It is a very strange apocalypse that the emergence of this work in Anne Fontaine's career.Even if the filmmaker continuously expressed his interest in the stories a disturbing bit, these took place in ordered families, with well-waxed furniture and parquet floors;perversity and transgressive audacity remained domestic, circumscribed to the intimate perimeter.The innocent changes the situation.
First real historical film of the director (Coco before Chanel (2009), as her name suggests, was a wobbly portrait of a Gabrielle Chanel in full ascent), he especially extracts from the bourgeois story to invest an elsewhere, or rather elsewhere.The context of the war, the situation of the others (and no longer the couple's ego, of the upside down family);Learning the body-spirit dialogue and especially the place of women, the primary universal victims of conflicts, draw here the lines of force of what is not a reconstruction.History could unfortunately take place in contemporary times: the innocent shows that doctors must contravene military and religious rules to treat so -called collateral victims.This is still the case today.
Claiming Bernanos, and registering in a form of narrative asceticism, Anne Fontaine does not omit the flesh: in parallel with the sequences in the closed gray of the convent or the icy night of the lonely forests, it instills parentheses of life inmiddle of the rubble of the apparently improbable paradox war.With small discrepancies, ruptures, it advances two disjoint worlds (the lay and the spiritual) having known separately the same barbarism towards a serious light, offering them to share a common liberation, if not irenic.
Interpreter of the melancholy surgeon courting the heroine, Vincent Macaigne has among the strangeness of the film.He owes his presence to Anne Fontaine, who bet, precisely, "on his quirk, his fantasy, his irony.Until now, it has always been in a little sore roles: blur, poorly shaved, hair anyhow.The director continues: "I immediately made her cut her hair and put a corset.This bodily element changed its attitude, stylized it.He is not the beautiful surgeon that we expect to see in a romantic couple;He makes it unconventional.This is good: the only eligible convention in a war film is that of Geneva.VR
The innocent of Anne Fontaine (FR, 1h55), with Lou de Laâge, Vincent Macaigne, Agata Buzek
By Anne Fontaine (FR, 1h40) with Lou de Laâge, Vincent Macaigne...
By Anne Fontaine (FR, 1h40) with Lou de Laâge, Vincent Macaigne...
voir la fiche du filmPoland, December 1945.Mathilde Beaulieu, a young internal of the Red Cross responsible for treating French survivors before their repatriation, is called to help by a Polish nun.First reluctant, Mathilde finally agrees to follow her in her convent where thirty Benedictines live cut off from the world.