DESPATCH — Guillaume Canet in acid rain apocalyptic, Romain Duris faces mutants: with the release of ambitious films, the fall promises to be a fantastic one for French cinema.
Long reluctant to produce genre films, the French 7th art no longer balks, with headliners appreciated by the public.
Wednesday , Pathé releases “Acide”, by Just Philippot, a big-budget project that intends to follow in the footsteps of American productions, like “The Road” with Viggo Mortensen.
This survival film pushes popular stars Guillaume Canet and Laetitia Dosch, a couple accompanied by their daughter, played by a newcomer, Patience, to their limits. Munchenbach.
After a very unexpected introduction, where Canet plays a “yellow vest”, the film finds the more traced tracks of a post-apocalyptic film, where the family can only count on itself to survive in the face of deadly and uncontrollable acid rain that eats away at buildings and bodies.
For director Just Philippot, who had been noticed with “La Nuée”, a rural drama mixed with fantasy about a carnivorous locust farm, “creating a climate of terror, strong emotions, is great” because it allows messages to be better conveyed, environmentalist for example, he explained to AFP at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film was presented out of competition.
“It's a type of cinema that we're not used to seeing in France,” confirms Guillaume Canet. “He conveys important messages about the clouds looming on the horizon, without giving lessons,” with this story of a family put to the test.
Family ties are also discussed in “Le royaume animal”, with Romain Duris and the young Paul Kircher (revealed in “Le Lycéen” by Christophe Honoré), which is due out on October 4.
Like “Acide”, the film was presented at Cannes, opening the “Un certain regard” selection.
Probably one of the most ambitious and unclassifiable French films of the new season, “Le royaume animal” imagines that a part of humans has begun to mutate into an animal form, from octopus to wolf.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000Faced with his wife's mutation, transferred to a closed care center, François (Romain Duris) will have to reinvent himself, and also rethink his relationship with his son Emile (Paul Kircher). Far from the apocalypse, the film imagines a cohabitation between species.
“I like the mix of genres,” confides to AFP the director Thomas Cailley, who had already signed “Les combattantes” with Adèle Haenel in 2014.
“Le royaume animal” mixes initiation film, dramatic comedy and fantasy, “like nesting dolls,” he adds. The arrival of mutant animals is a way of studying “how people position themselves morally” in relation to otherness, he notes.
To avoid the cardboard effect, the director used a whole series of techniques, from drawings of mutants imagined in collaboration with the comic book author Frederik Peeters, to mixed makeup, set or digital effects.
Not to mention a long choreography work with the actors, who appropriated the cries and movements of the birds.
Will these films fill the theaters??
The latest attempts in the field of auteur fantasy films have not really found their audience: “Teddy”, a werewolf film with Anthone Bajon and “La nuée”, released in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, only attracted 35,000 and 50,000 spectators each. “La Tour”, a horror film set in a housing project, had 31,000 admissions at the beginning of the year.
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