After weeks relatively infertile in discoveries on the big screens, that of Wednesday October 29 stands out for an overabundance which also risks harming the titles which appear there.
Besides the very remarkable The Stranger, by François Ozon, we find there the reunion of the imperturbably formidable Hong Sang-soo, the revelation of a first film full of finesse and emotion, signed Laura Carreira, Portuguese director living in Scotland, as well as the intriguing and multifaceted feature film by Thierry Klifa, carried by the genius of Isabelle Huppert.
“On Falling”, by Laura Carreira
They are called the pickers. We never see them, but we vaguely guess their existence, somewhere in the flow of objects of all kinds which now flock to everyone’s homes. Aurora, played by the impressive Joana Santos, is picker (or order preparer).
All day long, she circulates with her trolley between the shelves of the online shipping platform that employs her, controlled and monitored by the connected machine that she keeps constantly hanging around her neck. On the shelves, in a disorder deliberately organized because it is more profitable, there is the gigantic accumulation of mostly useless and harmful objects which are constantly purchased, transported, delivered.
In the bays, under permanent pressure, she is an incarnation like millions of ultra-modern solitude. Which is found, different and identical, outside of work, at the workers’ hostel where Aurora, a Portuguese employee of the Scottish subsidiary of a logistics multinational, lives.
She has a job, a salary, a place to live, we’re not in the depths, we’re at the bottom. The real background of our common world, invisible and this, over the days, weeks, months, without any particular crisis. Everyone Aurora meets falls somewhere between genuine kindness and a correct distance consistent with labor law and social customs.
It is one of the magnificent choices of the film to refuse the dramatic crisis, which nevertheless has a hundred reasons to arise in the course of everyday life. Oh yes, a colleague committed suicide. But we didn’t really know him, we barely saw him, he seemed nice though.
Alongside this heroine, filmed with exceptional love and respect, in the journey of each day’s actions, an emotion of improbable richness blossoms, where the Polish neighbors, the caretaker of a square, the supervisor of a work team, the recruitment officer of an administration or the compatriot who seeks to return behave at the best, or at least worse than we have the right to expect of them.
Thanks to her attentive and fluid staging, to her sense of distance and rhythm, thanks also to the moving interpretation of Joana Santos, to her radiant presence turned inward, to her almost silent, lucid tension on the edge of the abyss, Laura Carreira transforms the choice of the non-spectacular, the non-sentimental, into a powerful elixir of life and truth.
“The richest woman in the world”, by Thierry Klifa
Despite the careful cardboard at the beginning, the rather cunning evidence of the transfer of the so-called “Bettencourt affair” is omnipresent. The change in surnames only adds a little extra game: what was the name of the butler who recorded the conversations between the billionaire Liliane Bettencourt and the photographer François-Marie Banier?
And it’s a shame, because it’s ultimately the least interesting, but the film will in no way be able to escape it, at least in France. This will also be the main reason for its attraction to the public and the media.
They will be able to observe how the scenario plays on as many tables as possible, firstly highlighting the joyful and provocative seduction of the artist who burst into the formal and sinister world of the owners of the largest cosmetics brand in the world. Seduced and delighted, the person at the head of this empire is also shown as a fine and strong businesswoman and a generous patron.
Then this same scenario decides that at one point this gifted homosexual, this foul-mouthed actor exaggerates and redistributes motivations and guilt, distributed between behaviors that spare no one: the billionaire, her husband, her daughter, the photographer, the zealous servant…
Only the girl’s husband, that is to say “in real life” the one who holds the financial (and political-legal) power today, is entitled to special benevolence. To some extent, someone who finds himself at the head of one of the largest financial groups on the planet would seem to be sacrificing himself for his injured wife.
At the same time (sic), the scenario as it develops “understands” each and everyone. Jean Renoir’s famous phrase in The Rules of the Game (1939), a film towards which we perhaps, wrongly, believe we are eyeing The richest woman in the world and where it was said that “everyone has their reasons”here appears to be a somewhat cowardly blank check.
And it’s a shame, because it’s not nearly – a “little” as big as an elephant in a luxury villa, the unsurpassable affair – for Thierry Klifa’s film to be so much better. But to watch it, you’d have to be Japanese or Argentinian, you’d have to know nothing about the real deal.
From then on, we could easily rejoice in the comic energy which emanates from numerous scenes, the complexity of the handsome character of the servant, the questioning of what separates aristocratic dandyism (the transgressive artist) from the bourgeoisie fed up with power and money (the whole Bettencourt smala renamed “Farrère” in the film), the long history of the compromises of the great families with the worst of the past.
We could have much more fun and interest around the multiple and often stimulating propositions that arise from the meeting between the one called Marianne (Isabelle Huppert) in the film and the one named Pierre-Alain (Laurent Lafitte). Beauty, money, power, aesthetic codes, class relationships are questioned and brought into play with great energy.
We could also more calmly admire the very remarkable work of all the performers: Laurent Lafitte, exuberant but capable of revealing flaws; Marina Foïs, haunted by an injury that she is unable to truly name without destroying herself; André Marcon, opportunistic and lucid husband; and of course, Raphaël Personnaz, who gives the character of the butler, remarkably written, a mystery that is both dangerous and innocent.
And then, obviously, Isabelle Huppert. With what seems to be the most extreme economy of play, except in very rare moments of extreme explosion, she lives at the heart of the film, magnificent, frightening, seductive, laughing, intelligent, crazy, heiress, autonomous. In this story with multiple and fascinating protagonists, her Marianne Farrère – imperial and victim – exists in such a strong and complex way that she almost makes Liliane Bettencourt forget. Almost.
“What this nature tells you”, by Hong Sang-soo
And then there is, unique and supremely modest, Hong Sang-soo. Just after a marvel where pulsated – in a very different color chart – the same radiance of Isabelle Huppert (The Travelerreleased in January 2025), his thirty-fifth feature film invents a new modality of the immense human exploration that is his cinema, carried by an inner movement all the more touching because it is barely apparent.
Around a couple of lovers who arrive in the young woman’s large family home, her father, her sister and her mother successively appear. Between these five characters, but especially around the young man discovered by the members of his possible future in-laws, there is an extraordinary marquetry of weak signs – with fragile meanings – which concern both the family itself and the suitor.
Love story teenage girl, family comedy, social chronicle, poetic reverie, What this nature tells you borrows from these modes of storytelling, to detach itself from them, sometimes with infinite gentleness, sometimes with biting irony, sometimes with a brutality that is all the more lively because it is polite.
The film unfolds with a humor that is increased by the translation of the title into French, where the word “nature” rightly plays between what it evokes of the splendor of the parents’ garden and what characterizes each of the protagonists. From meals to drinking parties, as the South Korean filmmaker is wont to do, but also during walks in the countryside and visiting a temple, Hong Sang-soo plays virtuoso with his sense of frame, zoom and editing, exploring new resources.
A new resource is now added, the very unique use of blur, since In Water (2023). With means that he seems to rediscover with each film, especially since he is now alone in all the main technical positions (production, camera, sound, editing, music), Hong Sang-soo adds with delicate and cruel elegance a new chapter to the vibration of what obscurely haunts humans, men and women of all ages.
