Gregory Peck as a wounded soul healed by the love of a psychoanalyst played by Ingrid Bergman. Zlotowski similarly thickens her plot with romance, revelations of trauma and surrealistic visions, but with a light touch that becomes progressively playful. The more Lilian discovers, the less cleareyed she seems and the more winning her personality becomes.
The intrigue is far-fetched and surprising — this is one movie you can’t write in your head — and delivered with increasing winks and charm. That’s particularly the case once Lilian and Gabriel start making like Nick and Nora Charles, a turn that sweetens the story and points to a potential film franchise that I would like to see happen. Foster navigates the many narrative detours and tonal shifts with her customary virtuosity, but what makes the performance sing is the gentleness with which she dismantles Lilian, including the self-sovereignty that has helped isolate the character. In some roles, Foster can feel at an appreciable remove, as if she were behind a very thin membrane. Here, she uses that distance for her character, a woman who’s so stunned by death that she’s finally shocked back into life.
A Private Life
Rated R for a plot thread involving suicide and for some English-language profanity. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/movies/a-private-life-review-jodie-foster.html
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 17
Ein Seelenstriptease vor digital erzeugten Kulissen: Der Film «Nacktgeld» holt Arthur Schnitzler ins Zeitalter virtueller Realitäten
In seinem neuen Werk experimentiert der Schweizer Filmemacher Thomas Imbach mit einer neuartigen Technologie. Zur Entdeckung aber wird seine analog agierende Hauptdarstellerin.
Full text:
Lars von Triers «Dogville» (2003) ist ein Meilenstein der Kinogeschichte: Beseelt vom brechtschen Theater, siedelte der Däne die Passionsgeschichte seiner Protagonistin (Nicole Kidman) vor minimalistischen Kulissen an, mit Kreide auf den Boden gezeichnet waren Häuser und Strassen. Die radikale Verknüpfung von Film und Bühne wirkte hochartifiziell und erschütterte gerade deshalb.
Mit ähnlichen Prämissen und anderen Mitteln geht der findige Schweizer Filmemacher Thomas Imbach in «Nacktgeld» zu Werke. Hatte er für seine meisterhafte Stadtcollage «Day Is Done» (2011) über 15 Jahre hinweg aus dem Fenster seines Zürcher Ateliers gefilmt, ist seine Adaption von Arthur Schnitzlers Novelle «Fräulein Else» nun im analogen 16-Millimeter-Format ganz vor einem digitalen Hintergrund gedreht.
Feuertaufe für ein Filmstudio
Gesetzt wird dabei erstmals hierzulande vollumfänglich auf die ursprünglich für Computer-Games entwickelte Virtual-Production-Technik. Es ist sozusagen die Feuertaufe für das neue Filmstudio Basel, gegründet vom Schweizer Produzenten Alex Martin, der ganz auf diese Technologie vertraut und ihr gestalterisches und wirtschaftliches Potenzial rühmt: Sie spare Zeit, Kosten und Energie, sagt er in einem Interview mit dem in die Koproduktion involvierten SRF.
Virtual Production wird in Hollywood zur Erzeugung illusionistischer Settings verwendet: Jeder beliebige Hintergrund, von der Mondlandschaft bis zum Dschungel, kann digital erstellt und mittels 3-D-Technik auf eine Leinwand projiziert werden, wobei die Kameraposition computergesteuert angepasst wird. Anders als beim herkömmlichen Blue Screen müssen Schauspieler dabei im Studio nicht mehr vor einer nackten Farbfläche spielen, die später durch Inhalte ersetzt wird, sondern können mit der virtuellen Welt interagieren.
«Nacktgeld» versetzt uns in den Kopf der Protagonistin.
Imbachs Drehbuch hält sich recht eng an Schnitzlers Vorlage, verlegt die Geschichte jedoch vom Südtirol ins Oberengadin; Hauptschauplatz ist das «Waldhaus Sils Maria», das mit Baujahr 1908 bestens zur Belle Époque passt. Else alias Lili (Deleila Piasko) verbringt auf Geheiss ihrer reichen Tante einen Sommer im noblen Kurhotel, als ein Brief ihrer Mutter sie erreicht: Sie möge den unter den Gästen weilenden Kunsthändler von Dorsday (Milan Peschel) um ein grösseres Darlehen innert kürzester Frist bitten, um die Familie vor der Schmach des Ruins zu bewahren – und den Vater vor dem Freitod.
Von Dorsday, der schmierige alte Knacker, nennt Lili «liebes Kind» oder «entzückendes Wesen» und wittert seine Chance: Er habe die Erfahrung gemacht, dass alles auf der Welt seinen Preis habe. Seiner ist ein Striptease: Lili soll sich für eine Viertelstunde vor ihm ausziehen. «Sie wollen mich nackt sehen», sagt sie zu ihm und denkt sich: «Das wollen sie alle. Ich möcht’ Arschloch zu ihm sagen, aber ich kann nicht.»
Die vermeintliche Sommerbrise wird zum albtraumhaften Sturm, inszeniert mit leichter Hand. Das unmoralische, nein unverschämte Angebot stürzt Lili in ein Dilemma, das in raffinierter Erzählperspektive gespiegelt und gebrochen wird: Schnitzlers Stück ist über weite Strecken als innerer Monolog der faszinierend facettenreichen Frauenfigur angelegt. Er führt das Publikum in ihren Kopf, während die Geschehnisse mit den Gedanken kontrastieren.
Kulissenhaft und somnambul
Imbach glaubt in der neuartigen Technik den geeigneten Weg gefunden zu haben, diese Schichten zu zeichnen: Er legt es nicht auf verblüffenden Realismus an, den Virtual Production ermöglicht, sie liefert ihm statt Trompe-l’Œil-Effekten eher eine Folie für das Spiel zwischen Innen- und Aussenwelt mit Sprüngen in der Zeit- und Realitätsebene.
In den gelungensten Szenen wirkt das kulissenhaft und somnambul zugleich, und manches kann als moderne Version des brechtschen Verfremdungseffekts durchgehen. Allerdings nutzt sich der Reiz des Hochartifiziellen über die neunzig Minuten hinweg ab, bis die Schlusspointe sozusagen die vierte Wand öffnet und das Hotelzimmer als Filmset «entlarvt», das es nie war.
So ist die grosse Entdeckung dieses Films nicht die Technologie, sondern die Hauptdarstellerin: Seit ihrem Kinodebüt in «Cannabis» vor zwanzig Jahren hat man die 34-jährige Zürcherin Deleila Piasko kaum mehr auf Leinwänden gesehen, dafür öfter auf der Bühne, am Berner Stadt- und am Wiener Burgtheater, zu dessen Ensemble sie gehörte. Sie ist es, die der Figur Leben einhaucht, um die sich alles und alle drehen, so dass der Rest zur Staffage verkommt.
Das Auge der Kamera weidet sich an der klassischen Schönheit von Lilis Gesichtszügen, folgt dann wieder ganz nah ihrem Rücken, hinter dem gelegentlich ihr Über-Ich spricht. In wild-trotzigen Monologen oder Dialogen mit sich selbst versucht sie sich in ihrem Seelenstriptease von männlicher Definitionsmacht zu befreien und ihre Optionen auszuloten. Einmal hofft sie, dass der Vater sich schon umgebracht hat, damit sie sich vor dem Lüstling nicht ausziehen muss. Ein anderes Mal phantasiert sie ihren eigenen Tod herbei, und man ahnt, dass das Ende ihrer Widerstandskraft auch das Ende ihres Lebens sein müsste.
Frisch trotz hundert Jahren
Die vor hundert Jahren von Schnitzler ersonnene Frauenfigur und der Stoff, der nebst zahllosen Bühnen- schon gegen ein Dutzend Filmadaptionen kennt, bewahren sich bis heute eine erstaunliche Frische. Und der 63-jährige Imbach wird seinem Ruf gerecht, ein wagemutiger Filmemacher zu sein.
Doch während einst «Dogville» die Grenzen des Kinos sprengte, zeigt «Nacktgeld» sie eher auf. In Zeiten, da Videoprojektionen als Kulisse längst die klassischen Bühnen erreicht haben, wünscht man sich jedenfalls, diesen Stoff wieder einmal in einer Theateradaption zu sehen.
Le Point, January 16
« The Rip » : la grande arnaque de Matt Damon et Ben Affleck sur Netflix
Vingt-huit ans après « Will Hunting », le duo se reforme, sur Netflix, pour la troisième fois en quatre ans, dans un thriller gentiment efficace mais sans grande inventivité.
Full text:
Increvable duo. Avec The Rip, Matt Damon et Ben Affleck signent leur troisième collaboration en quatre ans (après Le Dernier Duel de Ridley Scott en 2021 et Air en 2023). Amis de longue date, révélés à Hollywood grâce au scénario de Will Hunting (1997) de Gus Van Sant, ils ont, chacun a fait leur chemin mais, on ne saurait pas trop expliquer pourquoi, leurs retrouvailles sont toujours sources de curiosité.
Cette fois, les deux potes coproduisent pour Netflix, The Rip, (ou « l’arnaque » en anglais, un terme inspiré du jargon policier pour désigner la saisie d’argent, de drogue ou d’armes) dernier film de Joe Carnahan (à qui l’on doit la version cinéma de L’Agence tous risques). Un polar musclé, au budget de près de 100 millions de dollars et dont le principal intérêt réside presque uniquement dans la réunion face cam des deux compères.
Les deux acteurs incarnent deux meilleurs amis, (évidemment), officiers d’une brigade des stupéfiants de Miami. L’unité, bouleversée par le meurtre de la capitaine Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) en plein service, doit se soumettre à l’exercice de l’interrogatoire, pour déterminer si cette mort est le résultat d’un complot interne.
Le jour même, le lieutenant Dane Dumars (Matt Damon) reçoit un tuyau pour retrouver de l’argent planqué par un cartel. Mais sur place, la découverte de l’énorme butin va réveiller des tensions internes…
The Rip glisse alors vers le huis clos. L’équipe composée notamment de Steven Yeun et de Teyana Taylor, (récemment gratifiée d’un Golden Globe pour sa prestation dans Une bataille après l’autre) est contrainte de se retrancher dans la planque sous la houlette de Dumars. Les tensions montent, la paranoïa s’installe, les loyautés vacillent. Qui dit vrai ? Qui joue double jeu ? Le compte à rebours est lancé.
Bourre-pifs et armes à gogo
The Rip est né de la conjugaison d’une expérience personnelle vécue par un ami du réalisateur Joe Carnahan et de « l’amour indéfectible » de ce dernier pour les grands classiques comme Serpico, Le prince de New-York, Heat de Michael Mann, ou encore L’arme fatale, sorti en 1987. « Matt, Ben et moi avons le même âge. On voulait faire un film dans le même genre, un film populaire, un polar, un genre que j’adore… », a confié Joe Carnahan au média Moviefone.
C’est sans surprise donc, que Joe Carnahan, qui s’est surtout fait connaître pour un cinéma très masculin, renouvelle la démarche avec ce film violent et viril. Qu’on ne soit pas surpris de se taper quinze bonnes minutes de scènes de course-poursuite et de fusillades improbables mais comment font-ils pour recharger ?
S’il ne fait pas que réaliser des films de ballots, comme le prouve Le Territoire des loups, sorti en 2012 – son plus grand film, plus proche du drame existentiel et mélancolique sur la survie qu’un simple film d’action – Joe Carnahan maintient dans The Rip un rythme effréné, tandis que le huis clos alimente la tension.
Le résultat : un film de flics, nourri de clichés, et forcément un peu décevant, même s’il nous offre quelques rebondissements astucieux… Sans doute le prix à payer pour que Matt Damon et Ben Affleck continuent de tourner ensemble.
The Rip, disponible sur Netflix
New York Times, January 15
Dramas Keep Showing Us Hapless Men — and Hypercompetent Women
Several of the past year’s films center on confused, bumbling protagonists — surrounded by women who are anything but.
Full text:
Consider the hapless man. He’s uncertain, ineffectual, star-crossed. Nothing ever seems to work out for him; he can’t confidently take action to face a crisis. You’d think he would make for a dull story. And yet there he was last year, serving, improbably, as the protagonist in several notable films.
Instead of prestige movie heroes like J. Robert Oppenheimer, we had the unlucky lead who bumbles forward as if confounded by the plot unfolding around him. He’s a man of action, sometimes, but not much sense. He turns to exactly the wrong person for help with an important task. He spends so long numbing himself with drugs and alcohol that he can’t recall the talismanic words that will protect him.
And of course he reckons with the people these films inevitably put beside him: hypercompetent women. They are ever-present — and they are usually so capable, so confidently efficacious, that if they were the story’s focus, the movie would be over in 15 minutes.
Take Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind.” James Blaine Mooney, its central figure, is an aimless, out-of-work father and a former art-school student who teams up with a couple of equally hapless men to just barely carry off a heist of Modernist paintings from a local museum. The women in his life — his wife, Terri; his mother, Sarah; and an old friend, Maude — either warily indulge him or are fed up with him. After the crime, when James has been identified as a suspect and the walls are closing in, they are the ones who recognize what a danger he is to himself and others, even as he seems unaware of how far he’d go to evade capture; they understand him, and the severity of his predicament, far better than he seems to.
Or consider the Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning “It Was Just an Accident.” Its protagonist, Vahid, is a mechanic who thinks he has found the sadistic captor who tortured him in jail. Vahid stalks and kidnaps his quarry — but just as he’s about to take revenge by burying the man alive, he comes to doubt whether he has the right person. Thus begins a darkly comical sequence in which Vahid drives the man around Tehran, visiting other former prisoners to confirm that this was their torturer. But the men are either unwilling to help or dangerously unhinged. It’s when he meets two female former prisoners, Shiva and Golrokh, that he gets some guidance; they are the ones who might help determine the truth.
Then there is Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a bomb-making revolutionary who goes underground as the U.S. government hunts down members of his cadre. Sixteen years later, he’s a burned-out, hippie-ish single parent living on the margins in Northern California, raising the daughter he had with a fellow militant, Perfidia — a long-departed warrior-ideologue who cheated on him with the Army colonel pursuing them, then abandoned her family and betrayed her comrades to save herself.
‘You look so lost,’ she tells him.
Perfidia is the film’s driving force, directing the group’s strategy and taking Bob as a lover; her actions push the story forward even after she leaves. All through the film, though, so many of the women Bob encounters have things together in ways that put him to shame — say, the nurse doing intake at a police station after Bob is arrested in a military raid, who hands him off to another nurse, at a hospital, who calmly, unflappably leads him to freedom. Even Bob’s teenage daughter, Willa, is the responsible one, a purple belt in karate who effectively parents her own father.
All these protagonists are ineffectual bunglers. Once they’ve decided to act — not a given — they seem unmoored by the forces arrayed against them. It’s not just viewers who can see this. Early in “One Battle,” Perfidia’s mother asks Bob how he will take care of her baby granddaughter: “You look so lost,” she tells him.
The women they come across, on the other hand, seem ready for anything. They might see several chess moves ahead of both the protagonists and antagonists. They know how to affect the world of the movie, and they do so with ease — exactly what the actual “hero” of the story is completely unable to do.
You might expect the haplessness of these men to say something about modern gender relations, but it may really have more to do with politics. To varying degrees, each of these films plays out against the backdrop of a repressive society in which the government exerts control over its citizens. “The Mastermind” has James drifting rudderless in the malaise of New England in 1970, amid antiwar protests and Big Brother-like portraits of Richard Nixon. “Accident” is set in contemporary Iran, where Vahid was jailed and tortured for protesting poor labor conditions. In “One Battle,” Bob is far from his days of youthful rebellion, meandering through a liquor-and-weed-induced fog with only his paranoia to help him survive.
These men embody, on some level, our own smallness in the face of vast, oppressive forces — the pathetic haplessness of anyone who faces off against the full apparatus of the state and feels puny in comparison.
All three fit the archetype of the schlemiel: irredeemably inept, an accident of a person, the butt of some great cosmic joke. The schlemiel is as much a literary figure as a cinematic one. Think of the main characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Chelm stories or Benny Profane in Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel, “V.” (The long line of hapless men in Pynchon’s works includes Zoyd Wheeler of “Vineland,” the inspiration for Bob in “One Battle.”) But film history is equally littered with schlemiels, from Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp to Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot. Many of them could also be said to be put upon by the state of their world — by, for example, its dehumanizing, technocratic innovations in Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936) or Tati’s “Playtime” (1967).
One difference, with those figures, is that events always seem to end up working out for them; they bumble blissfully onward, not toward grim disaster but toward some kind of grace. Another is that they do not appear alongside processions of hypercompetent women — women who seem able to understand and redirect the plot as easily as the screenwriter might.
The fact that these figures are so often women may be a way of suggesting that men have had their run, and look where it has gotten us. It may be that the characters who are most capable of enacting change are the ones who have more to lose. (Perfidia’s demands include “free borders, free bodies, free choices.”) Or it may be that these women serve as mommy figures — all-powerful authorities whom these men, made infantile by the world, look to for care and guidance. (“I’m a little unclear as to what the plan is,” Bob tells Perfidia. “I’m going to need some direction.”)
Whatever the case, today’s schlemiels do not get to stumble comically through life. Their films offer no sense that anyone can escape unmarred. Even in recent movies whose protagonists are not so inept — say, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” which takes place chiefly during Brazil’s military dictatorship and features similarly capable women — there is no feeling that either the hero or the society around him will end up OK. The women in these stories are cures and exemplars, the ones with the capacity to fix everything. We should not be surprised if the coming years bring more films like these — all dreaming that there is somebody out there with whom we might throw in our lot, somebody competent enough to tell us what to do to make the world right.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/magazine/movies-hapless-men-hypercompetent-women.html
New York Times, January 15
Telling the Stories of a House Full of Secrets
Mascha Schilinski’s movie “Sound of Falling,” which takes place over a century in a rural farmhouse, shows how trauma is transmitted through generations.
Full text:
While the director Mascha Schilinski was researching “Sound of Falling,” her decades-spanning film set on a German farmstead, she came across a chilling sentence in a first-person account of life on such a property from the 1910s. Amid banal descriptions of laundry and parenting, a resident noted that “the women need to be made safe for the men.”
Schilinski, 41, was taken aback when she realized this was a reference to the forced sterilization of servants so that they wouldn’t become pregnant and miss work. “These are accounts we don’t know about,” she said in a recent interview, “because they are so filled with shame.”
Such untold stories inspired Schilinski to make “Sound of Falling,” one of the most unconventional and acclaimed German feature films in recent memory. After winning the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, it was released in Germany to ecstatic reviews in the summer. Now the movie, which is Germany’s submission for the international feature Oscar, is being released in U.S. theaters on Friday.
The film, which Schilinski co-wrote with Louise Peter, interweaves the stories of several girls living on a farm in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt in the 1910s, 1940s, 1980s and 2020s via ghostly, hallucinatory visuals and intricate sound design.
In the film’s 1914 story line, a girl navigates a series of deaths and gruesome injuries in her family; during World War II, a teenager develops an interest in an amputee living in the farmhouse; in 1980s, when the region is part of communist East Germany, a young woman navigates sexual advances from her uncle; and in the 2020s, two adolescent neighbors form an intense friendship.
“The word trauma is often associated with war or big stories, but sometimes it is just small, quiet things,” Schilinski explained in a Berlin cafe. “It is transmitted through generations, gets inscribed in our bodies and determines how we are. But we can’t understand how, because there are stores we don’t know about.”
In the film’s largely nonchronological structure, the shocks are mirrored and refracted through the characters’ experiences. Dramatic events include not only forced sterilization, but also parents’ attempted mutilation of their son, suicide and the forced marriage of a teenager.
German reviewers have praised the film’s unusual approach to little-known stories of women across the 20th century. A critic at the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praised Schilinski’s “countless brave aesthetic and formal decisions.” Der Spiegel newsmagazine called it “the most ambitious German film to have been made in ages.”
Kathleen Hildebrand, a film editor at the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, said that “Sound of Falling” reflected a rare level of ambition in German cinema. Movies from Germany are rarely invited to compete in the main selection in Cannes, she noted. The last German film to be a serious contender there, the bittersweet comedy “Toni Erdmann,” came out a decade ago.
“We are a big, wealthy nation, but other countries are better represented,” Hildebrand said. She added that it was not because of a lack of talent, but because the bureaucratic nature of Germany’s film public funding bodies, which play a large role in bankrolling its film industry, makes them reluctant to make unconventional choices. “It is not a country for big, bold films at the moment,” she said.
Schilinski said her modest budget — less than $2.5 million — made it challenging to produce a film that unfolds over more than a century. The project was shot in 33 days on a single empty farmstead in the Altmark region of northern Germany.
Although the area was home to prosperous farms in the 1800s, it has been one of the regions of the country most affected by demographic decline in recent years as disproportionate numbers of young and female residents moved to larger centers.
Because the director had spent time living on the farm during the research process, she was able to borrow equipment from local farmers, including a harvester from the Communist period, that the production otherwise would not have been able to afford. “It only worked because I know this village,” she said.
The film’s cinematographer, Fabian Gamper, who is also Schilinski’s real-life partner, said he wanted to movie to evoke “a memory from 300 years in the future of how things used to be,” but needed to adapt his approach because of budget limitations. To achieve some shots that look like period photographs, he created a pinhole camera, used in 19th-century photography, and, at one point, attached it to a drone.
The shoot was further complicated by German regulations for the film’s many child actors, who could shoot for only three hours per day. Schilinski auditioned hundreds of girls before selecting the 7-year-old actress Hanna Heckt to play Alma, the girl whose 1910s story line anchors the film.
“We wanted to find faces that looked like they had actually lived at exactly this time period,” Schilinski said.
She added that she likes to work with child actors, whom she said had a nearly “hallucinatory ability to uncover things,” acting like “little detectives.” Her first feature, “Dark Blue Girl,” featured a then-unknown child actress, Helena Zengel, who went on to be nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in “News of the World” with Tom Hanks.
Schilinski also emphasized that “Sound of Falling” reflected her lifelong interest in metaphysical connection. After dropping out of high school and working in a casting agency for children, she became a performer in a telepathy act in a traveling Italian circus. “My eyes were covered and I would say what people had in their bag,” she recalled.
Growing up in a prewar apartment in Berlin, she said, she had also been fixated on the experiences of people who might have lived there before her. “I was obsessed with what had happened there or what had caused an indentation in the wood floor,” she said.
“I have often had this feeling that you can go through life as a proxy, with issues that you can’t quite explain from your biography,” she said. “But that keep coming back.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/movies/sound-of-falling-mascha-schilinski.html
New York Times, January 15
Jodie Foster: An American Oscar-Winner in Paris
In “A Private Life,” the actress takes on her first solo lead role in which she speaks fluent French, but her French connection goes all the way back to childhood.
Full text:
Jodie Foster was in pain. A collapsed disc in her back needed surgery. A hip replacement would follow.
But it was her 63rd birthday (Nov. 19), and she was in Paris. Dressed in a slim dark gray jacket and matching trousers, her hair coifed and makeup set, the two-time Oscar winner was poised for a marathon of interviews to promote the French release of her film “A Private Life” (opening in American theaters Jan. 16).
She began the day with an interview and a midmorning nosh at the chef Guy Savoy’s gastronomic paradise. Her meal: poached eggs under a hill of shaved Italian white truffles and oyster tartare with a granita of lemon and seaweed.
“Wow, this is so cool,” she said. “I took two Advils, so I’m gonna be OK. Isn’t this heaven?”
A photo shoot along the Seine followed. Foster grinned and posed even when a cold drizzle morphed into a downpour. Only when plump hailstones rained down was the shoot called off. “I have a mind over matter thing,” she said. “It’s my job.”
Foster has made dozens of films over the decades, both as an actress and a director. Three of them have been French. But “A Private Life” (the French title: “Vie privée”) is the first in which she delivers a solo lead performance in French. And she speaks not just any French — but fluid, fast-moving, just about accent-less French.
She plays Lilian Steiner, an American psychoanalyst whose tightly controlled life in Paris unravels after her patient of nine years (Virginie Efira) dies suddenly, apparently by suicide. Convinced she was murdered, Lilian begins an obsessive private investigation. Her ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), agrees to help. Along the way she consults a hypnotist and enters a hallucinatory dream state in which she and her patient were lovers in a previous life, playing in the string section of a Paris orchestra during the Nazi occupation.
The film, billed as a comic-tragic whodunit and directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, received an enthusiastic ovation at Cannes last May but opened to mixed reviews in France. Some critics faulted the plot as unrealistic and hard to follow but gushed over the performances, particularly the disarming chemistry between Foster and Auteuil.
Foster’s French connection started as a child, thanks to her France-obsessed stage mother, who was raising four children on her own. Foster, who began her career in a Coppertone commercial when she was 3, largely supported the family.
“My mom was completely in love with France,” said Foster. “She read books on Napoleon, drove a Peugeot, bought a French armoire and a French tapestry and French art works. Finally she went on a bus tour in France with a guide and a bus full of people, and she came back and said, ‘OK, that’s it. You’re gonna learn French. We’re gonna leave this country and you’re gonna be a French actor.’”
Her mother brought her to Paris for the first time when she was 8. She remembers binge eating buttered baguettes filled with ham and taking photos of the Eiffel Tower and the bridges over the Seine. Her mother bought her a mini-Burberry coat and a French sailor suit and tam.
“I was Jodie in Paris,” she said.
Foster already had an exceptional connection to language. She started talking when she was 9 months old and could read billboards aloud in Spanish when she was 3 (the family’s housekeeper spoke Spanish). At 8 years old, she was able to correctly pronounce the name of the street of their hotel when her mother, who never learned French, could not.
Back in Los Angeles, Foster was enrolled in a French lycée, where she mastered French grammar and vocabulary and perfected her French accent.
“French school is hard,” she said. “There is recitation where they put you up against the wall and then they say like, ‘Recite this poem.’ I did science, I did math, history, everything in French. And every kid in my class was French except me.”
Unadorned and freckle-faced at 13, she appeared for the first time at Cannes in 1976 with “Taxi Driver,” in which she played a child prostitute. At the movie’s news conference, seated with her fellow actor Robert De Niro and her director, Martin Scorsese, Foster wowed journalists with her fluent French.
Afterward, her mother took her out of school and moved her to Paris to appear in a French film “Moi, Fleur Bleue.” She played a young teenager who, determined to lose her virginity, has sex with a much older man.
“That’s like the worst movie,” said Foster. “Terrible.”
They stayed in Paris for almost a year, buying an apartment (which Foster sold about 14 years ago) on the Île Saint-Louis. “Yeah, I didn’t go to school the whole time, so I missed geometry. How about that?”
To prepare for the role of Liliane Steiner, Foster read French books aloud at home and then turned up in Paris to immerse herself in French life, visiting bookstores, riding the Métro and the bus, working out at a gym, meeting with French psychoanalysts, taking cello lessons, dining in small bistros.
Her older sister Lucinda has lived in Paris for more than 40 years, and Foster spent time with her grandniece and even took her grandnephew to his karate classes. “I ate cheese, had aperitifs,” she said. “I didn’t talk to any Americans in Paris for three weeks. Sometimes when I had to speak French all day, I could barely move my jaw by the end of the day.”
She appreciates that French life truly respects privacy. Back home in the United States she is used to being more guarded. She says little publicly about her family, although Charlie, one of her two adult sons, is now in the public eye as an actor, and Foster’s wife, Alexandra Hedison, is an artist and photographer.
“Thankfully, the French leave you alone,” she said. “There is a kind of anonymity that I am able to have in everyday life. Isn’t it amazing when you can go in the Métro or on the bus, and somebody will be six inches from you and they don’t look at you, don’t talk to you. If you were in an elevator in America, within 10 seconds, an American will tell you where they work, who they’re married to, how much money they make.”
Zlotowski, the director, had long tried to woo Foster to star in a film before succeeding with this one. “She has this amazingly weird connection to the language,” said Zlotowski. “I had in a way Jodie in my bones — she is like one of a kind, a badass hero, solitary character.”
Because Foster’s French was so perfect, Zlotowski had her curse in English whenever she was angry to help remind viewers that she was American.
Foster entranced her French co-stars — with her French, bien sûr, but also with her bonhomie. “Ah là là — Jodie Foster — you are meeting a legend,” said Mathieu Amalric, the award-winning actor and filmmaker who plays the husband of the deceased patient. “I was scared to meet her. And then in 30 seconds she’s a human being and not a legend anymore.”
Noam Morgensztern, who plays an angry patient in the movie (and is a classically trained actor with Comédie Française, the country’s elite national theater), said, “She’s a perfectionist. Ultraprecise. I adored that! And her French is so incredible I sometimes forgot that she wasn’t French.”
Efira called her an “actress who is not caught up in her own myth — she’s not Catherine Deneuve.”
Foster developed an exceptionally close bond both on and off screen with Auteuil. Between takes, the two sat in folding chairs and talked about their lives. “The meeting between us was so natural, as if we’d known each other forever,” he said in an interview conducted in French. “I have the misfortune of not speaking English properly, so every time I’ve met American or English actors I admired, I’ve never been able to have a deep conversation. The fact that Jodie speaks perfect French, I was able to overcome that wall.”
One of the film’s key moments is when Lilian arrives unannounced at the medical office of her ex-husband, an ophthalmologist. Her tears will not stop flowing. He tells her he has never seen her cry. She replies, “I’m not crying. It’s my eyes.”
Coincidentally, that same line was uttered to touching effect by Auteuil in the 1986 film “Jean de Florette.” His performance as the ugly, hapless Ugolin won awards and made him famous.
“I was happy that Jodie reinvented the moment,” he said.
Foster resisted at first when Zlotowski requested that she improvise in the film. “I told Rebecca, ‘Look, I don’t know that I’m gonna be able to improvise in French. I’m gonna panic.’”
But the connection with Auteuil was so strong that they were carried away into improvising their last scene, a moment of tenderness together at a restaurant.
“There was such an atmosphere of complicity, freedom, and lightness and trust,” Auteuil said. “We were like two trapeze artists. We threw ourselves into the air, caught each other with our arms, and kept catching each other.”
Foster called this film a “trial balloon,” with perhaps more to come. “I am a different person in that language,” she said. “I have a whole host of other things to express. I would maybe even like to direct in French.”
She has little else left to prove. “I’ve given everything that I have to making movies. One of the best things about having made so many movies and having been in the business for so long and just being old is that you just don’t worry anymore.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/movies/jodie-foster-interview-a-private-life.html
The Conversation, January 14
« Stranger Things » : pourquoi le final divise tant les fans
Le 1er janvier 2026, Netflix diffusait le dernier épisode de la série Stranger Things. Intitulé « The Rightside Up », cet épisode de deux heures conclut dix années de fiction et d’hommage à la culture populaire des années 1980. Sur les réseaux sociaux, les réactions des fans explosent. Certains crient à la trahison, d’autres défendent les choix narratifs des frères Duffer. Beaucoup pleurent parce que c’est tout simplement la fin. Mais ce qui frappe, c’est l’intensité du débat où se joue une bataille collective pour donner sens à ce qu’on vient de regarder.
Full text:
Pendant dix ans, Netflix a construit un univers tentaculaire autour de l’œuvre des frères Duffer, transformant la série en un véritable espace immersif qui dépasse la fiction : réalité augmentée permettant aux fans de visiter les lieux de la série, jeux vidéo les replongeant dans la ville fictive d’Hawkins, sites interactifs les invitant à participer à l’histoire… Toutes ces expériences ont permis à la plate-forme d’alimenter un lecteur modèle au sens de Umberto Eco, c’est-à-dire un spectateur doté de compétences narratives très développées, capable d’interpréter les codes de la série et d’y participer activement.
La dernière aventure : Le making-of de Stranger Things, Saison 5 | Bande-annonce VOSTFR | Netflix France.
Chaque saison a renforcé les attentes de ce spectateur, qui ne se contentait alors plus seulement de regarder la série mais participait également à la construction de l’univers de la série. Mais comment le final de la série peut-il honorer dix ans de participation et satisfaire une communauté qui a appris à co-créer le sens ?
L’histoire sans fin
Le final peut se lire en deux parties. La première concerne la bataille finale contre Vecna et le Flagelleur mental qui vient clore l’arc narratif principal de la série. La seconde concerne l’épilogue se déroulant dix-huit mois plus tard.
La première partie de ce season finale a beaucoup fait parler d’elle en raison de la faible durée à l’écran de la bataille finale. Les fans se sont alors amusés à comparer la durée de cette scène avec celle où l’un des protagonistes fait son coming-out dans l’épisode précédent.
Mais c’est l’épilogue qui a le plus engendré de réactions divisées de la part des fans. Lors d’une ultime partie de Donjons & Dragons dans le sous-sol des Wheeler, Mike suggère une hypothèse sur ce qui s’est vraiment passé concernant la mort du personnage de Eleven. Kali aurait créé une illusion pour sauver Eleven, la laissant s’échapper. Et puis une vision finale : Eleven vivante, dans un petit village lointain bordé par trois cascades, pour y vivre en paix.
Les frères Duffer laissent volontairement planer le doute, comme ils l’expliquent dans une interview :
« Ce que nous voulions faire, c’était confronter la réalité de sa situation après tout cela et nous demander comment elle pourrait mener une vie normale. Eleven a deux chemins à suivre. Il y a celui qui est plus sombre, plus pessimiste, et celui qui est optimiste, plein d’espoir. Mike est l’optimiste du groupe et a choisi de croire en cette histoire. »
Pour comprendre pourquoi certains fans acceptent cette ambiguïté plutôt que de la rejeter, nous pouvons convoquer le concept du « double visage de l’illusionné » proposé par Philippe Marion. Selon le chercheur, pour entrer pleinement dans une fiction, il faut accepter d’être dupé tout en sachant qu’on l’est.
Les spectateurs de Stranger Things acceptent volontairement les règles du jeu narratif. Ce contrat implicite entre l’œuvre et le spectateur est fondamental. Il explique aussi pourquoi la boucle narrative du final fonctionne. La série débute en 2016 par une partie de Donjons & Dragons et se termine par une autre partie, dans le même lieu. Cela suggère que tout ce que nous avons regardé était en quelque sorte le jeu lui-même, comme l’illustre le générique de fin où l’on voit apparaître le manuel d’utilisation du jeu Stranger Things.
Pendant dix ans, les fans ne sont pas restés passifs. Ils ont débattu, théorisé, réinterprété chaque détail. Et en faisant cela, ils ont construit collectivement le sens de la série. Le théoricien Stanley Fish nomme cela les communautés d’interprétation : des groupes qui créent ensemble la signification d’une œuvre plutôt que de la recevoir. Le final ambigu d’Eleven n’est donc pas une faille narrative mais une invitation à imaginer des suites, à co-créer le sens ensemble.
Mais certains fans ont refusé cette fin. Ils ont alors inventé le « Conformity Gate » : une théorie diffusée sur les réseaux sociaux selon laquelle le final serait une illusion, un faux happy-end. Selon cette théorie, un vrai dernier épisode révélerait que Vecna a gagné. Et pendant quelques jours, les fans y ont cru, espérant un épisode secret qui confirmerait leur lecture.
« J’y crois »
Il se joue dans la conclusion d’une œuvre sérielle un enjeu qui dépasse le simple statut du divertissement ou de l’art. Achever une série, c’est refermer une page de sa vie. La série fonctionne comme un espace de vie organisé parfois autour d’un groupe d’amis, d’un couple, d’une famille, etc.
Infusée pendant des années de rendez-vous répétés, l’implication émotionnelle atteint des sommets qui donnent parfois des réflexions troublantes : « Je connais mieux les personnages de Mad Men que ma propre famille » nous dit un témoignage dans le documentaire d’Olivier Joyard, Fins de séries (2016).
Il y aurait des séries que nous quittons en bons termes, celles qui nous quittent et celles que nous quittons. Ainsi, la fin est une affaire d’affect.
Historiquement, certaines séries ont refusé de conclure explicitement. The Sopranos se termine sur un noir brutal où le destin de Tony reste en suspens. Plus récemment, The Leftlovers, de Damon Lindelof, opère une manœuvre similaire : deux personnages prennent le thé et l’une raconte un voyage dans une réalité alternative. Mais la série refuse d’authentifier ce récit par l’image. Elle laisse les spectateurs décider s’ils y croient ou non.
Le récit de Nora dans le final de The Leftovers.
C’est une stratégie que James Matthew Barrie utilisait déjà dans Peter Pan (1904) où il demandait au public de crier « J’y crois » pour sauver la Fée clochette.
Stranger Things opère la même opération de décentrement final entre deux versions du récit : Eleven s’est-elle sacrifiée ou a-t-elle rejoint cette image d’Épinal de paradis que Mike lui promettait ? C’est d’ailleurs ce même Mike qui apparaît alors en démiurge narratif, alter ego des frères Duffer, maître du jeu et de l’univers ramenant la série entière à sa métafinalité. Il crée deux récits dont l’authentification est laissée à la conviction des auteurs dans la pièce ou presque.
Les personnages font le choix de croire en cette fiction, mais comment peut-il en être autrement puisqu’ils sont eux-mêmes dans la fiction ? Le détail qui diffère de The Leftovers, c’est le choix d’authentifier par l’image la survie d’Eleven dans un plan qui la révèle dans un paysage islandais. Le choix n’est donc pas totalement libre, l’authentification par l’image donne une force supplémentaire à ce happy end dans l’interprétation de la conclusion.
Le débat va néanmoins durer, les fans vont faire vivre la série par la manière dont elle se termine, réactivant ainsi les affects qui lui sont liés.
« Je refuse d’y croire » ou le clivage de la réception
Par ailleurs, l’épilogue final donne à voir quelques images du futur de chaque protagoniste dans les mois à venir prenant soin de laisser hors champ tout un pan à venir de leur vie d’adulte. Rien ne dit que dans quelques années, l’univers de Strangers Things ne sera pas ressuscité à l’instar de tant d’autres œuvres avec une suite directe où Mike et ses amis, devenus adultes, devront faire face à une terrible menace, engageant des retrouvailles inévitables avec Eleven. Pour cela, il suffit de murmurer : « J’y crois. »
Dans une sorte d’ironie finale que seule la fiction sérielle peut nous réserver, les paroles de la chanson de Kate Bush semblent prophétiser la réaction du final pour une partie de l’audience qui souhaite prendre la place des frères Duffer pour réécrire la fin, pour réécrire leur fin, « I’d make a deal with God. And I’d get Him to swap our places » (« Je passerais un accord avec Dieu. Et je lui demanderais d’échanger nos rôles »).
https://theconversation.com/stranger-things-pourquoi-le-final-divise-tant-les-fans-272733
Le Figaro, January 13
Emmanuel Carrère : « Tous les clichés sur la Russie sont vrais »
GRAND ENTRETIEN – L’écrivain, Prix Médicis 2025 pour Kolkhoze, signe avec Olivier Assayas la remarquable adaptation au cinéma du Mage du Kremlin. Sur fond de guerre en Ukraine et de basculement du monde, il revient sur les mirages de l’« âme russe», l’isolement des puissants et les ravages de l’hubris.
Full text:
LE FIGARO. – Vous avez participé à l’adaptation du Mage du Kremlin. Vous écrivez vous-même. Pourquoi vous attacher à adapter le livre d’un auteur vivant ?
EMMANUEL CARRÈRE. – Giuliano da Empoli et Olivier Assayas m’ont proposé de faire mon métier de scénariste. Je n’ai pas hésité longtemps. Comme auteur, je sais qu’il est préférable de ne pas se charger soi-même d’une adaptation au cinéma. Le Mage du Kremlin concentre beaucoup de thèmes passionnants : la Russie, l’influence, l’isolement des puissants, l’ivresse du succès, l’hubris. Souvent, quand on écrit un scénario à deux, cela se passe par échanges de mails avec de rares réunions. Pour celui-ci, Olivier Assayas et moi avons passé trois mois assis du matin au soir ensemble dans cette pièce, à chercher comment raconter cette histoire. Il fallait trouver un équilibre entre le plaisir de quelque chose qui ressemble tout de même à un film de gangsters et l’ambition de raconter trente ans d’histoire de la Russie, depuis la fin de l’Union soviétique. Un flot d’événements, de personnages, que nous avons cherché à rendre clair, compréhensible même pour le spectateur peu informé. Cette visée pédagogique, nous l’assumons, je pense qu’elle fait partie de la singularité du film, qui est un objet très particulier. Il oscille, même en termes de production, entre le cinéma d’auteur et la grosse production à l’américaine, avec des acteurs anglo-saxons qui sont d’ailleurs exceptionnels. Mais Assayas est familier de ces grands écarts, c’est quelque chose qui le stimule et qu’il aborde avec beaucoup de calme. Quand d’autres soulèvent des problèmes, lui trouve des solutions. On ne peut pas, pour des raisons évidentes, tourner en Russie ? Qu’à cela ne tienne, on reconstituera la Russie en Lettonie ! Et ça marche ! On retrouve la Russie évoquée dans le livre de da Empoli.
La Russie est consubstantielle à votre œuvre et peut-être à votre vie. Qu’est-elle pour vous ? Une passion déçue, un mystère, un tourment ?
Je n’ai plus la phrase dans l’ordre mais Churchill disait, en substance, que la Russie était un mystère enrobé dans un secret lui-même caché dans une énigme. Ce n’est pas faux. J’ai une théorie selon laquelle non seulement tous les clichés sur la Russie sont vrais mais un jugement sur la Russie qui ne serait pas un cliché aurait les plus fortes chances d’être faux. L’immensité et la monotonie des espaces qui donnent aux paysages une dimension métaphysique ; l’énergie sauvage, imprévisible qui fait qu’on ne sait jamais, quand une soirée commence, comment elle va s’achever ; la fièvre sensuelle et l’inquiétude mystique qui placent les plaisirs et les prières toujours au bord du gouffre ; et cette mythologie fumeuse d’une troisième Rome élue par les dieux tout autant que maudite. Dans les années 1990, les étrangers qui avaient le goût de l’aventure, et j’en ai connu beaucoup, sont allés chercher dans ce Far West du grand Est un cocktail détonant d’alcools forts, d’argent facile, de fêtes sans limite, de création artistique la plus audacieuse, de déglingue sans tabous. Tous ceux qui ont vécu ça se le rappellent comme des années les plus rock’n’roll de leur vie. À côté de cette vitalité furieuse, nos démocraties libérales apaisées et émollientes semblaient bien fades. Tout cela a changé, je dirais à partir de 2010. Ces démocraties un peu ennuyeuses sont aujourd’hui menacées de disparition, coincées entre Poutine et Trump, elles nous apparaissent comme des chefs-d’œuvre en péril et, c’est sûr, nous faisons un peu moins les malins.
À quelques exceptions près, tout le monde s’est trompé sur les intentions de Poutine
On sent dans Kolkhoze quelque chose comme un sentiment de culpabilité. Diriez-vous que vous vous êtes trompé sur la nature du régime de Vladimir Poutine ?
À quelques exceptions près, tout le monde s’est trompé sur les intentions de Poutine, cette volonté impériale et prédatrice mâtinée de méthodes mafieuses. Avant l’invasion à grande échelle de l’Ukraine, beaucoup ne voyaient pas ce qu’il fallait voir. Je n’en tire pas un sentiment de culpabilité, je réfléchis simplement sur ce qui a pu nous aveugler. Je n’ai bien connu la Russie que dans les années 2000. Une Russie absolument pas touristique ou littéraire mais âpre et un peu glauque. La Russie que j’aimais n’était pas celle de Poutine, du retour des tsars ou de Staline, de la verticalité contre l’horizontalité de l’Europe. C’est la folle liberté et l’énergie inquiète et féconde qui m’intéressaient. Tout était ambigu, contradictoire, paradoxal. Un personnage aussi sulfureux que Limonov a été un opposant extrêmement courageux à Poutine, il a payé ce courage de plusieurs années de prison, en même temps il était pratiquement d’accord sur tout avec lui, à cela près qu’il le trouvait trop mou… Regardez aussi Navalny : pas un bon social-démocrate, lui non plus, mais il a incarné l’opposition, les derniers temps, avec une grandeur extraordinaire. J’ai une autre théorie, c’est qu’on a toujours raison de juger les gens sur leur mine. C’est presque invraisemblable, dans le casting d’un film on n’oserait pas avoir un héros qui ait une aussi belle tête de héros que Navalny et un méchant qui ait une tête de méchant aussi effrayante que Poutine…
La Russie a retrouvé son statut de puissance maléfique. Faut-il y associer la culture russe ?
Pouchkine n’est pas Poutine, évidemment, mais quand mes amis ukrainiens s’indignent contre la présence de statues du poète russe à chaque coin de rue de leur pays et qu’ils me demandent ce que nous dirions, nous, Français, si nous étions cernés par des statues de Goethe, j’avoue que je ne peux que les comprendre. Malgré tout, la littérature russe, je suis tombé dedans quand j’étais petit et elle m’accompagne depuis. Pour nous, Français, cette littérature a un statut presque aussi éminent que la littérature française, nous avons avec elle un rapport presque aussi intime. Comme si Tolstoï et Dostoïevski se plaçaient naturellement entre Balzac et Proust. Cette littérature est-elle vénéneuse ? Le ferment de l’idéologie impériale russe ? Dostoïevski, par certains aspects, notamment dans son rôle de contempteur de l’Occident, répond à cette critique. Mais Les Frères Karamazov est un livre trop vaste, trop profond, trop fou pour être réductible à une idéologie. Autre cliché vérifié : l’âme russe. Impossible d’en tracer les contours donc il est difficile d’en faire un système, un régime, une pratique du pouvoir.
Le Mage du Kremlin quitte le théâtre et son rang d’observateur pour devenir acteur de l’Histoire. Comme écrivain, avez-vous connu vous aussi cette tentation ?
Jamais. Ça m’intéresse d’accompagner Emmanuel Macron à un sommet international, et de faire un portrait sur ce fond-là. Mais c’est une curiosité entomologique plus qu’une fascination intime… J’ai construit ma vie de manière à subir le moins de pouvoir possible et, plus encore, à ne jamais en exercer. Sans parler d’être conseiller d’un prince, je n’aurais même pas envie de faire partie du jury d’un prix littéraire.
Vous n’avez donc pas de regret de ne pas avoir eu le prix Goncourt ?
Vous savez, c’est la quatrième fois que je suis sur les listes du Goncourt et que je le rate. La première, c’était en 1988 ! J’avais eu quelques voix, à l’époque, cette fois-ci zéro. C’est pas mal, zéro, non ? Une performance.
Peut-être un privilège…
Peut-être. Je ne sais pas ce que ça dit, en tout cas, mais ça dit quelque chose.
Vous êtes indifférent aux grandeurs d’établissement ?
Je ne les méprise pas du tout mais elles ne m’attirent pas pour autant. J’aime bien la phrase de Julien Gracq sur l’Académie française, à laquelle on m’a quelquefois, très gentiment, suggéré de me présenter : « Cela me fait plutôt plaisir que les “horse guards” existent, mais je n’ai pas pour autant envie d’en faire partie. »
Plus largement, on a l’impression que vous êtes à la fois attiré par les marges les plus radicales et soucieux de conserver une grande centralité, je dirais même une grande respectabilité. Cette tension est-elle réelle ?
Cette tension n’est pas si pénible. Quand j’étais enfant, une des premières lectures qui m’ont frappé, c’étaient les aventures de Sherlock Holmes. Le héros, Sherlock Holmes, est le personnage le plus déviant qui soit : asocial, dépressif, toxicomane… Son colocataire et biographe, le Docteur Watson, est au contraire un homme de bon sens, un peu conformiste, et c’est pour cela qu’il raconte si bien les enquêtes de Holmes. Je ne me vois pas du tout comme Docteur Jekyll et Mister Hyde mais comme Holmes et Watson à la fois. C’est la même relation que je décris dans Le Royaume entre le fou furieux qu’était saint Paul et saint Luc, son paisible et contemplatif biographe. Je me sens les deux.
New York Times, January 11
Unpacking ‘People We Meet on Vacation’ With Emily Henry and the Stars
The author and the actors Emily Bader and Tom Blyth explain why the movie differs from the novel and raise the possibility of spinoffs.
Full text:
This article contains spoilers.
In the publishing world, Emily Henry is a tour de force. Her books have sold more than 10 million copies. Her fans are loyal and ravenous.
Now, the 35-year-old author is hoping that fervor translates to the screen: Adaptations are confirmed for five of Henry’s six contemporary romance novels, including film versions of “Happy Place,” “Beach Read,” “Book Lovers” and “Funny Story.”
But the first to actually make it onscreen, in the form of a Netflix movie that premiered on Friday, is “People We Meet on Vacation”: the friends-to-lovers tale of Alex, an uptight English teacher, and Poppy, a free-spirited travel writer, who take platonic vacations together each summer. After a period of estrangement, the pair reunite at a wedding and finally confront their true feelings.
In casting the romantic comedy’s two stars, the director Brett Haley scanned the internet to see which actors the book’s fans wanted, but “all of those people were either unavailable or not interested,” he said in a phone interview.
Instead, after seeing hundreds of actors, the filmmakers cast Emily Bader, 29, best known for starring in the Amazon series “My Lady Jane,” and Tom Blyth, 30, who broke out as Coriolanus Snow in “The Hunger Games” prequel, “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”
“Going through the casting process was really, really scary,” said Henry, who also served as an executive producer. “There were a lot of names thrown out who I was just like, ‘I don’t see that,’ and, more importantly, ‘I don’t think the readers will be excited about it.’” After Bader and Blyth were cast, she said, “that’s when I was like, ‘It’s going to be OK.’”
Still, there were inevitable challenges in adapting a roughly 400-page tome into a two-hour movie.
Some plots were cut or changed. For practical reasons, the film scrapped a prominent Palm Springs, Calif., setting and shot almost entirely in Spain and New Orleans, with those places doubling for locales in British Columbia, Tuscany, Boston and Ohio. “We don’t have a James Bond budget, unfortunately,” Haley said.
Over a video call in December, the author and the lead actors discussed the book-to-screen changes and the merits of romance.
These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Readers often get attached to the versions of characters they imagine in their heads. What traits of Alex and Poppy were the most important to carry over to the screen?
EMILY HENRY Poppy could so easily be absolutely insufferable, and I think most people would have played her insufferably. It was really important that you could tell that when she’s razzing Alex, his whole thing is to be this stick-in-the-mud, but it’s just this game they play. [The actors] both really naturally understood that.
EMILY BADER Poppy is this Energizer bunny of a person. I wanted to make sure not to shy away from that in a fear of being insufferable. We put a lot of judgment on young women characters.
TOM BLYTH For Alex, his stick-in-the-mud quality was something I was a bit nervous of at first. How do you make him endearing when he’s naysaying her? Because as a reader and as a watcher, I felt I’d be on Poppy’s side.
HENRY You are so much more Poppy in real life.
BLYTH I’m way more Poppy! Well, sometimes. I’m not feeling very Poppy today. But I think I was just a little too fixated on, “How do I make him likable?” Any character you play, you have to learn to love their downfalls, weaknesses and the injuries in the past that have made them how they are now.
Emily H., when you first read the script, what changes from the book were you the most nervous about?
HENRY We did not end up with drafts [from the screenwriters Yulin Kuang, Amos Vernon and Nunzio Randazzo] that made me nervous. I was paying the most attention to things I thought went against the ethics of the book’s worldview.
There were a lot of drafts and moments where I felt the script was being too hard on Poppy. There were moments that I felt there wasn’t room being left for the fact that Alex is also failing.
Spoiler warning: In the book, Alex and Poppy have a falling-out after sharing a drunken kiss and almost having sex on a trip to Croatia. The movie ditched Croatia and incorporated some of what happens into another trip adapted from the book, Tuscany, where an almost-kiss after a pregnancy scare is now enough to derail their friendship.
What went into the decision to alter what led to Alex and Poppy’s friendship breakup, and how do you feel about that shift?
HENRY This was, I think, the hardest thing for the screenwriters to crack. There were so many different versions. For a lot of the process, the Tuscany pregnancy scare was not in the [film], and that’s one of my favorite moments in the book because you realize how scared Alex is of losing her. So, I kept getting in Brett’s ear being like, “I think you need Tuscany.” They figured out how you could pull that into the almost-kiss. In Croatia, I don’t remember if they just kiss or have sex ——
BADER [Laughs.] I love that you can’t remember your own book!
HENRY It’s been a while, you guys. They hook up in some capacity. I actually feel like it was such a smart edit to get all of that into just one scene. My only hard-line, because I’m coming from publishing, was that they can’t actually kiss [in Tuscany] because romance readers tend to have very strong feelings about infidelity. It’s really hard for them to root for characters who have stepped over that line.
BLYTH Maybe this just speaks to how messy I am — I remember seeing that change [removing the kiss] and going, “What? That’s the crux of the drama, that they do cross the line.” I was definitely in the corner of “They should make out.” I’m like, “We need stakes.” But what I loved about it was that Brett and the writers, with your guiding hand, were able to find a way to make it happen where the sexual tension, the romantic tension, is all still there without them actually crossing the line.
Emily H., you’ve referred to some of the changes as “universe expansion.” Have you considered writing more Alex and Poppy stories?
HENRY Just the other night, Brett and I were having dinner, and we were talking about all the characters, like, “I wonder what else is happening with them?” It was spinning out of control very quickly. There have been text messages about it since, so we’ll see. I think there’s a fun idea to be had.
Henry said a lot of the actor casting suggestions gave her pause. “After Bader and Blyth were cast, she said, “that’s when I was like, ‘It’s going to be OK.’”
BLYTH Can you please write a story about Buck [a boat tour guide played by Lukas Gage]?
HENRY Oh, my God!
BADER I think Sarah [Alex’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, played by Sarah Catherine Hook] deserves something, too.
HENRY Sarah, for sure, deserves her own. Also Miles Heizer and Tommy Do, who played David [Alex’s brother] and Nam [David’s fiancé], are so funny and so charming, and I kind of want a prequel of them.
Romance books and movies are often undervalued or overlooked. What is the appeal of this genre for all of you?
BADER Romance doesn’t always make the Letterboxd Four, but oftentimes those movies hold some of the strongest memories and the most rewatchability. I mean, this isn’t a rom-com, per se, but “Pride and Prejudice”
HENRY It’s a rom-com, in my opinion.
BADER I remember watching it on a bed with my sister and my mom and like 17 dogs countless times. I think as much as movies are there to challenge us and open our brains, they’re also there to comfort us.
Henry said she loves the romance genre “because it takes the brightest parts of life and the darkest parts of life, and it puts them side by side in a way that feels safe.”
BLYTH [To Henry] The stories that you’re writing are hopeful but they’re also sexy and fun, and the characters are modern, flawed people. I think anything that people consume as entertainment, or whatever you want to call it, that gets people feeling empathetic, it’s a real public service.
HENRY Well, thank you. This is where I can get onto a long rant. I hear a lot of feedback from people who aren’t really romance readers, who think of it as sheer escapism, and that has not been my experience as a writer or a reader or a watcher. The reason I love romance so much is because it takes the brightest parts of life and the darkest parts of life, and it puts them side by side in a way that feels safe because you have that safety net of a happy ending.
I have a real issue with the fact that a tragic love story is treated as more important or more artistically valuable than a love story that ends in a place of hope and optimism. Because, in real life, if you are a person who wants a monogamous, long-term relationship, your best-case scenario is you meet someone, you fall in love, you love each other your entire life and then one of you dies, and it is the worst, most excruciating pain. By putting that end cap on the moment that they’re happy and they’re hopeful, you are — I’m getting teared up. This always makes me emotional because it makes me think about my dogs, honestly. You are saying that the value, the important part of the story, is this moment when they are happy and they are together.
And that’s my worldview. It’s like, things really suck a lot of the time, but love is the thing that makes this all worth it.
BADER Oh, my gosh, I’m actually crying.
HENRY Try not to think about it too much because it can ruin your life.
BADER That was actually so profound. It’s something that we don’t talk about that often. To be vulnerable, to choose to love, is to choose pain.
HENRY The only way to break your heart is to let yourself love. You can end the story in the sad, tragic moment, or you can end it in the beautiful, happy moment. And that doesn’t mean the sad, tragic moment doesn’t happen. It just means this is the moment that matters.
New York Times, January 11
The Projectionist: Wagner Moura Stays Outspoken, Even When Trouble Follows
The Brazilian star of “The Secret Agent” is a major Oscar contender, though some at home turned against him for criticizing the right-wing government.
Full text:
The new Brazilian drama “The Secret Agent” takes place in 1977, a period the opening titles describe as a time of “great mischief.” That phrase is a loose English translation of pirraça, a Portuguese word that the film’s star, Wagner Moura, recently tried to define for me.
“It’s like when a kid does something that he knows his parents are not liking but does it anyway,” he said. As he described that tendency, Moura grinned.
“I have that,” he said.
For Moura, that mischievous streak has emerged whenever he sensed expectations about how a Latino actor should behave in Hollywood. After his breakout role as Pablo Escobar 10 years ago on Netflix’s “Narcos,” Moura frustrated his agents by turning down many of the high-profile, lucrative projects that came his way.
“Politically, I’ve never shied away from saying what I thought was right, even if I had to pay the consequences of that,” Wagner Moura said.
“They were like, ‘Oh, you are a Brazilian actor, you should be so happy with that offer,’” he recalled. “And there was a part of me that felt some sort of pleasure to say, I’m not going to do that.”
Ironically, by sticking to his convictions and picking idiosyncratic projects like “The Secret Agent,” Moura now appears poised for the biggest global moment of his career. The rambunctious political thriller has already earned him a Golden Globe nomination and lead-performer prizes from the Cannes Film Festival and New York Film Critics Circle. Though he is facing a competitive field of best-actor contenders that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothée Chalamet and Michael B. Jordan, many pundits believe Moura will score his first Oscar nomination for the film.
Forging a coherent acting career across two continents is no easy task, but the 49-year-old Moura has managed it, bringing warmth and intelligence to politically minded material like 2024’s “Civil War,” the Apple TV series “Dope Thief,” and an adaptation of the Ibsen play “An Enemy of the People” that he recently performed in his native city, Salvador. The director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who conceived “The Secret Agent” with Moura in mind, praised his progressive clarity as an artist.
“His star power comes from how constant he is,” Mendonça Filho said.
Moura credits that steadfastness to his late father, an Air Force sergeant. “He wasn’t politically active, but there was a matter of values, the way you should behave as a person,” he said.“I don’t want to sell myself as a moral compass, but I stick to who I am and the things that I believe are right.”
Playfully, he added, “That’s kind of a cocky thing to say, but I will say it anyway. I’m almost 50, so [expletive] it.”
Just before Christmas, I met Moura in Los Angeles, where he has lived for several years with his longtime partner, the photographer Sandra Delgado, and their three sons. In conversation, he was lively and opinionated with a cheeky sense of humor, his boyish face offset by graying hair and a voice so deep and resonant that it sounded like a special effect.
“This film doesn’t have to be in Dolby Atmos,” Mendonça Filho joked, “because Wagner’s voice has it.”
Even so, “The Secret Agent” uses that asset sparingly, drawing even greater power from Moura’s watchful, sympathetic eyes. He plays Armando, a widowed father on the run during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Pursued by hit men, Armando assumes a new identity and takes shelter with other political refugees while awaiting safe passage out of the country. Until then, he faces the near-impossible task of staying calm and inconspicuous in a place where violence can erupt without warning.
After the Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here” won last year’s international-film Oscar, many in Moura’s home country hope “The Secret Agent” will become another awards-season triumph. Still, he knows that not everyone in Brazil is cheering him on. Just a few years ago, when Jair Bolsonaro was president, he helped turn much of the population against Moura for openly criticizing the right-wing government.
“Politically, I’ve never shied away from saying what I thought was right, even if I had to pay the consequences of that,” Moura said.
In that way, he could empathize with Armando, who is not a guerrilla fighter but a former professor who will not bend to government-sanctioned corruption. Simply for holding firm to his values, this ordinary man is branded an enemy of the state.
“And I felt like that in Brazil many times,” Moura said.
DESPITE THOSE EXPERIENCES, Moura speaks about his home country with deep affection. Brazil made him famous twice over, first through soap operas, then as the star of a hugely successful crime drama, “Elite Squad,” which many Brazilians can still quote by heart.
The day I met Moura, he was preparing for a family holiday back in Salvador, which he described as one of the most diverse places on the globe. “The Brazilian passport is the most wanted passport on the black market because everyone can be Brazilian,” he said. “You don’t look at the passport and go, ‘I don’t think so.’ Everyone can be Brazilian — you, me, everybody.”
But for all he loves about Brazil — like the warmth of its people and cultural icons like the singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil — Moura will not hesitate to confront its problems or the politicians who exploit them.
“It’s beautiful, but also Brazil is violent, it’s elitist, it’s misogynist, it’s homophobic,” he said. “And Bolsonaro is a manifestation of all that.”
As artists like Moura and Mendonça Filho became more vocal about Brazil’s conservative turn, they also faced right-wing backlash from Bolsonaro’s government and on social media. “When they say that we artists are this intellectual elite that’s against the people, people buy that,” Moura said. “It’s like the old manual of fascism where they attack press, artists, universities, things like that. And he was very effective.”
Moura felt that hostility most acutely after making his directorial debut with “Marighella,” a political biopic that was also set during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Though the movie premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in early 2019, Bolsonaro’s government effectively blocked its release in Brazil until the end of 2021. By then, Moura had been painted in such a controversial light by the right wing that some theaters installed metal detectors when he attended screenings.
“What the far right is afraid of is not what we say, it’s what we do,” Moura noted. “If I had social media, I could have spent every day saying he was a fascist, but that wouldn’t bother him as much as the film I did.”
National attitudes began to shift after Bolsonaro lost the presidential election four years ago and was convicted of planning a coup to stay in power. Still, Mendonça Filho believes that even today, if Brazilians were polled on the street, about a quarter would continue to view him and Moura negatively.
“One segment of Brazilian society looks at us as if we were communists,” he said.
That feeling of political persecution informed “The Secret Agent,” set during the late period of Brazil’s violent military dictatorship, which began with a 1964 coup and persisted for 21 years. “This is a film about a country that has a problem with memory,” Moura said, pointing out that when the military regime ended, an amnesty law let perpetrators off the hook.
“Bolsonaro would never have been possible without that law,” he said.
More recently, however, Moura has sensed signs of reconciliation. In November, when “The Secret Agent” was released in Brazil, it was met with major fanfare. “We sold a million tickets for it, it’s a big success,” Moura said. “And I love the fact that this film is being released in Brazil in a moment where we are finally getting sort of even with our memory.”
Moura pointed out that, like President Trump, Bolsonaro claimed the election was stolen from him and encouraged his supporters to storm the capital. The crucial difference came afterward, when the Supreme Court responded by sentencing Bolsonaro to house arrest and blocking him from pursuing political office until 2060.
“It was fascinating how Brazil was super fast in sending people to jail, finding the financiers, and taking away Bolsonaro’s political rights,” Moura said. “Are the institutions in Brazil stronger than the U.S.? I don’t think so. But in my opinion, that happened because Brazilians know what a dictatorship is.”
And if there are people who don’t remember the lessons learned in the wake of Brazil’s military regime, Moura hopes films like “The Secret Agent” and “I’m Still Here” will stand as a reminder. It’s harder to bury history when filmmakers are determined to bring it to vivid life, he argued, adding that the shelf life of a country’s politicians can pale in comparison to that of its artists.
“They all go away, it’s just a wave,” he said. “Bolsonaro is now in jail, so in the history books, he’s going to be this fascist elected by Brazilians that tried a coup d’état. Whereas Caetano Veloso will always be Caetano Veloso.”
WHEN MOURA FIRST began working in Hollywood, an agent told him to be less selective, arguing that every job is meant to lead to the next. But even then, Moura had a healthy skepticism about playing the Hollywood game.
“Maybe it’s some sort of anti-colonialism thing,” he joked. “I’ve never done anything for money or because it’s a big Hollywood thing that everybody’s going to see. And especially after ‘Narcos,’ I don’t want to do anything that would stereotype Latinos.”
Perhaps because of his willingness to say no, Moura never became Hollywood’s No. 1 Latino draft pick. But he wasn’t exactly angling for that, either.
“I want to go for the same characters that white American actors my age are going for,” he said. “I want to play characters named Michael who speak the way I speak.”
And if Hollywood can’t provide that, he’ll make it happen himself. Later this year, Moura will direct his first English-language film, “Last Night at the Lobster,” about the final shift at a soon-to-close chain restaurant. “It’s a very political film,” Moura said, noting that he will star opposite Brian Tyree Henry and Elisabeth Moss. “It’s an anticapitalism Christmas movie.”
In the meantime, there are awards shows to attend. “This campaigning thing, it’s intense, isn’t it?” he said.
Though Moura was previously nominated for a Golden Globe for “Narcos,” this time feels different, he said. Maybe it’s because he’s getting older, and these things matter in a new way. Or maybe it’s because “The Secret Agent” is such a personal, distinctly Brazilian project, and all this global attention feels like an unexpected but lovely affirmation.
Still, he doesn’t want to lose himself to a season where egos often become supersized. When the awards campaign began this fall, Moura was tied up with his monthslong commitment to the Ibsen play in Salvador, limiting his availability for press. “Everybody was like, ‘You have to get rid of the play and go campaign. Do you understand how important this moment is for you?’” he recalled.
As you might imagine, that pressure only stoked Moura’s defiant sense of pirraça, and he remained with the play. “This is something I’m proud of,” he said. “I don’t compromise.”
If “The Secret Agent” does lead to new Hollywood opportunities, he hopes that those projects will want him for that steadfast character, not because there’s an expectation he’ll assimilate. So far, staying true to himself seems to have served him well.
“Someone said to me once that success is when you do what you always did, but people suddenly start to pay attention,” he said.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/movies/wagner-moura-the-secret-agent-golden-globes.html
The New York Times, January 9
‘Young Mothers’ Review: Teen Parents, Breaking Cycles
The Dardenne brothers’ latest film is a tender portrait of four teenage moms in a Belgian maternity shelter.
Full text:
The films of the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are teeming with people being forced to find out whether the bonds that hold a society together are up to bearing their weight. They scramble to keep from falling off the map completely, migrants and orphans and unemployed and laborers just struggling to get by. In movies like “L’Enfant,” “The Kid with a Bike” and “Two Days, One Night,” the Belgian directors ask big questions in intimate, neorealist packages. How do personal circumstances — a person’s job or immigration status or race or economic situation — tangle with bureaucracy and the social safety net? And what do acquaintances, neighbors and strangers owe to one another, just because we dwell alongside one another?
No wonder parenthood repeatedly appears in these films, often as a burden. An adult’s responsibility for their child is the most fundamental obligation. And yet when money is scarce, or the adult was never cared for by their own parent, that bond can be tenuous or troubled. Cycles of poverty, abuse and neglect are hard to overcome.
In the Dardennes’ new film “Young Mothers,” parenthood is the focus. Though the two stick to their observational, naturalistic style for this one, they deviate from their usual single-story structure, instead following four teen mothers living in a state-run maternity shelter. The building is plain and administrative, but it’s clean and organized and safe, and you occasionally get the sense that for some of these girls, it’s the most secure home they’ve had in a long time.
Each of the young mothers has her own story, and aside from living in the same home, they don’t overlap all that much. Jessica (Babette Verbeek), who is in the final stages of pregnancy, is desperately trying to make contact with her biological mother, Morgane (India Hair). Another resident, Julie (Elsa Houben), is a recovering addict training to work in a hair salon. She is excited to marry her daughter’s father, Dylan (Jef Jacobs), but terrified of relapsing.
At the same time, Perla (Lucie Laruelle) has recently reunited with the father of her baby. But he seems uninterested, and as it dawns on Perla that her dreams of forming a family with him may not come true, her depression starts to take over. And there is Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan), who has decided after painful deliberation to give her daughter up for adoption. But her mother, Nathalie (Christelle Cornil), wants to right her own wrongs as a mother and raise Ariane’s baby.
The film cycles through their stories, scene by scene, so they all advance in tandem, and we understand that in the group home every girl is fighting her own battles while also accomplishing the mundane tasks of life: cooking spaghetti for the group dinner, doing laundry, cleaning, learning skills to care for her child. Each girl is treated, by the group home staff and by the film, with loving dignity. They’re all teenagers, too young to be in this situation, and yet they have also been pushed by circumstance into fending for themselves long before this moment — otherwise they wouldn’t be in this shelter. They’ve experienced abuse, poverty, addiction and abandonment. They are determined to do better for their own children: That is what they owe them.
Because of the ensemble structure, each tale is interrupted by another, so “Young Mothers” lacks some of the suspense that powers many of the Dardennes’ other films. Yet that slower pace allows a tenderness to develop, and the tension between the girls’ youth and newfound maternal instincts to emerge. A bit of the child they so recently were still lurks underneath the mature person they’ve been forced to become. Jessica’s longing to connect with Morgane seems almost like an infant’s hungry reach toward her mother, yet there’s an adult’s angry insistence in it as well. Julie is full of a young girl’s hope and a much older woman’s fear. Perla’s belief that her baby’s father will want to be with her is obviously juvenile to everyone but her, yet she also knows how to take care of herself. And Ariane harbors a child’s desire to trust and an adult’s jaded knowledge that her parent is untrustworthy.
This is its own kind of tension, and it is heartbreaking and true. It’s reflected in the older characters as well, two of whom were young mothers themselves. They may very well have been like these girls, forced to make these kinds of choices. Are they glimpses of the young mothers’ futures?
A bit of the way into the film, we also briefly meet Naïma (Samia Hilmi), who has recently finished the shelter’s program and is moving out on her own. The girls celebrate her at a lunch where we see what they might hope for: an apartment, a job as a railway ticket inspector, a home with her baby and maybe a supportive partner.
This is no fairy tale ending, by most movies’ accounts. We don’t really know what future awaits Naïma, or Jessica or Julie or Perla or Ariane. But at one point, Ariane contemplates the moment when her daughter will be her age, and for a second she has hope that her girl’s life will be much better than her own. Perhaps, this time, she’s managed to break the cycle.
Young Mothers
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/movies/young-mothers-review.html
The New York Times, January 9
Critic’s Notebook : Josh O’Connor x 4
The star’s nuance and emotional power, along with his natural charisma, quietly enriched a quartet of movies in 2025.
Full text:
Last fall, during what I now think of as our Season of Josh O’Connor Content, the British actor steamed up a gay romance in one movie, went on the lam in another, rode a horse across the scorched earth in a third and slipped on a priest’s collar to find deliverance in the fourth. O’Connor was ubiquitous, and indispensable. Other actors could have played these roles, and maybe even convincingly made them their own. Yet the specificity both of O’Connor’s screen presence and of his strikingly different performances — their nuance and slow-gathering emotional power — makes it tough to imagine anyone else in them.
It isn’t unusual for hot commodities to appear in more than one movie a year, either by design or coincidence. That scorcher Pedro Pascal showed up in three movies in 2025, while other in-demand attractions like Paul Mescal and Elle Fanning made do with two. No one, though, seemed as agreeably omnipresent as O’Connor, who between September and November starred in “The History of Sound,” “The Mastermind,” “Rebuilding” and “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” amid innumerable public-relations meet-and-greets. Taken together, these four dissimilar movies announced, well, whispered O’Connor’s arrival.
If you are wondering who?, you aren’t alone. O’Connor has been making movies for more than a decade, mostly in his home country. His public profile has steadily increased in recent years, partly because of the dominating influence of Netflix, home to two of his wider-seen vehicles — “Wake Up Dead Man” and the royal soap “The Crown.” O’Connor acknowledged the relative novelty of his celebrity last month when he hosted “Saturday Night Live.” During his monologue, he warmed up the room with affable self-deprecation. “For those of you who know my face but maybe can’t quite place me, no, I am not the mouse from ‘Flushed Away.’” The show briefly cut to an image of the rodent hero from that 2006 animation.
Calling attention to the delightful elephant ears in the room was a shrewd, ingratiating move, and drew the kind of friendly laughs that close the gap between performer and audience. The monologue didn’t zing but did its job because it made O’Connor — with his smiles, gentle self-mockery, unplasticky good looks and pitcher ears, which almost invite you to grab hold of them — seem like a real person, not some entertainment bot. There’s much to be said about his talent, which was honed by study (the Bristol Old Vic Theater School in England) and has deepened with his choices. There’s also something to be said about his natural charisma.
PRAISE FOR O’CONNOR’S BIG YEAR started last January at the Sundance Film Festival following the premiere of Max Walker-Silverman’s “Rebuilding.” Set in contemporary Colorado in the aftermath of a devastating wildfire, it is a thoughtful reconsideration of the West and the western genre, their romance and corrosive myths. O’Connor plays Dusty, a loner who’s struggling after the loss of his small ranch. At one point, he reluctantly moves into a FEMA trailer in an isolated makeshift camp, and insistently tells another disaster victim who’s living there: “Listen, I’m not like these folks.” O’Connor delivers the line as if he were sharing a confidence; the words already sting so he doesn’t need to embellish them.
Dusty is so self-contained that you need to discover the character from the outside in — an O’Connor specialty — less from the words he says than how he says them. Dusty’s silences, his isolation and his surroundings speak for him, and their weight grows heavier incrementally. The character’s cowboy laconism allows O’Connor draw you in with his now-muted charisma and the mysteries of Dusty’s inner being, which emerge from how he moves through life and takes up space, how his eyes cloud and head bows. Even in his talkier movies, O’Connor can retreat inwardly so persuasively (and bring you along with him) that it seems like you can see thoughts forming in his head. Dusty also strikes totemic poses, cutting a solitary figure against a landscape that evokes other lonesome travelers, men in particular.
Like some other notable O’Connor movies, “Rebuilding” is also about men and masculinity. Few actors have made men seem as intriguingly complex and contemporary as he has recently. At this point, though, in this serious appreciation of his serious talents, I need to acknowledge a truism that is conspicuous from his loyal admirers, from high-fashion influencers and social-media habitués, and which was grasped by “S.N.L.”: O’Connor is one of pop culture’s feverishly loved boyfriends. He’s prodigiously talented, yes, with a depth and breadth that may not have fully emerged. Yet part of his appeal is that, similarly to how both Pascal and Benedict Cumberbatch signify, O’Connor’s acting abilities dovetail with a singular charm and air of unforced authenticity that feel as welcoming offscreen as on.
O’Connor’s offbeat heartthrob image makes his casting as a priest in Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man” one of its slyer jokes. As a boxer turned pastor who’s swept up in a murder mystery that tests him with material hurdles and spiritual tribulations, the actor shows obvious comic flair. More crucial to the movie’s meaning, however, is the sincerity that O’Connor brings to this pugilist priest and his struggles. He’s far more tamped-down in “The Mastermind,” a low-key, politically resonant 1970s drama from Kelly Reichardt. Here, the mystery is the actual character, a comfortably middle-class malcontent turned thief who’s blinkered and finally consumed by self-interest. O’Connor’s precision fits Reichardt’s termitelike approach to narrative, as does their shared uninterest in making you love them.
As distinct as O’Connor’s performances are in “Wake Up Dead Man” and “The Mastermind,” they are also of a piece with his diverse, expansive body of work. The choices that he’s made, those he has received or pursued — including Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera,” a dreamy Italian art film in which he plays an Orpheus figure — have demonstrated his expressive range, and only made him more appealing. He can go nice or nasty as well as both at the same time, and he doesn’t mind testing your sympathies. He’s at once wincingly recognizable and admirably off-putting in “The Crown,” in which his Prince Charles makes his princess bride’s life a misery. With nasally droning hauteur and seething resentment, O’Connor brings to life a man raging in the shadow of yet another woman who’s far more loved than he is.
O’Connor was showered with awards for his performance as Prince Charles, but by the time he appeared on “S.N.L.” that role had been eclipsed by some of his later juicier turns. Chief among these came in Luca Guadagnino’s irresistible tennis romance “Challengers” (2024), in which O’Connor plays a roguish player involved in a sexy, lightly fraught romantic triangle with another, more successful male player and a female player turned coach. The men just share an eager, open-mouth kiss, but Guadagnino teases the possibility that they could get it on, if only when their female love interest is watching them. Guadagnino is a connoisseur of beauty, and one of the other gifts he bestows in “Challengers” is the understanding that O’Connor is at ease as an object of desire, and he showcases the actor accordingly.
I HAVE TO WONDER if this part of O’Connor’s acting portfolio and his persona made some at “S.N.L.” uncomfortable. The skits showcasing him were lackluster overall, including the two in which he kissed another man. The funnier sketch hinged on how a group of women at a bachelorette party respond to two hyperbolically sensitive male strippers in cozy cardigans: It turns the women on. Whatever the context, there is still power and real stakes involved when men hungrily lock lips in public, especially given the re-emergence of aggressively and, at times, violently reactionary gender norms. That it matters who kisses whom was only affirmed by the fact that “S.N.L.” even tried to squeeze laughter from something so human.
The show fell flat despite O’Connor, and it’s hard not to wonder if he was too elusive a figure and too complicated. “I know I have a reputation for being what the internet calls a soft boy,” he said in his monologue, as he opened his arms and his eyebrows jumped. After ticking off some hobbies (embroidery, gardening), he added: “I’m just your average, everyday 65-year-old woman.” That line earned some laughs, but it was more revealing than funny. Intentionally or not, it also expressed an unease about gender that isn’t evident in O’Connor’s performances, including in his breakout movie, “God’s Own Country” (2017), a small, poignant drama in which he plays a farmer who falls in lust, then in love, with another man.
O’Connor inhabits that movie with naked feeling and the same is true of his tonally dissimilar performance in Oliver Hermanus’s “The History of Sound,” which finds the actor in the arms of Mescal’s besotted lover. They play conservatory music students who, after being separated by World War I, reunite for a wistful trip in Maine. The ostensible reason for their journey is a project that O’Connor’s character is coordinating to record old folk songs before they vanish, and that sends the men trekking through the backcountry. Their idyll is filled with soulful music and passion, and while the movie can slip into preciousness, the actors are superb. O’Connor is quietly shattering as a man who can’t be saved, even by love.
In June, O’Connor will take a great leap into the stratosphere with his starring role in Steven Spielberg’s latest, “Disclosure Day.” He’s also in the next Joel Coen movie, which was shooting in Scotland last year and is shrouded in secrecy. Both filmmakers have substantially larger profiles than any of the directors O’Connor has worked with. Yet while his casting in them cements his It Guy status, they are no guarantee of a thriving, wide-open future for O’Connor, and they also can’t serve as a bulwark against the industry’s turbulence, the audience’s fickleness and all the other uncertainties every performer faces. I don’t know if O’Connor will get to kiss another guy in either movie or be able to demonstrate his soft-boy appeal in all its depth. I imagine that his talent will be undeniable; I hope his softness is, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/movies/josh-oconnor-2025-performances.html
The New York Times, January 9
‘People We Meet on Vacation’ Review: When Stuffy Met Silly
Love grows between a restless travel writer and a contented homebody in this occasionally cute, instantly forgettable romantic comedy.
Full text:
If you make it to the end of “People We Meet on Vacation” — a movie that once would have slipped unremarked among its rom-com brethren on Lifetime — you will experience exactly the ending you expect. For fans of the movie’s source material (Emily Henry’s 2021 novel of the same name), that’s the good news; the bad news is the mountain of cliché you have to scale to get there.
Starting with the premise, which sees Poppy and Alex (Emily Bader and Tom Blyth), students at the same Ohio college, become friends during a rideshare and decide to reconnect every summer for an exotic vacation. (The see-you-next-year romance is almost its own subgenre.) She’s your standard movie free spirit, which means she talks incessantly, eats with the decorum of a ravenous 8-year-old and performs embarrassing dance moves in public. He’s supposedly a stuffy rule-follower, except — because he’s played by a rather engaging dramatic actor — he reads mainly as a quietly endearing adult.
Spanning 12 years and multiple flashbacks to unmemorable holiday high jinks, “People We Meet on Vacation” unfolds in vivid colors and mostly foreign locations. Along the way, Alex and Poppy — whose job as a travel writer reminds us how sharp Jameela Jamil can be, even in the minuscule role of Poppy’s boss — acquire and retire romantic partners and perpetuate the inane notion that getting soaked to the skin is some kind of aphrodisiac. Who doesn’t want to have sex while looking like a drowned rodent?
Occasionally cute and almost instantly forgettable, “People,” tidily directed by Brett Haley, offers less-than-witty dialogue (“You’re ripped!” “She wants to bang you”) and flyby turns by Alan Ruck and a typically excessive Molly Shannon as Poppy’s parents. It also leaves us with the veiled suggestion that a woman in love might happily exchange a big-city career for small-town coupledom. Now where have we seen that before?
People We Meet on Vacation
Rated PG-13 for skinny-dipping with stoners. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/movies/people-we-meet-on-vacation-review.html
The New York Times, January 9
‘Magellan’ Review: The Beauty and the Bloodshed of a Smaller World
Gael García Bernal plays the explorer Ferdinand Magellan in Lav Diaz’s portrait of a brutal adventurer and his travels across the globe.
Full text:
In “Magellan,” Lav Diaz’s haunted dream of a movie about Ferdinand Magellan’s effort to circumnavigate the world, the Portuguese explorer’s famed exploits are charted selectively. Played with pungent severity by Gael García Bernal, this Ferdinand is at once opaque and obvious, a man of his time, a harbinger of the future, and an instrument of terror. He’s a husband and a father, too, though Diaz is less interested in his personal affairs than in the meaning of notions like discovery and what it portends when one group of people violently imposes itself on another, which also makes this a story of imperialism.
The world became much smaller when a single lonely ship from the Magellan expedition finished its trip around the globe after three harrowingly difficult years. By the time that ship, the Victoria, returned to Spain in 1522, the expedition had lost several vessels while crossing oceans, snaking through a perilous strait and sailing tens of thousands of miles. Most of the crew was dead, and so was Magellan, who, at 41, was killed by Indigenous people. Demanding that they cede to his interests, he led a small group to attack them. The population responded in kind, ending his adventures. A year and a half later, the surviving crew finished the trip.
Corpses are scattered across the ground when Ferdinand, badly wounded and wearing a metal breastplate, first appears onscreen. It’s 1511 in the aftermath of the successful Portuguese campaign to seize the Malaysian port city of Malacca. Although Diaz inserts times and place names throughout the movie, which function as helpful narrative coordinates, his storytelling is more elliptical than encyclopedic. He skims over historic events and omits crucial travelers, and characters at times enter and exit without much introduction. They also don’t deliver the simple, convenient lessons and summations that are familiar from more conventional movies; it’s gratifying not being pandered to.
Here, history and story tend to convene in crystallizing moments, in faces, gestures, actions and in blunt, cruel words. The most arresting way that Diaz telegraphs, though, is through the sheer beauty of his images. The movie is often visually intoxicating, at moments gasp-out-loud ravishing, especially in its presentation of the natural world, which can have a soft visual quality that deepens the sense of otherworldliness. The square framing tightly focuses your gaze, as do the minimal camera movements. When the camera does move, the effect can be startling, as in an early, leisurely push into a lush, verdant inlet that suggests what this ostensible new world may have looked like from the deck of a ship.
At other times, Diaz’s use of tableau-vivant-style compositions and chiaroscuro evokes some Renaissance paintings, reminders of the world that birthed Ferdinand. Diaz sketches in that world quickly and starkly. Soon after Ferdinand appears, there is a cut to a man clutching a bottle and staggering into a scene of carnage, like a drunk after a horrific night on the town. This is Afonso de Albuquerque (Roger Koza), the Portuguese general who led the assault on Malacca. After taking a swig, he addresses Ferdinand and other soldiers, and stakes Portugal’s claim. “Medina and Mecca,” he says, “will become remote deserts, and Islam will finally disappear.” Then he passes out and falls into the dirt, the soldiers roaring with laughter.
There’s absurd comedy in this spectacle: So much for the glories of the Age of Discovery! You could almost laugh along with Ferdinand and the others if the whole thing — the ravaged dead, the triumphant living and the specter of the colonialist future — weren’t so grim. Diaz, though, doesn’t encourage either your pity or outrage. Instead, for the most part, he retains a measured, quasi-analytic distance. Diaz’s unheroic, non-psychological conception of the explorer as well as Bernal’s hard, heavy presence and forcefully uningratiating performance also keep you at a remove. Far more expressive is Ferdinand’s enslaved servant, Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), who becomes a very different, ethically and politically, fellow traveler.
There’s plenty of drama here nevertheless, and tension, too, including when Ferdinand returns to Portugal, where he recuperates from a gangrenous wound (the rot has already set in), weds a much younger woman, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), and lands on a new route to the Spice Islands (a.k.a. Indonesia) for honor and riches. Some histories remember Magellan for his adventures, ambitions, tenacity and navigational prowess, as well as for his putative discovery of extant societies. Diaz instead skewers both the man and the familiar, politically expedient, aggrandizing myths. In one queasily amusing scene that distills Diaz’s point of view, the explorer and an associate discuss a possible new spice route and how they’ll sell their plans to the Portuguese king. “We work for his greed,” they chortle repeatedly.
In the end, Ferdinand goes to the Spanish king to fund the expedition, and soon leaves on his long, grinding journey. Diaz re-creates some of the ensuing onboard drama (there were mutinies), and omits some grim details. (When the food ran out, the ships’ rats went on the menu.) Instead, as he does from the start, Diaz returns repeatedly to the places and the people who Ferdinand and his crew encountered, exploited and occasionally slaughtered. The explorer has his moments of triumph, including in his campaign to convert some Native people to Christianity, an effort that helps undo him. Yet nothing expresses the sweep and scope of his adventures as powerfully as the look of horror that fills the face of an Indigenous woman who, while out one pacific day, looks up and sees the beginning of her world’s end.
Magellan
Not rated. With English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. In theaters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/movies/magellan-review.html
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 9
«Roofman» erzählt die wahre Geschichte eines modernen Robin Hood
Jeffrey Manchester raubte McDonald’s-Filialen aus, schenkte seinen Opfern Jacken gegen die Kälte und versteckte sich wochenlang in einem Spielzeugladen. Der Regisseur Derek Cianfrance macht daraus eine melancholische Tragödie eines Einsamen.
Full text:
Jede Zeit hat ihren Robin Hood. Der, von dem Derek Cianfrance in «Roofman» erzählt, trägt zwar keine Strumpfhosen, mehr unfreiwillig als gewollt eine Pistole anstatt Pfeil und Bogen und bereichert nicht nur die sozial Schwachen, sondern auch sich selbst. Aber sein moralischer Kompass funktioniert trotzdem halbwegs, und auch das Auftreten ist sympathisch.
Jeffrey Manchester heisst dieser Neo-Robin-Hood, und dass Cianfrance nach einem zusammen mit Kirt Gunn geschriebenen Drehbuch Reales aufgreift, gibt seinem Film einen existenziellen Drall. Ende der 1990er Jahre hatte sich der reale Manchester bei einer Einbruchserie in den USA über die Dächer Zugang zu McDonald’s-Filialen verschafft und sie ausgeraubt.
Ein Gentleman-Gauner
«Viele derer, die er ausgeraubt hat, waren beeindruckt davon, was für ein netter, anständiger Kerl er zu sein scheint, ein echter Gentleman», sagte ein Sprecher des kalifornischen Justizministeriums im Jahr 2000 gegenüber der «Los Angeles Times». Der heute Mittfünfziger verbüsst derzeit eine Haftstrafe und kommt frühestens 2036 auf freien Fuss.
Cianfrance zeigt seinen von Channing Tatum gespielten Jeffrey Manchester gleich in der ersten Szene als Gentleman. Der gelangt über das Dach in ein McDonald’s-Restaurant, sperrt die Mitarbeiter vorübergehend ins Kühlhaus und schenkt einem seine Jacke, damit dieser nicht friert. In diesem Moment fragt man sich genau das, was Jeffrey als Erzähler aus dem Off zum Publikum spricht: Wie soll aus so einem netten Typen ein Krimineller geworden sein?
«Roofman» reisst das Bild eines Army-Veteranen an, der an einer posttraumatischen Störung leidet, eine desolate Ehe führt und finanziell verzweifelt ist. Der Tochter schenkt er zum Geburtstag seinen alten Spielzeugbaukasten, weil das Geld knapp ist. 45 Einbrüche später gestaltet sich Jeffreys Leben komfortabler, und die Tochter wird zum nächsten Geburtstag mit Geschenken überhäuft – nur wird der Vater wenig später in Handschellen abgeführt.
Dass Cianfrance die Antworten auf das «Warum» der Gaunerkarriere mehr andeutet, als dass er sie auserzählt, ist kluges Kalkül. Mit seinem ersten Film seit neun Jahren hat er nicht im Sinn, was man bei dem Stoff erwarten würde. «Roofman» ist kein klassisches Psychogramm des Diebes. Auch an dem Heist-Potenzial des Stoffs, das augenzwinkernd und visuell eindrücklich in Szene gesetzt wird, ist Cianfrance eher nebenbei interessiert. Vielmehr wird der Film immer mehr zur Tragödie eines einsamen Mannes, der versucht, seinen Platz in der Gesellschaft zu finden – und Liebe.
Sinnbild für Jeffreys Isolation wird das Versteck in einem Hohlraum in einer gewaltigen Toys-R-Us-Filiale, in das er sich nach seinem gewitzten Ausbruch aus dem Gefängnis verschanzt. Umgeben von einer knallbunten Plüschtier- und Plastikspielzeugarmee, richtet sich der Räuber mit Matratzen und Spider-Man-Bettwäsche ein, überlistet das Kamerasystem und harrt dort wochenlang aus, bis die polizeilichen Ermittlungen versanden.
Nachts streunt er durch die langen Regalreihen, nascht M&Ms und blödelt aus Langeweile mit übergrossen Plüschtieren und anderem Spielzeug herum. Tagsüber beobachtet er mucksmäuschenstill über einen Monitor, wie der Filialleiter Mitch (herrlich fies: Peter Dinklage) seine Mitarbeiter drangsaliert, unter ihnen die alleinerziehende Mutter Leigh (Kirsten Dunst). Jeffrey manipuliert die Schichtpläne, um Leigh zu helfen, und nähert sich der kirchentreuen Mutter und ihren beiden Töchtern unter falscher Identität mit materiellen Liebesgrüssen.
Der Film kommt mit seinen retrocharmanten, körnigen 35-Millimeter-Bildern oberflächlich betrachtet leichtfüssig daher. Zugleich ist die ganze Tragik des Aussenseiters, der seine Familie verlassen musste und sich jetzt eine neue aufzubauen versucht, in jeder Sekunde gegenwärtig. Vor allem, als «Roofman» Richtung Liebesfilm kippt und, selbstbewusst mit dem Kitsch kokettierend, von der Annäherung zwischen Jeffrey und Leigh erzählt.
Tatum glänzt mit einnehmendem Charme
Einmal mehr verbindet Cianfrance fluide verschiedene Genres und zeigt sich als hoffnungsloser Melancholiker. Nach seinem traurig-schönen, schonungslos ehrlichen Liebesdrama «Blue Valentine» und dem komplexen Vater-Sohn-Triptychon «The Place Beyond the Pines» fokussiert auch «Roofman» auf die Themen Liebe und Schuld.
Dass das flirrend-düstere Märchen funktioniert, ist auch den Darstellern zu verdanken. Tatum glänzt mit einnehmendem Charme und brennt die ganze Ausweglosigkeit seiner Figur auf die Leinwand, Dunst gibt die gutmütige, gläubige Mutter nuanciert. Verlassen kann sich Cianfrance zudem darauf, dass das Leben die besten Geschichten schreibt. Im Verlauf der Ereignisse kann man immer weniger fassen, dass diese irre Geschichte tatsächlich eine «true story» ist.
«Roofman»: Im Kino.
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 9
In Japan kann man alles mieten – sogar eine Familie: In «Rental Family» spielt Brendan Fraser einmal mehr gross auf
Der berührende Spielfilm erzählt davon, wie sehr soziale Masken das Leben prägen und wie tief Einsamkeit in Japan verwurzelt ist. Ein Treffen mit der Regisseurin Hikari.
Full text:
Niemand ist so, wie man denkt, wir alle spielen Theater: Was grundsätzlich wohl überall auf der Welt gilt, wird in Japan durch besondere soziale Phänomene verstärkt. Wichtiger als echte Emotionen ist dort das Ausfüllen einer Rolle, das Aufführen einer speziellen Performance für das Gegenüber. Der in Tokio lebende Amerikaner Phillip kann im Spielfilm «Rental Family» ein Lied davon singen.
Einst war er das Gesicht einer grell-albernen Zahnpastawerbung, heute steckt seine Schauspielkarriere in der Sackgasse. Da kommt ihm das Angebot einer Agentur für besondere Dienste recht: Er soll einen traurigen Amerikaner auf einer Beerdigung von jemandem verkörpern, den er gar nicht kennt. Von nun an steht Phillip als falscher Bräutigam vor dem Altar oder wird dafür bezahlt, mit einem Stubenhocker Videospiele zu zocken.
«Es gibt einen Haufen verrückter Dienste in Japan»
Brendan Fraser mimt nach seiner Oscar-Rolle in «The Whale» erneut einen Mann, der zu gross geraten ist für seine Umgebung. Wie ein tapsiger, freundlich lächelnder Riese bewegt sich Phillip durch eine Welt aus Vorstellung und Verstellung – und wird von ihr bewegt. Denn die Devise der Agentur, «Professionelle Distanz wahren!», funktioniert nicht bei jedem Auftrag.
Zwei seiner Rollen binden den Gaijin, den Fremden, emotionaler an seine Kunden als erwartet: einmal, als er einem alten, vergessenen Filmstar vorspielen muss, er sei ein Journalist, der eine Biografie schreibt. Und als er von einer Mutter beauftragt wird, ihrer Tochter Mia (Shannon Gorman) vorzutäuschen, er sei ihr leiblicher Vater. Ohne beide Elternteile wird das Kind nur schwerlich auf die Privatschule zugelassen. Doch aus dem falschen Vater wird im Lauf der Zeit ein echter Ersatzpapa.
«Rental Family» lief am letztjährigen ZFF und wäre ein perfekter Eröffnungsfilm gewesen: berührend, ohne zu sehr in den Schmalz zu kippen, nachdenklich, ohne Probleme zu sehr auszuwalzen. Zum Interview kommt die Regisseurin Hikari, die mit echtem Namen Mitsuyo Miyazaki heisst, mit Hut, sie ist fröhlich und warmherzig.
Das Geschäftsmodell der «Rental Family» sei in Japan seit den 1980er Jahren bekannt, sagt Hikari. Doch lange wurde darüber geschwiegen. Psychische Erkrankungen und entsprechende Therapien sind nach wie vor tabuisiert. Selbst wenn Kunden solche Dienste in Anspruch nehmen, sprächen sie nicht davon, so die Regisseurin.
«Vorzutäuschen, ein anderer zu sein, ist tief in unserer Kultur verankert, seit der Edo-Zeit im 17. Jahrhundert», erzählt Hikari. Damals etablierte sich das Kabuki, ein Familientheater, dem derzeit im Kino der japanische Oscar-Kandidat «Kokuho» ein Denkmal setzt: «Wenn nicht genug Zuschauer erschienen oder man wollte, dass die Schauspieler angefeuert werden, hat man einfach Leute gemietet, die hinten klatschten.»
Heute haben sich die Mietagenturen auf jeden Wunsch spezialisiert: «Es gibt einen Haufen verrückter Dienste in Japan», sagt Hikari. Wer seinen Job kündigen wolle, kann telefonisch einen Stellvertreter ordern, der dem Chef die Botschaft überbringt. «So etwas entbindet die Leute von ihrer Verantwortung und hindert sie am Erwachsenwerden. Man muss lernen, unangenehme Situationen zu bewältigen.»
Vom Onkel bis zur Freundin lassen sich alle möglichen Rollen buchen, selbst jemand, mit dem man einfach Filme schauen oder kuscheln möchte. Manchmal muss der Schein vor konservativen Verwandten gewahrt werden, dann wird eben der Hetero-Freund beim Kaffee präsentiert. «Bei meinen Recherchen bin ich auf einen Mann gestossen, der alle seine Angehörigen bei einem Tsunami verloren hatte. Jedes Mal, wenn eines der Familienmitglieder Geburtstag begangen hätte, buchte er gleich eine komplette Familie für die Feier.»
Einsamkeit, Ermutigung, Ersatz: Das sind die Hauptgründe, weshalb Rental Families genutzt werden. Vor allem Einsamkeit ist in Japan besonders verbreitet, wie auch etliche Filme von «Lost in Translation» bis jüngst «Perfect Days» zeigen. In extremer Ausprägung heisst das Phänomen «Hikikomori»: Menschen, die sich völlig aus der Gesellschaft zurückziehen und entweder alleine oder bei den Eltern wohnen. «Die Technologie in Japan ist so fortschrittlich, dass man das Haus überhaupt nicht verlassen muss. Es ist komfortabel, einsam zu sein», sagt Hikari.
Neue Möglichkeiten familiärer Bindung
Die Filmemacherin hat zwar selbst noch keine Rental Family in Anspruch genommen, aber sie kennt das Gefühl von Familienersatz: Als Austauschstudentin lebte Hikari in einer kleinen Stadt in Utah, als einzige Asiatin in der Schule. Sie habe sich einsam gefühlt, sagt sie, und sich dementsprechend mit anderen Aussenseitern angefreundet, aus der Gothic-Szene: «Sie wurden meine Familie, und wir sind bis heute, 30 Jahre später, befreundet.»
Daher wollte sie in ihrem zweiten Spielfilm nicht nur von kulturellen Differenzen erzählen, sondern auch über andere Möglichkeiten familiärer Bindungen nachdenken: «Die Schauspieler, die für die Rental Family arbeiten, bilden untereinander wieder Familien. Wenn zwei von ihnen gebucht werden, etwa als Bruder und Schwester, dann teilen sie bestimmte Ereignisse wie Geburtstage, es fühlt sich echt an.»
Während die Erwachsenen bereitwillig selbst getäuscht werden wollen, sind Kinder skeptischer: «Warum lügen die Erwachsenen ständig?», fragt Mia ihren Ersatzvater Phillip. Womöglich, weil es einfacher ist; und man manchmal den leichteren Weg wählt, um jemanden zu beschützen. Doch emotionales Engagement kann auch schwierig werden. Für Hikari ist die Existenz dieses Geschäftsmodells grundsätzlich kein Problem. Solange niemand verletzt oder ausgenutzt wird: «Am Ende sind das alles nur Menschen, die gegenseitig innere Leere spüren.»
Le Point, January 8
Ces trois films de Béla Tarr qu’il faut absolument avoir vus
Disparu le 6 janvier, le cinéaste hongrois, compagnon de route du prix Nobel László Krasznahorkai, laisse une trace indélébile dans le cinéma mondial.
Full text:
En 2011, le grand cinéaste hongrois Béla Tarr (1955-2026) – « un visionnaire », disait Gus Van Sant et « l’un des grands artistes de notre temps » selon son collaborateur fétiche, le Prix Nobel de littérature 2025 László Krasznahorkai – reçoit l’Ours d’argent au Festival de Berlin pour Le Cheval de Turin. Le film, annonce-t-il, sera son dernier, alors qu’il n’a pas encore fêté ses 55 ans. « Nous avions fait tout ce que nous voulions faire, déclare-t-il en 2024 au quotidien anglais The Guardian, qui l’interroge sur cette retraite prématurée. L’œuvre est achevée, c’est à prendre ou à laisser. »
Cette attitude brute reflète bien la personnalité de cet artiste sans concessions, venu au cinéma par refus de l’artifice au point de présenter sa première œuvre, Le Nid familial (1979), comme un « antifilm » : « J’aimais beaucoup le cinéma, explique-t-il au Monde en 2012. Mais ce que l’on voyait était d’une telle stupidité… Tout était faux ! Situations, acteurs, dialogues… J’ai décidé que si un jour j’avais une caméra je filmerais de vraies personnes, une vraie réalité, de vrais conflits humains, de vrais problèmes. Je voulais en finir avec ces films en couleurs imbéciles. Je voulais faire des films en 16 mm, caméra au poing, en cinq jours, débordant d’énergie. »
Beau programme que le cinéaste applique dans toute son œuvre, représentative de ce que certains critiques appellent le « slow cinema » : des films en général en noir et blanc, largement tournés en plan séquence et ne craignant pas la longue durée. On recense trois documentaires, une adaptation de Macbeth en deux plans seulement tournée pour la télévision hongroise en 1982, et neuf longs-métrages, récompensés aux Festivals de Locarno et de Berlin. Voici nos conseils pour aborder cette œuvre puissante.
Satantango (1994)
C’est peut-être le plus célèbre des films de Béla Tarr, une adaptation qui dure plus de sept heures du roman de László Krasznahorkai (disponible en Folio dans une traduction de Joëlle Dufeuilly sous le titre Tango de Satan). Nous sommes en Hongrie, dans la plaine de la Puszta battue par le vent et la pluie, et le désordre règne depuis que la ferme collectiviste ne fonctionne plus.
Un complot fomenté par deux villageois pour voler la recette de l’année se heurte à une rumeur qui sème la stupeur et la panique : le formidable et effrayant Irimias, que l’on présumait mort, serait revenu ! Est-ce là une résurrection, ou l’œuvre du démon ? Il y a douze chapitres, et autant de portraits de personnages à la fois attachants et monstrueux, dans ce film prodigieux où l’on plonge en apnée avec ses plans-séquences virtuoses et sa vision maculée de boue d’une humanité en souffrance.
Les Harmonies Werckmeister (2000)
Six ans après le coup de maître de Satantango, Béla Tarr s’inspire d’un autre livre de László Krasznahorkai, devenu un ami proche, La Mélancolie de la résistance pour ce film de (seulement !) 2 h 30. C’est un retour dans la plaine hongroise où une petite ville voit débarquer un cirque qui transporte une baleine momifiée alors que le désordre – pillages, émeutes – se répand alentour et qu’un « Prince » fascisant harangue les foules.
Un innocent dostoïevskien, Janos (dont le prénom évoque le Jonas biblique), est fasciné par la baleine et le désastre qui s’annonce. Il vit de petits boulots, notamment pour un vieux monsieur Eszter fasciné par le compositeur Andreas Werckmeister. Il y a quelque chose du Fellini des dernières années, celui qui captait l’émergence de Silvio Berlusconi, dans cette œuvre majeure où quelque chose du destin hongrois et des années Orban se donne à voir de façon prophétique.
Le Cheval de Turin (2011)
Le « Cheval de Turin », c’est ce malheureux équidé fouetté par un cocher sous les yeux effarés de Friedrich Nietzsche, qui se jette à son cou et s’effondre en larmes dans une scène rapportée par son ami Franz Overbeck et qui marque l’entrée dans la folie du philosophe, en 1889. Le film ne met pas en scène cet épisode, le racontant simplement dans un carton liminaire.
Mais il nous indique l’identité du tandem cocher-cheval dont Béla Tarr raconte la vie quotidienne. Dans une campagne piémontaise d’une rudesse très hongroise, le cocher mène une existence solitaire et mutique, éclairée seulement par la présence de sa fille, tandis que son cheval refuse d’aller de l’avant. D’une portée métaphysique bouleversante, le film – le dernier de Béla Tarr – est un chef-d’œuvre.
Certains films de Béla Tarr sont disponibles en DVD chez Carlotta Films et à la location sur le site La Cinetek.
The New York Times, January 8
The Projectionist : Can Timothée Chalamet Break This Oscar Curse?
The best actor Oscar almost never goes to young men, though the 30-year-old has his best chance yet with “Marty Supreme.”
Full text:
As an ambitious table-tennis player willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead, Timothée Chalamet delivers some of his best work in “Marty Supreme” and is all but certain to earn his third Oscar nomination later this month. Winning the award, however, will require him to overcome a handicap far more daunting than anything his character faces onscreen.
For nearly a century, Oscar voters have been reluctant to hand the best-actor prize to young men, almost always opting to reward more seasoned performers. Chalamet, who turned 30 on Dec. 27, would become the second-youngest best-actor winner in academy history: Adrien Brody was 29 when he won for “The Pianist” and remains the sole man in his 20s to triumph in that top category.
Adrien Brody accepting his Oscar and the record for youngest best actor winner. Credit…Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press
Can Chalamet break that longstanding curse, or will he follow in the footsteps of Leonardo DiCaprio, whose “always a bridesmaid” status at the Oscars became a running joke throughout his 20s and 30s?
Though Oscar voters have no qualms about rewarding young actresses, they traditionally want to see more mileage on their men. Besides Chalamet, who previously earned nominations for “Call Me by Your Name” and “A Complete Unknown,” only two other men under 30 have been nominated for best actor in the last decade, Daniel Kaluuya (“Get Out”) and Paul Mescal (“Aftersun”). During that same period, seven women under 30 were nominated for best actress, and three — Brie Larson (“Room”), Emma Stone (“La La Land”) and Mikey Madison (“Anora”) — went on to win.
At industry parties and awards-season events over the years, I’ve watched that dynamic play out as older male voters eagerly chat up beautiful ingénues while showing far less interest in young hunks with Oscar buzz. If an up-and-coming actor looks like the sort of guy their granddaughter would swoon over, resistance may set in, and it can take years for that actor to earn the elders’ genuine respect.
DiCaprio can attest to that arc: When “Titanic” made him a superstar and tied the record for most Oscar wins, voters refused to even nominate him. The perception that DiCaprio was just some teenage heartthrob lingered as he moved into more mature roles in Martin Scorsese films, and the academy made him wait until age 40 to receive his first Oscar, for “The Revenant,” a grueling wilderness drama that proved he had left his youthful image far behind.
What’s the reason for that resistance? I’d wager some of it has to do with how young men like DiCaprio and Chalamet broke through in romantic roles. Though movies with those roles are some of the few that reliably cast actors under 30 — it’s where Mescal (“Normal People”), Robert Pattinson (“Twilight”) and Jacob Elordi (“The Kissing Booth) all made their names — the whiff of romance can also be a turnoff, depending on who’s sniffing.
Straight men often loathe the actors women love, a tension I call the “girlfriend gap”: In the 2010s, while analyzing celebrity data from the market-research firm E-Poll, I was struck by how many men gave rock-bottom ratings to romantic idols like Pattinson and Zac Efron simply because they knew women adored them. (Good luck to Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, the talented leads of the breakthrough romantic series “Heated Rivalry,” who deserve major film roles but may face that same friction.)
Are Oscar voters really as reactionary as those resentful middle-American men? One would hope for a more rarefied sensibility, and with the academy diversifying in recent years, the whims of a straight-male voting bloc may carry less weight.
Still, that time-honored tradition gives me pause even when predicting nominations this year for actors like Elordi and Michael B. Jordan, who front major contenders — “Frankenstein” and “Sinners” — yet still face Oscar headwinds. Jordan in particular has never been nominated, despite work in “Black Panther” and “Creed” that was more than deserving. How much longer will they make this 38-year-old phenom wait?
By the time women like Jennifer Lawrence and Natalie Portman turned 30, the Oscars had already canonized them as among the pre-eminent performers of their generations. Chalamet and Jordan may not need that validation to continue thriving as A-listers, but I’d argue that the academy has much more to lose by continuing to overlook them.
The Oscars are so eager to attract young men to its broadcast that the ceremony will soon move to YouTube to better reach them. And recent years have seen several academy decisions — like expanding the best-picture category and proposing an Oscar for best popular film — meant to make room for more blockbuster nominees that young men may tune in to see.
So here’s a thought: If courting young men is a priority, awarding them should be more than a possibility. I’d bet that far more young men nowadays dream of being influencers than Oscar winners. But if they saw actors their own age on that stage, it may remind them that this nearly 100-year-old tradition still matters.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/movies/timothee-chalamet-michael-b-jordan-oscar-curse.html
Le Monde, January 8
Dans « Mr. Nobody Against Putin », un jeune enseignant filme la militarisation d’une école en Russie
Dans ce puissant documentaire, Pavel Talankin capte la propagande du Kremlin qui s’impose dans les classes, pour justifier la guerre menée en Ukraine depuis 2022.
Full text:
C’est l’histoire, captivante, d’un simple employé d’une école, en Russie, au fin fond de l’Oural, qui devient lanceur d’alerte presque malgré lui. Dans la petite ville deKarabach, connue pour être l’une des plus polluées au monde, avec son usine de cuivre, Pavel Talankin est habituellement chargé de filmer le quotidien des élèves ainsi que les événements festifs. Mais le jeune vidéaste voit le sien changer radicalement, en 2022, au lendemain de l’invasion à grande échelle de l’Ukraine. Très vite, des consignes émanant du Kremlin imposent aux enseignants de livrer l’explication officielle sur « l’opération militaire spéciale » visant à « dénazifier » l’ennemi. La cérémonie du drapeau fait désormais partie du rituel scolaire, tandis que les enfants, certains âgés de 8 ou 10 ans, doivent apprendre par cœur des analyses géopolitiques qu’ils n’ont pas la maturité ou le recul pour comprendre.
Cela s’appelle de la propagande, et ce documentaire, coréalisé par David Borenstein et Pavel Talankin, réussit à la faire ressentir quasi physiquement : chargé d’enregistrer avec sa caméra ces séances d’embrigadement (comme preuve d’obéissance du système éducatif), Pavel occupe un poste d’observateur privilégié, allant et venant dans les classes, captant les expressions des élèves, leurs regards dubitatifs, mais aussi leur absence de réaction. C’est l’un des moments les plus cruels du film, où l’on saisit comment, peu à peu, opère le lavage de cerveau, à coups de jeux militaires, voire de concours de lancer de grenades (!), alors que des mercenaires de Wagner, en treillis, rendent visite aux adolescents.
Tout en rondeur, dans son pull rose, Pavel, dit Pasha, n’a pas le profil de l’activiste qui serait prêt à affronter les forces de l’ordre lors de manifs antiguerre – sa mère, bibliothécaire à l’école et pro-Poutine, explique que son garçon a toujours été « différent ». Dévasté par ce qu’il voit, le trentenaire décide, dans un premier temps, de démissionner, avant de se raviser : il lui semble plus utile de documenter la militarisation en cours, pour alerter l’opinion internationale, mais aussi les citoyens russes. En lien avec son coréalisateur américain, basé à Copenhague, auquel il transfère les rushes, Pavel Talankin continue de filmer jusqu’en 2024, avant de fuir la Russie, ne s’y sentant plus en sécurité.
Journal filmé
Pavel Talankin réussit à trouver la bonne tonalité, se mettant légèrement en scène, racontant sur le mode du journal filmé un quotidien qui frise l’absurde et procure des sueurs froides. Comme lorsque Poutine annonce la création d’un mouvement pour les enfants, visant à inculquer dès le plus jeune âge l’amour inconditionnel de la patrie. Un professeur de l’école l’explique sans détour : « La patrie, vous l’aimez comme votre mère, et si vous ne l’aimez pas, vous êtes un parasite, et vous devez quitter le pays. » Plus tard, dans la cour, des fillettes et des garçons en uniforme s’initient à la marche militaire. Un ancien élève, « appelé » au front, comme il le dit sans plus de précision, se fait raser la tête lors d’une fête.
Certes, tous les adolescents n’ont pas l’esprit guerrier, certains perdent le sourire, telle cette jeune fille dont le grand frère a été mobilisé – elle viendra bientôt pleurer sa mort sur sa tombe. Au fil des mois, Pavel, qui était le confident des élèves, dans son bureau toujours ouvert, se retrouve seul. Les jeunes ne passent plus. Ont-ils changé, ou sont-ils inquiets à l’idée de se faire remarquer en compagnie de cet opposant au régime, qui n’hésite pas, un jour, à enlever le drapeau russe flottant sur le toit de l’école ? Face caméra, les mines retenues de ces jeunes nous hantent.
The New York Times, January 7
Bela Tarr, Titan of Slow-Moving Cinema, Is Dead at 70
Called his “masterpiece,” one film, “Satantango,” is seven hours long. A favorite of critics and film festivals, he focused on the “human dignity” of marginal characters.
Full text:
Bela Tarr, a Hungarian filmmaker whose slow-moving black-and-white epics, including “Satantango” and “Werckmeister Harmonies,” focused relentlessly on the condition of day-to-day living, died on Monday in a hospital in Budapest. He was 70.
Reka Gaborjani, his stepdaughter, said in an interview that he had died after a series of “long and serious” illnesses.
Gergely Karacsony, the mayor of Budapest and leader of the opposition to Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, said in a statement, “The freest man I’ve ever known is dead.” He saluted Mr. Tarr for championing “what is essential: human dignity.”
Mr. Tarr’s experimental style exploded ideas of time and narrative, with single shots lasting for minutes. He sought to penetrate surface emotions by having the camera linger on characters’ faces. Conventional plotting is diluted in the filmmaker’s extended takes. The bleak Hungarian landscape, composed of rain, wind, mud and squalid, semi-abandoned villages, is an integral element.
“Satantango” (1994), seven-and-half-hours long and based on the novel of the same title by the Nobel Prize-winning author Laszlo Krasznahorkai, follows displaced farm workers in a mad thievery scheme. “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000), also based on a novel by Mr. Krasznahorkai, concerns the arrival of a sinister circus in an impoverished provincial town and the unrest it provokes.
The average shot in “Satantango” lasts about two-and-a-half minutes; in a conventional Hollywood film, the average lasts two-and-a-half seconds.
These films were acclaimed at festivals in Europe and were praised by unconventional moviemakers like Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant. The writer Susan Sontag called “Satantango” “enthralling.”
The critic Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, writing in 2006, called “Satantango” “his masterpiece.” It showed Mr. Tarr’s ability to “find beauty in every miserable and mundane corner,” she noted.
A.O. Scott of The Times, writing in 2012, said there was always “something ancient and ageless about his films.” Mr. Tarr appeared somewhat out of place in modern cinema, Mr. Scott added, and was more like “a medieval stone carver who happened to get his hands on a camera.”
But Mr. Tarr’s work did not receive wide popular acceptance either in the United States or Europe.
Mr. Tarr insisted on the human value of the seemingly bedraggled and marginal characters his films focused on. “I’m working for 30 years, and I’m doing the same movie,” he said in an interview in 2011. “About human dignity. One thing is important: human dignity. Please don’t destroy it. Please don’t humiliate.”
The “poor, ugly, sad people” he filmed “have a right to life,” he said.
Rural communities in Hungary’s hinterlands were also the settings for Mr. Tarr’s movie “Damnation” (1988), which plays out in a mining settlement.
Mr. Krasznahorkai, a friend of his, collaborated with Mr. Tarr on the script for the director’s final feature film, “The Turin Horse” (2011), about the bleak lives and grueling work of a horse cart driver and his daughter as the world comes to an end. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Mr. Tarr, who was 56 at the time, surprised the audience in his acceptance speech by announcing that it would be his last movie.
Mr. Tarr said the decision to quit was simple. “We had made everything we wanted,” he told The Guardian in 2024. “The work is done, and you can take it or leave it.”
Bela Tarr Jr. was born in the southeastern university town of Pecs, Hungary, on July 21, 1955, and grew up in Budapest, the son of Bela Sr. and Mari Tarr. His father designed theater and movie sets, and his mother worked in a local theater giving actors prompts for their lines.
Mr. Tarr started making amateur films at 16 while working in other jobs, including in a shipyard and as a receptionist.
His professional filmmaking career began with domestic dramas, like his 1979 feature debut, “Family Nest,” made with the support of the experimental studio Bela Balazs in Budapest.
“I loved the cinema, but what you could see was so profoundly stupid!” Mr. Tarr told Le Monde in 2011. “Everything was false. I decided that if I ever got a camera, I would film real people, a real reality, real human conflict, real problems.”
Over eight subsequent movies, he developed a style that made him a critics’ favorite and regular on the international festival circuit. He worked on many of his movies with Agnes Hranitzky, his long-term partner, who edited the pictures. (She is Ms. Gaborjani’s mother.)
After releasing “The Turin Horse,” Mr. Tarr focused on running a film school called film.factory in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as teaching at other academies.
In his native Hungary, he was an outspoken critic of the country’s tilt toward national-populist politics under Mr. Orban. Mr. Tarr had numerous personal experiences of the dangers of authoritarian rule. In the 1980s, the Communist Hungarian government shuttered a film studio he ran with other experimental filmmakers.
In January 2025, Mr. Tarr married Amila Ramovic, a Bosnian art curator who had worked on museum shows with him. He is survived by her along with Ms. Hranitzky and Ms. Gaborjani.
Mr. Krasznahorkai, the author, said in an emailed statement on Monday that Mr. Tarr “was one of the greatest artists of our time. Unstoppable, brutal, unbreakable.”
“When art loses such a radical creator, for a while it seems that everything will be terribly boring,” Mr. Krasznahorkai added. “Who will be the next rebel here? Who will come forward? Who will kick everything apart?”
In an interview with the Hungarian newspaper Nepszava, Mr. Tarr defended himself against accusations that his filmmaking was remote and difficult.
“A man gets up at 4 in the morning, gets dressed, drives in the dark to get to the filming location by 6. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s windy. It’s raining,” he said, inserting an expletive. “An actor shows up, hung over and has a thousand problems. If I didn’t think you were all going to watch it, then why the hell would I do all this? I’m not a masochist.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/movies/bela-tarr-dead.html
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 7
Nachruf auf Béla Tarr: Ein negativer Prophet
Er war nicht nur einer der Großen des osteuropäischen, sondern einer der Größten des europäischen Films überhaupt: Nun ist Béla Tarr im Alter von 70 Jahren gestorben.
Full text:
Über Menschen, die ein besonders konzentriertes oder reduziertes Erzählkino mögen, ist ein höhnisches Klischee im Umlauf: Sie würden am liebsten einem Glas Wasser dabei zusehen, wie es durch Verdunstung allmählich leerer wird. Und das über Stunden und natürlich in Schwarz-Weiß. Die Filme, mit denen der ungarische Regisseur Béla Tarr berühmt wurde, kommen diesem Ideal eines „slow cinema“ radikal nahe. Zuvorderst der Monolith, der 1994 im Forum der Berlinale präsentiert wurde: „Satanstango“ dauert siebeneinhalb Stunden, und viele Minuten in diesen Stunden vergehen damit, dass jemand aus einer unwirtlichen Behausung einen Blick nach draußen wirft, auf eine flache Landschaft, auf die es unerbittlich regnet.
In diese nahezu stillstehende Zeit fällt allerdings ein Schimmer von Hoffnung: Ein gefährlicher Charismatiker namens Irimiás soll in das Dorf zurückkehren. Und während der lokale Arzt Ewigkeiten braucht, seinen Schnapsvorrat zu erneuern, wird „Sátántangó“ dann doch zu einer vollständigen, wenngleich eben drastisch entschleunigten Erzählung von einem Land, das sich aus dem Morast seines im Kommunismus zerstörten Zukunftssinns kaum mehr zu befreien vermag.
Menschen sind besondere Tiere
Béla Tarr hatte für sein Opus magnum eine kongeniale Vorlage: einen gleichnamigen Roman von László Krasznahorkai, mit dem er davor auch schon „Verdammnis“ (1988) gemacht hatte und danach noch „Die Werckmeister-Harmonien“ (2000), „Der Mann aus London“ (2007) und schließlich „Das Turiner Pferd“ (2011). Alle diese Adaptionen beruhen auf einer maximalen Erstreckung der Vorstellungskraft: denn Krasznahorkai, der dieses Jahr endlich den verdienten Nobelpreis bekam, ist ja im Grunde ein Sprachartist, jedoch mit einem Hang zum Allegorischen, wie ihn übrigens nicht zuletzt das ungarische Kino eines Miklós Jancsó suggerierte.
Tarr wiederum ging von der latenten Phantastik der Bücher aus und versetzte sie vor seiner Kamera in einen Schwebezustand zwischen äußerster Konkretion und symbolischer Aufladung. Die Menschen sind in dieser Vision von den Tieren und der Erde kaum zu trennen, und wie „Satanstango“ mit einer Viehherde begann, so endete Tarrs filmisches Werk 2011 mit dem Leidensweg eines Pferds und der Implikation, dass der Wahnsinn Nietzsches wohl nicht nur für ihn die folgerichtigste aller Reaktionen auf die Welt wäre.
Tarr erklärte damals nach „Das Turiner Pferd“ seinen Rückzug von der Filmkunst und hielt sich auch weitgehend daran. „Missing People“ (2019) gehört eher in die Welt des Theaters, die Wiener Festwochen hatten ihm einen Auftrag erteilt, und Tarr hatte 250 obdachlose Menschen für ein Projekt zusammengeholt. In gewisser Hinsicht schloss er damit an seine künstlerischen Anfänge an, als er in Budapest in den Siebzigerjahren mit Geschichten über „einfache“ Menschen begann. Die Begegnung mit Krasznahorkai inspirierte ihn zu einer stärkeren Betonung der formalen Aspekte des Kinos, die er dann zum Beispiel in einer Plansequenz (in einer langen, ununterbrochenen Kamerafahrt) in „Die Werckmeister-Harmonien“ zu einsamer Meisterschaft trieb.
Zu dem politischen Regime von Viktor Orbán blieb Tarr, der auch enge Beziehungen zu Berlin unterhielt und an der Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB) ein einflussreicher Lehrer war, immer auf Distanz. Sein eigenes Ungarn blieb einer forcierten ästhetischen Autonomie verhaftet, zu der nicht nur der Kommunismus, sondern sogar mehr noch das allein übrig gebliebene kapitalistische Weltsystem geradezu zwingt. Béla Tarr war, wie die Figur des Irimiás in „Satanstango“, ein negativer Prophet. Am Dienstag ist er nach langer und schwerer Krankheit im Alter von 70 Jahren gestorben.
The New York Times, January 6
Five Horror Movies to Stream Now
A new year brings thrillers galore, with evil emerging from a pandemic, a summer camp and a rideshare app.
Full text:
‘No More Time’
Death, isolation and conspiracy theories are just three of the pandemic-era horrors that drive this eerie thriller, the debut feature from the writer-director Dalila Droege.
To escape city life, a couple (Jennifer Harlow and Mark Reeb) drive until they reach a mostly deserted mountain town, one of many such communities barely hanging on in an America under siege by an unnamed contagion. Armed and on edge, they settle in at an abandoned home and get to know the few neighbors they have, including a little girl who claims her mother flies in the clouds. What this couple doesn’t know is that they’re being monitored by a mysterious stranger who communicates with trees, the kind of supernatural touch that Droege uses sparingly, to her film’s benefit.
What the story lacks in plot, it makes up for in a mood that’s as artful as it is disorienting. Jay Keitel’s stark cinematography and Mary Ellen Porto’s unnerving sound design do the heavy lifting, alternating between chilling and warm, mirroring how horribly topsy-turvy our world felt not that long ago. If you’re willing to revisit that sanity-crushing time, this film is worth the nightmare it might trigger.
HBO Max includes this dark comedy in its “Make It a Thriller Night” category. It’s not immediately evident why a film called “Friendship,” that stars Tim Robinson, a master of cringe comedy, would be in the same company as “Blood Simple.” But this feature debut from the writer-director Andrew DeYoung is just as dark as that and other films about awful people doing terrible things in ordinary circumstances.
As Robinson does in “The Chair Company,” his nutso HBO Max comedy series, he plays a suburban Everyman dad who makes well-intentioned but savagely awkward attempts to connect with other people. Here that man is Craig, a corporate middleman who befriends Austin (Paul Rudd), a handsome weatherman and guitarist in a punk band. Eager for bromantic affection, Craig falls hard for his friend, an obsession that quickly turns toxic.
Did I mention this is a comedy? Your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for Robinson’s Craig, a Frankenstein’s monster of Pee-wee Herman and Josef, the title killer in the “Creep” films and series. Let’s call it cringe horror.
‘Marshmallow’
Morgan (Kue Lawrence) gets shipped off to summer camp even though he’s still mourning the sudden death of his grandfather. One night, the counselors tell a campfire ghost story about a maniac doctor who created monsters out of mutilated bodies he stored at his cabin. The campers are warned that they may encounter the boogeyman doctor roaming the grounds.
It’s best not to know much more about Daniel DelPurgatorio’s shape-shifting film before watching, which you should, especially if you’re willing to have your heart broken. The film isn’t set in the 1980s, the golden era of summer camp horror movies, and for good reason: Its coming-of-age concerns — about loss, identity, memory — are more timeless, much like they are in “The Plague,” a stellar new horror film about tween anxieties.
Andy Greskoviak’s script loses steam midway through as it relies too heavily on cat-and-mouse games. But then comes a twist that subverts expectations about what came before and about what camp-set horror should be. This film made me deeply nostalgic for the 1980s, just not in the way I expected.
Marshmallow
‘In Our Blood’
Emily (Brittany O’Grady) reluctantly travels from Los Angeles to New Mexico to visit her estranged addict mother, Sam (Alanna Ubach), for Thanksgiving. Emily’s friend Danny (E.J. Bonilla), a cinematographer, joins her, insisting that it will be good for both women if they document their reunion on camera.
But the following day, Emily’s mother goes missing, triggering a search that her mother’s tight lipped friends don’t seem eager to join. A severed pig’s head that winds up in Emily and Danny’s hotel room is the first of many omens that something sinister is afoot.
This crafty little thriller looks and feels like nonfiction — no surprise, considering that it’s the first narrative feature from Pedro Kos, an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker. Kos and the screenwriter Mallory Westfall seamlessly and convincingly weave together fiction with documentary techniques to tell a compelling (if well-tread) story about addiction and its lasting scars. A genre detour at the end turns the mostly naturalistic film into something more supernatural and silly, but also enjoyably bloody.
In Our Blood
‘Self Driver’
D (an excellent Nathanael Chadwick) is a Toronto rideshare driver who spends his day picking up the usual finance bros, wasted party girls and older grouches. But he’s got bills to pay, so when one of his customers offers him the chance to work for a shady new company that pays its drivers generously, D accepts. But there are catches: Drivers must accept jobs, never talk to their customers and, if they turn down or quit a job, their fare will be docked or eliminated.
Determined to get paid, D does what the app tells him to, including, in the film’s most distressing scene, making $50 for every punch he lands on a sad sack customer — a kink-like transaction that D seems to relish.
Although it feels like a short film stretched thin, “Self Driver” is nonetheless a keenly-observed and engaging meditation on how soul-sucking the gig economy is, and the lengths people will go to make a paycheck in a world stacked against the working class.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/movies/horror-movies-streaming.html
The New York Times, January 5
In ‘Ann Lee,’ Dance Is the Fuel for a Godly 18th-Century Rave
“The Testament of Ann Lee,” starring Amanda Seyfried, tells the story of the Shakers and their feminist leader. Dance and music are its vital, mystical language.
Full text:
Breath is the key. Movement flickers in Amanda Seyfried’s eyes before flowing through her body as she exhales, her breath, tentative at first, becoming stronger and more emphatic. She tosses one arm into the air and then the other before twirling and joining in the collective rhythm of the people around her whose hands, like bouncing balls, fall and rebound on their chests.
In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” Seyfried plays the founder of the Shakers, the 18th-century religious sect named for the shaking and ecstatic dancing that characterized their worship. Directed by Mona Fastvold, the movie comes to life through music and dance to create a new kind of musical, passionate yet never overly performative.
Fastvold’s film tells the story of Lee’s life — born in Manchester, England, in 1736, she was a feminist who fought for equality for the sexes. But beyond that, Fastvold was struck by the Shakers’ embodiment of music and movement. “There were descriptions of, for lack of better words, rave parties that they would throw for days on end in Manchester, where they would just dance and dance and move and sing and shake and improvise vocally and physically,” she said in an interview with Seyfried and Celia Rowlson-Hall, the film’s choreographer. “Until people would call the cops and have them dragged away.”
Lee had four children who died in infancy. The trauma of losing her children led her — and the Shakers — to commit to celibacy, which promised a greater spiritual connection to God and promoted equality between the sexes. As a woman working against society’s norms to build a utopia, Seyfried, the film’s grounding force, is singular in her devotion.
Seyfried’s body and voice seem ignited from within. It was a blessing, she said, “to be able to explore something and live through their experience with movement — you’re so present.”
That idea of presence is integral to the dancing in “Ann Lee,” which has less to do with codified steps than surrendering to a higher power. Here, the Shakers play their bodies like instruments. Their arms — floating, suspending, swinging — are like wings, angelic and wild, as they try, ecstatically, to fly toward the divine. By the end, when the group settles in America, the choreography is less raw and more steady, reflecting the clean lines of Shaker design.
Seyfried, who starred in two “Mamma Mia!” films, can sing and dance, but the choreography in those movies was different. “It’s sugary sweet, it’s fun, it’s exciting, it moves you,” she said. “But this is more human. It took me a long time to connect to that part of the movement for me. But once you really know it, it’s a whole other tool. I’ve never gotten the opportunity to convey all these things with this type of physical expression.”
While Fastvold was writing the script with her husband, Brady Corbet — who directed “The Brutalist,” also written together — she was thinking of Rowlson-Hall, whose earthy movement, with prickly depth and sensitivity, can peel back surface emotions to reveal a character’s inner world. (The two worked together on “Vox Lux,” 2018.)
Rowlson-Hall was inspired by illustrations Fastvold found showing the formations of the Shakers in prayer. There were pencil drawings and paintings of the circular dance movements. Fastvold also found reconstructions of the movement on video, but, she said, “They seemed like their own interpretation.”
The choreography is mainly born from Rowlson-Hall’s imagination. “We were going through images and descriptions of these rave parties and just thinking, ‘To dance all through the night, not on drugs, not having sex — like wow,’” Rowlson-Hall said. “Where does the body get to go in this? And what’s propelling you and giving you that energy as you feed off the other people?”
The tone of the dancing was crucial. “It’s never a performance,” said Fastvold, who trained as a ballet dancer. “It’s never for anyone but you. My ultimate fear was that the dance would feel like a snappy number, like, ‘Look at this cool thing we’re doing here.’ It’s never about showing you some fabulous choreography.”
Instead the choreography is an extension of human expression: worship, pain, love and the lifelong grief that Lee suffered from losing her children. The cast includes both trained and untrained dancers. “What matters is that they knew what the movement meant,” Fastvold said. “It’s not about doing it right or wrong, it’s about intention.”
Though Seyfried is front and center, the cohesion of the group is essential, and if the intention of any of the dancers wavered, Fastvold added, “This whole collective experience would completely falter.”
Seyfried, as fluidly expert as she seems in the film, has little dance training. “I was in the third row of dance team,” she said dryly, and she took ballet classes as an adult in Los Angeles.
But working on “Ann Lee,” Seyfried, a trained singer, found a new relationship to her voice through Rowlson-Hall’s choreography. The process was life changing, she said, “in terms of how I relate to my body as a singer.” Her self-criticism melted away. She felt liberated.
While shooting the somber song “Beautiful Creatures,” she tried different approaches. “I would scream through the song, I would cry through the song, I would whisper through the song,” she said. “I got to explore all ways of making noise — primal, instinctual, angry, emotional, whatever it is.”
The result is gutting in the way that all of those textures, like frazzled emotions, remain.
In “Ann Lee,” the voice and the body become one, and movement is a part of the music. “Every exhale is in the songs,” Fastvold said. “Normally you would take that out. We make space in the music for the sound of her hand, her finger against the floor. I wanted the movement and the breaths and the world and the rain and the wind and the foot slips on the stomps and all of that continue to be equally represented.”
Rowlson-Hall realized that as Seyfried and the cast focused on their vocalization as they moved, she said, “It unlocked something. The way that I like to approach it is the more that I can take the dance away, then the more it can just be her moving through her life — her body and her grief and her joy.”
She didn’t run rehearsals in the usual way, repeating the choreography until it was fluent. “That’s not what it is,” Rowlson-Hall said. “It’s like if we found the container, and you’re holding all of that in, then go. I actually don’t care what it looks like because you are living in it honestly. And so it was very much like, this is what I’ve created. It’s yours now.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/arts/dance/ann-lee-amanda-seyfried-celia-rowlson-hall.html
Le Point, January 6
« Father Mother Sister Brother », « Ma frère », « Les Échos du passé »… Les films à voir (ou à éviter) cette semaine
Vous avez le choix entre le retour de Jim Jarmusch, un portrait de la jeunesse d’aujourd’hui, un western italien avec Nadia Tereszkiewicz, la ressortie d’un polar culte et d’autres beaux films d’auteur.
Read without Pay Wall:
The New York Times, January 5
The Top Movies of 2025, According to Times Readers
We asked you to vote on the best films of the year. The results ranged from big box office hits to small art-house indies.
Full text:
What are the best movies of 2025? After publishing our critics’ Top 10 lists, followed by New York Times experts’ 25 notable titles, we heard an earful from readers. So we asked you to vote and tell us which films, in your opinion, were the best of the year.
Thousands of you took us up on the challenge, and the results were fascinating: a mix of box office hits and art-house winners. In some ways you aligned with the critics, especially in your very top picks. But controversial films like “Eddington” and “Friendship” also ranked high with readers even as documentaries barely made the cut.
Here are the top 50 films you voted for, along with a look at whether those movies landed on our critics’ or experts’ lists.
1. ‘One Battle After Another’
No. 1 on Alissa Wilkinson’s list; No. 2 on Manohla Dargis’s list; also a 25 most notable title, according to our panel of experts.
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
2. ‘Sinners’
No. 1 on Dargis’s list; No. 8 on Wilkinson’s list; also a 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
3. ‘Weapons’
A 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
4. ‘Hamnet’
A 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Watch it in theaters.
5. ‘Frankenstein’
Read the review. Stream it on Netflix.
6. ‘Sentimental Value’
A 25 most notable title
Read the review. Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
7. ‘Train Dreams’
A 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Stream it on Netflix.
8. ‘Bugonia’
Read the review. Stream it on Peacock.
9. ‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’
Read the review. Stream it on Netflix.
10. ‘Eddington’
A 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
11. ‘Sorry, Baby’
No. 7 on Dargis’s list; also a 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
12. ‘It Was Just an Accident’
No. 4 on Dargis’s list; No. 2 on Wilkinson’s list; also a 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Buy it on most major platforms.
13. ‘Marty Supreme’
No. 3 on Dargis’s list; No. 4 on Wilkinson’s list; also a 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Watch it in theaters.
Have seen
14. ‘Superman’
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
15. ‘KPop Demon Hunters’
A 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Stream it on Netflix.
16. ‘The Secret Agent’
No. 8 on Dargis’s list; also a 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Watch it in theaters.
17. ‘Black Bag’
A 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Stream it on Amazon Prime.
18. ‘Wicked: For Good’
Read the review. Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
19. ‘F1: The Movie’
Read the review. Stream it on Apple TV.
20. ‘28 Years Later’
Read the review. Stream it on Netflix.
21. ‘Nuremberg’
Read the review. Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
22. ‘A House of Dynamite’
Read the review. Stream it on Netflix.
23. ‘Blue Moon’
Read the review. Rent or buy on most major platforms.
24. ‘Friendship’
A 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
25. ‘The Phoenician Scheme’
Read the review. Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
26. ‘Rental Family’
Read the review. Watch it in theaters.
27. ‘The Life of Chuck’
Read the review. Stream it on Hulu.
28. ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’
A 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
29. ‘Sirat’
30. ‘Jay Kelly’
Read the review. Stream it on Netflix.
31. ‘Mickey 17’
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
32. ‘Zootopia 2’
Read the review. Watch it in theaters.
33. ‘Nouvelle Vague’
Read the review. Stream it on Netflix.
34. ‘Companion’
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
35. ‘Materialists’
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
36. ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’
Read the review. Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
37. ‘The Mastermind’
No. 10 on Dargis’s list.
Read the review. Stream it on Mubi; rent or buy it on most major platforms.
38. ‘No Other Choice’
Read the review. Watch it in theaters.
39. ‘Twinless’
Read the review. Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
40. ‘Bring Her Back’
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
41. ‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’
Read the review. Stream it on Paramount+.
42. ‘I’m Still Here’
Read the review. Stream it on Netflix.
43. ‘Warfare’
Read the review. Stream it on HBO Max.
44. ‘Roofman’
Read the review. Stream it on Paramount+.
45. ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’
Read the review. Buy or rent it on most major platforms.
46. ‘The Naked Gun’
Read the review. Stream it on Paramount+.
Have seen
47. ‘Come See Me in the Good Light’
Read the review. Stream it on Apple TV.
Want to watch
48. ‘The Perfect Neighbor’
A 25 most notable title.
Read the review. Stream it on Netflix.
49. ‘Die My Love’
Read the review. Stream it on Mubi; rent or buy it on most major platforms.
50. ‘The History of Sound’
Read the review. Stream it on Mubi; rent or buy it on most major platforms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/movies/2025-best-movies-marty-supreme.html
Le Point, December 31
Bardot : quand Éros défiait Thanatos
Fière d’appartenir au beau sexe, cherchant à fuir la vieillesse, « la reine Bardot », décédée dimanche 28 décembre, incarnait l’intemporel du désir.
Full text:
Cimetière de Saint-Tropez, 1983. Une belle femme en short caresse la tombe de ses parents, puis se redresse et dit : « La mort est une horreur. On soigne son corps, sa beauté, pour finir par pourrir. J’y pense chaque jour. » Brigitte Bardot pensait à la mort comme ça : en short. Elle la niait de tout son corps, lui opposant ses seins, ses reins, ses jambes, sa voix, comme venue d’un lieu très doux, le sexe peut-être. C’est ce qu’il faut garder d’elle. Éros contre Thanatos, cette fierté d’appartenir à ce qu’on appelait encore le beau sexe. Ou, simplement, au sexe. Une femme, rien qu’une femme.
1958. Elle se baigne et fait la fête à Saint-Tropez. Elle s’appelle BB. La première people à être nommée par ses initiales (c’est le titre de ses Mémoires : Initiales B.B.), évocatrices de sa moue d’enfant. À moins que ce ne soit d’un derrière qui, tout en restant comme celui des tout-petits, qu’on regarde sans concupiscence, devint planétairement célèbre avec Le Mépris (« Et mes fesses, tu les aimes, mes fesses ? » demandait-elle à Michel Piccoli).
Jamais impudique, si nue fût-elle, BB reste un cas. Moralistes, psychanalystes et sociologues ont tenté de comprendre. Beauvoir, qui en devina une part – « Quelque chose de hautain dans son visage boudeur, un visage qui est ce qu’il est » – mais qui l’enrôla sous la bannière féministe. Duras, qui parla de « la reine Bardot ». De Gaulle, qui aimait sa « simplicité de bon aloi » mais la voyait comme une « meilleure source de devises que Renault ». Ou ces sages devenus hargneux qui s’en prirent à la femme, créée non par Dieu – comme le pensaient Roger Vadim et les spectateurs sidérés à qui il révéla cette enfant dans la femme et cette femme tout enfant encore – mais par le diable. Ou encore ceux qui virent en elle un défi à la morale et un outrage public à la pudeur alors qu’elle n’était qu’un attentat à la laideur, ce qui est plus impardonnable.
N’était-elle que le révélateur de son temps, l’époque du scoubidou, des ballerines et du hula-hoop, de la transgression des manières d’être et de penser des années 1950 ? Pas seulement : elle incarnait l’intemporel du désir. Elle, si animale, n’aima-t-elle tant les bêtes que parce qu’elles ne parlent pas, comme si on leur avait dit « sois belle et tais-toi », comme à elle, ou parce qu’elles ne trahissent ni ne mentent, tout comme elle, toujours fidèle à ses amitiés comme à ses détestations ? Pas sympathique d’avoir plus d’empathie pour un taureau de corrida que pour un enfant bombardé au Vietnam, mais c’était son choix, assumé avec courage. Droite et de droite, BB, qui ne détestait pas être aimée, aimait être détestée.
Incarne-t-elle la France – qui ne cessera de la regarder et, tout en aimant la haïr, de l’aimer, malgré tout –, la chute dans la vieillesse, les attitudes haineuses contre tout ce qui change et menace l’ordre ancien ? Mais de l’aimer, comme disait Piccoli, « totalement, tendrement, tragiquement ». Car il y a du tragique dans cette traversée de nos songes sur l’écran blanc de nos nuits noires. Une sorte de Norma Desmond à la Madrague, sauf que, au contraire de l’actrice finie de Sunset Boulevard, Bardot n’a pas voulu contrer le destin et a toujours refusé de revenir au cinéma comme l’ombre d’elle-même.
Humaine
Aujourd’hui, on n’a toujours pas compris de quoi BB était le nom. Renonçons à comprendre, et même à décrire : le portrait de Brigitte Bardot, pas besoin de l’écrire, il est dans ce distique d’Angelus Silesius : « La rose est sans pourquoi, elle fleurit parce qu’elle fleurit/ Elle ne se soucie pas d’elle-même, elle ne se demande pas si on la voit. » Bardot, c’est pareil : elle est sans pourquoi. Les pourquoi, elle les a emportés avec elle.
Un mythe, avec ce mélange de sacré et d’immonde que la psychanalyse y révèle ? Pas seulement. Ce que je veux garder de BB est autre chose, presque rien. Par exemple, sa façon très classe d’être humaine avec l’actrice Maria Schneider, rencontrée en 1969 sur le tournage d’un film, Les Femmes. Toute sa vie, elle l’aima, l’aida, la protégea, secrètement, loin du show-biz et du show-off. Jusqu’à la fin de Maria : « Elle a été un peu, beaucoup, passionnément ma fille. »
BB, froide et distante, n’aimant qu’elle-même, et encore, au passé ? Non. Une femme qui détestait la vieillesse, la maladie et la mort. Une femme, rien qu’une femme.
https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/brigitte-bardot-eros-contre-thanatos-6DR5NDSA4JAUNN4YSP7F6HXV5U/
Le Point, December 31
« Qui brille au combat », « Los Tigres », « Magellan », « La Dernière Valse »… Les films à voir (ou à éviter) cette semaine
Vous avez le choix entre un film sur Magellan porté par Gael García Bernal, le premier long-métrage de Joséphine Japy, et une poignée de films d’auteur qui valent le détour.
Full text:
Cette semaine marque l’ouverture de l’année cinéma 2026. Dans l’ombre du raz-de-marée Avatar 3, du succès toujours solide de Zootopie 2 et de l’adaptation de La Femme de ménage, qui cartonne en France avec plus de 165 000 entrées en une semaine, la première semaine de l’année réserve pourtant une sélection de films bien plus stimulants qu’il n’y paraît.
Au programme : un drame intimiste et délicat autour du handicap avec Qui brille au combat, premier long-métrage de Joséphine Japy ; un thriller sous-marin tendu et spectaculaire signé Alberto Rodríguez avec Los Tigres ; un film sensible sur le deuil et la transmission venu de Hongkong, La Dernière Valse ; une fresque historique ambitieuse consacrée à l’explorateur portugais dans Magellan, porté par Gael García Bernal ; un drame politique et intime ancré dans l’Arménie contemporaine avec Le Pays d’Arto ; enfin, un premier film singapourien nerveux et prometteur autour de l’escrime, En garde.
« Qui brille au combat » ★★★
Drame intimiste
Bertille (Sarah Pachoud) est atteinte d’un handicap lourd au diagnostic incertain, le syndrome de Phelan-McDermid. Marion, sa sœur aînée (Angelina Woreth), prend soin d’elle au quotidien, tandis que ses parents, Madeleine et Gilles (Mélanie Laurent et Pierre-Yves Cardinal), pris dans un stress permanent, tentent d’organiser au mieux leur vie de famille sans se décourager. Lorsqu’un nouveau diagnostic est posé pour Bertille, l’espoir renaît…
Avec son premier film comme réalisatrice, l’actrice Joséphine Japy (Neuilly sa mère, Respire, et la série Tapie) évoque en toute simplicité et sans misérabilisme la maladie génétique de sa sœur Bertille, prénom qui signifie « celle qui brille au combat ». Et il s’agit bien du combat de ses proches pour la surveiller, la protéger dans sa confrontation avec le quotidien, en essayant d’échapper au découragement.
Dans la lignée des films sur le handicap (Hors normes du tandem Nakache-Toledano, La Guerre est déclarée de Valérie Donzelli, Un p’tit truc en plus d’Artus), thématique ultra sensible dans laquelle la critique formelle est exclue de facto, Joséphine Japy s’inscrit dans le drame intimiste, porté par des interprètes inspirés et pudiques.
« Los Tigres » ★★★★
Un thriller qui tient la plongée
Ce polar singulier signé Alberto Rodríguez plonge dans les eaux troubles d’un port industriel où Antonio et Estrella, frère et sœur scaphandriers, inspectent et réparent les coques des cargos. Quand Antonio découvre de la cocaïne dissimulée sous un navire, la tentation du vol et du deal s’impose comme une issue à ses problèmes financiers. Le début d’une immersion sans retour dans les embrouilles…
Rodríguez (La Isla mínima) signe un thriller sous-marin d’une prouesse technique remarquable, visuellement scotchant, porté par le duo Antonio de la Torre / Bárbara Lennie. Au-delà du suspense, le film ausculte une fratrie soudée par un passé douloureux et dépeint avec justesse le quotidien de ces ouvriers de l’extrême. Les séquences sous-marines, filmées avec une précision documentaire, créent une tension suffocante à mesure que l’étau se resserre autour d’Antonio. De la belle ouvrage.
« La Dernière Valse » ★★★★
Six Feet Under sous les néons de Hongkong
La Dernière Valse s’ouvre sur une idée très concrète : que devient le sens des traditions lorsqu’elles se heurtent aux contraintes du réel ? Dans le Hongkong post-pandémie, Dominic, organisateur de mariages surendetté, reprend une entreprise de pompes funèbres et découvre, au fil des cérémonies, que dire adieu ne relève pas seulement de la logistique, mais d’un geste chargé de symboles, notamment taoïstes.
Énorme succès public à Hongkong, le film d’Anselm Chan Mou Yin évite pourtant le pathos appuyé. À la manière de Six Feet Under, il oscille constamment entre des situations parfois comiques (portées par l’humour très hongkongais de Dayo Wong) et des moments plus graves, presque méditatifs, sur la mort, la transmission et la place des vivants.
Le casting impressionne par sa justesse. Michael Hui, immense figure du cinéma local, campe un maître taoïste à la fois rigide et bouleversant, incarnation d’un monde révélant autant sa sagesse que ses angles morts. Autour de lui, La Dernière Valse interroge avec finesse notre rapport aux traditions : faut-il les préserver intactes ou accepter qu’elles se transforment pour survivre ? Sans jamais trancher frontalement, le film rappelle que les rituels, loin d’être figés, sont avant tout des lieux de dialogue entre les générations et, peut-être, une manière d’apprendre à mieux vivre en acceptant notre propre finitude.
« Magellan » ★★★
Un film fascinant, historiquement discutable
Le cinéaste philippin Lav Diaz est connu pour ses films longs et exigeants. Sa version idéale de Magellan dure… neuf heures! Mais pour cette sortie en salle, il faut se satisfaire d’un montage de deux heures quarante où l’on suit le navigateur – joué par Gael Garcia Bernal qui a dû apprendre le portugais pour l’occasion – de Séville jusqu’aux Philippines avec un passage en Amérique du Sud. Le projet est clair : il s’agit de raconter Magellan du point de vue philippin en questionnant le récit occidental sur le grand explorateur.
Pour servir son propos, Lav Diaz se permet un certain nombre de libertés qui conduisent les spécialistes – comme Michel Chandeigne, conseiller scientifique de l’exposition qui a lieu actuellement au Musée de la Marine à Paris – à le juger totalement décalé par rapport à la réalité historique. Reste un film contemplatif et fort sur la solitude et l’ennui des marins, et l’obsession d’un personnage grandiose dont la folie évoque Aguirre de Werner Herzog.
« Le Pays d’Arto » ★★★★
L’Arménie au cœur
Céline (Camille Cottin) débarque en Arménie afin de régulariser la mort d’Arto, son mari. Au fil de ses démarches, elle découvre qu’il a changé d’identité, qu’il s’est battu sur le front d’Agdam et que ses anciens compagnons le tiennent pour un déserteur. Comment distinguer le vrai du faux et reconstituer le parcours d’un fantôme mystérieusement disparu, sans doute suicidé ? En compagnie d’une guide (Zar Amir) qui mène la résistance contre l’Azerbaïdjan, Céline tente de découvrir la vérité dans un pays marqué par la guerre.
« Je voulais faire découvrir mon pays et mon histoire. C’est un film d’après-guerres sur les traumatismes, les fantômes, le deuil, la transmission, l’amour. J’ai repris l’écriture du film pendant la guerre, c’était un travail douloureux », confie la réalisatrice franco-arménienne Tamara Stepanyan, issue de l’école du documentaire (Mes fantômes arméniens). L’amour pour son pays lui permet de dépeindre, avec une mise en scène sobre, le combat des Arméniens pour leur identité et leur liberté.
Tout est dit à travers le regard de ses interprètes arméniens et la présence de Camille Cottin, sobre et juste, dans ce personnage de femme marquée par le deuil, qu’elle voit comme une Antigone moderne. Sur un drame qui se joue toujours en Arménie, dans l’indifférence polie du monde, Arménie, de Tamara Stepanyan, est un film digne, sans effets inutiles, ce qui le rend d’autant plus pertinent, poignant et authentique.
« En Garde » ★★★
Escrime et faux-semblants
Premier long-métrage de la réalisatrice singapourienne Nelicia Low, En garde raconte l’histoire de deux frères liés par l’escrime et par un passé douloureux. Le cadet, jeune espoir de la discipline, voit revenir dans sa vie son frère aîné, tout juste sorti de prison après un accident mortel survenu lors d’un match. Peu à peu, leur relation se resserre dans un mélange d’admiration et de malaise, jusqu’à faire naître le doute sur la véritable nature du drame.
Le film est porté par une atmosphère tendue et par des scènes d’escrime efficaces, souvent très réussies. Rien d’étonnant à cela : la réalisatrice connaît bien cet univers pour avoir elle-même été escrimeuse de haut niveau. Les acteurs sont justes, et la relation entre les deux frères est assez captivante à observer. En garde avance ainsi comme un thriller discret, plus psychologique que spectaculaire.
C’est surtout dans sa dernière partie que le film laisse un peu sur sa faim. Le twist final peut dérouter et paraît parfois un peu trop invraisemblable, là où le récit avait jusque-là su maintenir une tension et un mystère convaincants.
The New York Times, December 30
Everything (and Everyone) Brigitte Bardot Scorned
Full text:
In Brigitte Bardot’s death I see the passing of a generation: the Frenchwomen who tried to find a path to autonomy in the 1950s and ’60s. One of the last things Ms. Bardot did was write a book, published earlier this year in French, an abecedarium titled “Mon BBcédaire.” The book, a not very chic compendium of thoughts scrawled in her own handwriting, received a tepid reaction from the French press, who were mostly disappointed by her portrayal of France. (“F is for … France, dear country of my youth! She has grown dull, sad, submissive, ailing — damaged, ravaged, banal, vulgar.”)
Young Brigitte Bardot, the actress, was a vessel for the imagination. Her sun-drenched, instinctual sexuality onscreen thrilled France, and then the whole world. She seemed to be without artifice, feral and physical. Men projected onto her, but she could not be possessed. She was the very idea of a postwar Frenchwoman: provocative, apparently in control. They liked men, and were convinced that they could manipulate them to their whims.
As a girl, Ms. Bardot left her strict, bourgeois, Catholic industrialist family for the life of a bohemian; at 39, she gave up being a film actress and retreated from the public’s adulation (and later foreclosed any potential return to it). She pursued animal liberation with intensity. “Animals saved me,” she once said. “Without them, I would have committed suicide.”
As her life progressed, Ms. Bardot provoked in new, often bigoted ways. She tarnished her legacy with her frequent racist, Islamophobic, homophobic and anti-trans comments and by mocking the #MeToo movement. I grew up around strong Frenchwomen of Ms. Bardot’s type, beautiful and independent, yes, but often cutting and cruel. They said horrendous, retrograde things with a mischievous twinkle in their eye.
I admit I loved those women, even as I strongly disagreed with their beliefs. They were not sweet; they were formidable. My grandmother lived alone on a houseboat on the Seine after divorcing my grandfather in the early 1970s. She gave me advice about men: “You must keep them like a pretty puppy on a leash, nice to show off but never to be taken seriously.” And to my surprise, she was completely accepting when I told her I dated women. She told me that she, too, had been in love with a woman once — a famous tennis player who drove a racecar, owned a pet cheetah and looked a bit like my grandfather. She would never date a woman again, she said. It was far too painful.
Brigitte Bardot died on Sunday. Let her memorialize herself in her own words.
Reading them, I laugh, often despite myself.
A comme ABANDON (A IS FOR ABANDON)
Absolute distress.
D comme Désir (D is for desire)
An erotic compulsion for another, which can go as far as murder!
E comme Enfer (E is for hell)
It exists on Earth.
F comme Fumer (F is for smoking)
It’s marvelous! It’s forbidden! Everything that does us good is forbidden. I’m sick of it!
I love smoking, I’ve always smoked and I always will. I like to defy the forbidden, it is my passion!
G comme Grossesse (G is for pregnancy)
A degrading punishment imposed on women’s bodies after they have given themselves to the love of a man … it transforms the lover into a disfigured progenitor who no longer inspires mad desire. It is the beginning of the deterioration of a couple’s relationship.
That last part, at least, was not Ms. Bardot’s problem. Nor my grandmother’s. My grandmother is still alive, at 95, and I love her still. These women, of a passing generation, expected nothing from anyone, and gave little grace in return. I wish they had known how to be gentler — with the world, and with themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/opinion/brigitte-bardot-france.html
The New York Times, December 30
Park Chan-wook and the Funny Thing About Stomach-Churning Horror
When American studios wouldn’t back his film about a laid-off manager committing gruesome murders, the director returned to Korea. Now he has a hit on his hands.
Full text:
Park Chan-wook is one of Asia’s most famous directors, an auteur beloved as much for his complex, often critical visions of his home country of South Korea as for scenes of stomach-churning horror. But when Park started work on “No Other Choice,” he really wanted to direct it as an American film, so much so that he spent 12 frustrating years trying to get financing from Hollywood studios. The source material, Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 horror thriller novel, “The Ax,” was based in the United States, “so it just felt very natural to me,” he said. “I didn’t put too much other thought in it.”
Beyond the novel’s suburban East Coast setting, the plot and lead character also felt particularly American to the Korean director: a manager of a paper company has his life upended by corporate downsizing, and to secure a new job, he sets about murdering his rivals in increasingly gruesome ways. “This is a story about the capitalist system,” Park said. “I thought it would be best told in America, since America is the heart of capitalism.”
Tightfisted studios in the United States had other ideas, however, and Park ultimately made the film in South Korea. But the move had its upsides, like the chance to reunite with Lee Byung Hun (“Squid Game,” “KPop Demon Hunters”), the Korean superstar who first worked with Park on the 2000 film “Joint Security Area,” and who plays Mansu, the beleaguered former manager, in this one.
Back then, neither of them were doing nearly as well as they are now. “Director Park had failed in his first two films, and I had failed in my first four films, so there wasn’t really a great sense of hope about it,” Lee recalled. But “Joint Security Area” proved a breakout film for both director and star, winning multiple awards and becoming the highest grossing feature in Korean history at the time.
Like that film, “No Other Choice” was a box office hit in South Korea, winning film festival awards and garnering rave reviews. In the U.S., where it arrived Thursday in theaters, it has earned three Golden Globe nominations and has been shortlisted for best international feature at the Oscars.
For awards season, Park has gotten advice from his longtime close friend, Bong Joon Ho, whose dark comedy “Parasite” won best picture in 2020. “Since he’s already been through an Oscar campaign with ‘Parasite,’ he scared me a lot about them,” Park said. “He would tell me things like, you have to make sure to take care of your health.”
It’s not just the jet lag from all those trips from Korea to the U.S. and back again, Park said. “I think people here are very used to standing with a cocktail and talking with strangers every day, but that’s a very foreign act for all of us in Korea. On top of that, Bong and I are both very introverted, which makes it even harder.”
Park has made a string of critically acclaimed films since he first began thinking about what would become “No Other Choice.” There was “The Handmaiden” (2016), which was the first Korean film to win a BAFTA Award, and “Decision to Leave,” for which Park won best director at Cannes in 2022.
In person, the director, 62, is soft-spoken and warm, dressed in a maroon sweater over a white collared shirt, not quite what one might expect from the creator of some of the most intense and visually stunning films of his generation. Speaking through an interpreter on a recent morning at a restaurant at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles, he described the long slog to adapt “No Other Choice” since falling in love with the novel in 2005.
“There’s so much I now regret,” he said.
Fittingly for a film that hinges on money, the struggles began over financing. “It’s not that they offered me nothing,” he said of the Hollywood executives he spoke with. But it wasn’t nearly what he felt he needed to make the film.
Still, Park was enticed by the prospect of shooting at the gigantic U.S. paper mills he had seen on numerous location scouts, and unnerved by the daunting prospect of transporting his American hero and already-written English screenplay to Busan. There would be so much to change, he thought.
“Years ago, one of our producers, Michèle Ray-Gavras, actually suggested to me, since we can’t make this an American film, why don’t we just make it into a Korean film,” he said. “But I just kept waiting and ignored her suggestion. But now that we’ve made it into a Korean film, I’m thinking, why didn’t I just do this a lot earlier?”
Indeed, elements of the film that feel particularly Korean aren’t. A fancy eel dinner given as a pre-layoff omen? “I just made that up,” Park admitted. The post-layoff inspirational seminars, where the recently sacked self-soothe with words of affirmation? “My co-writer Don McKellar found out that people do that in job training programs in America.”
There were plenty of Korean elements, however, like the family’s nearly unbearable grief over losing their Netflix account. “In America, you have other streaming platforms like Paramount or Disney or Max, but in Korea, people mostly just watch Netflix,” the director said. The distressing loss of face when the husband is laid off also had a particularly Korean feel. “The Korean audience can empathize with that more because Korean society still has traces of Confucian values, where being a proficient husband and father is really closely connected to your job, and making money from it.”
The film is one of Park’s funniest, with much of the humor rooted in misery and misfortune. In one scene, our hero, Mansu, buries a rival neck deep in the ground and jams sausages and vodka down the man’s gullet, all part of a plan to make it look as if the man drank himself to death. We feel bad for Mansu, Park said, for being “forced” into this situation, while simultaneously horrified by the violence.
“You’re watching him stuff these disgusting sausages in, but then he’s also disgusted by what he’s doing, so he almost barfs,” Park said. “So that part is funny, but it’s mixed with all these different emotions that you usually don’t feel at the same time.”
Many of Park’s films are full of such comically dark moments, like “Oldboy,” with its “when will it end?” single-take fight scene in which the hero dispatches goon after goon with a hammer in his hand and a knife in his back, or “Decision to Leave,” in which a married detective develops an awkward crush on a woman he suspects threw her husband off a cliff.
“The humor I like comes from absurd situations,” he said. “But I think what I find funny isn’t too different from anybody else.”
Lee disagreed. “I think when he tries to do humor, it sometimes skips a couple of steps, so it can go over people’s heads,” he said. “I tell him, humor can’t be that deep! It should just be one step, and relatively intuitive.”
The author Viet Thanh Nguyen worked with Park on the HBO adaptation of his novel about a Communist spy in post-Vietnam War California, “The Sympathizer.” He said, “Park didn’t make any jokes in my presence.”
The author recalled an evening when Park was at his home in Los Angeles with two other producers. “He said, ‘You know what? What if we had all the white characters played by one white guy?’ Now, that’s a funny thing. But he didn’t smile when he said it. He was just thinking of it as an artistic and intellectual choice.” (Robert Downey Jr. ended up playing the many white characters.)
With “No Other Choice,” one of Park’s biggest challenges was making Mansu’s motivations believable. “I had a lot of conversations with Byung Hun where he asked me, ‘Just because someone lost their job, would they become a serial killer?’” he said. “He even argued that he himself wouldn’t become a serial killer in that situation.”
“So I told him, the character I want you to portray in this film is not you,” Park continued. “It’s someone who would become a serial killer because they lost their job.”
Park and Lee have had a few such philosophical conversations over the years. After the release of “Oldboy” and the Vengeance trilogy that film is part of, Lee asked the director, “Where do all these violent and angry emotions come from? And Director Park said that perhaps because I have such a quiet and normal life, I’m able to express these extreme emotions through my imagination.”
And it’s not as if theatergoers have to empathize with Park’s motley crew of cheats, murderers and scoundrels, or necessarily should, the director said: “I don’t think the sole purpose of film or art is for the audience or the reader to think, oh, I would also do that. I can completely understand why they do that.”
He continued, “It’s actually to convincingly propose that there are people who would act differently from how I would in this world,” he continued. “I think that allows the audience and the reader to expand their imaginations and their understanding of mankind.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/movies/park-chan-wook-no-other-choice-korea.html