During the Cannes Film Festival, Konbini tells you about its favorites or comes back to the biggest events of the selection.See also on KonbiniWhat is Love and Forests?Love and Forests, it was originally a novel of the same name written by Éric Reinhardt and published in 2014. It is also the return of Valérie Donzelli as a director, four years after Notre Dame, who returns to the Cannes Film Festival (eight years after the painful presentation of Marguerite and Julien). But this year, she is not in competition. Love and the Forests is the story of Blanche (Virginie Efira) who falls in love with Grégoire (Melvil Poupaud), a charming and romantic man. Their romance quickly becomes intense, everything gets carried away quickly, and under his impulse, Blanche leaves her native Normandy and finds herself isolated in the Messin forests. Love and Forests is the story of manipulation, a violence, a cruelty; of a terrible, jealous, possessive husband, who has not always been so. Finally, who has never really shown it. Why is it good? It’s hard not to think of Mon roi by Maïwenn. The subject of a couple with a perverse, manipulative, narcissistic, violent and possessive husband and the gradual intrusion of this increasingly terrible hold is the same. And Maïwenn’s film was rightly a shock when it was released. On the comparison, the Donzelli comes out on top. Because his vision of the present in a flashback story is more likely here; because we feel the staging more, with stylistic effects that marry the subject (whether in the dream, in a moment of respite or by the nightmare in the sequences of violence). Because Virginie Efira. And because there is a real mix of genres. The great tour de force of this dark film, the most difficult of the filmmaker, remains to have used an increasingly recurrent theme of contemporary cinema, namely domestic violence and the influence of a spouse in a little exploited genre – the thriller. There is, in Love and the Forests, an aftertaste of thriller, dark investigation and giallo (this very Argento light on the edges). The structure also plays a big role. If the violence takes its time, we spend the second half of the film bent in two, the belly in bulk facing a story from which we guess, finally we hope, a positive outcome – by the snail structure, because we see that the White of the present came out of this hold. The question is: how and how far will it have gone? The film advances crescendo, not only on the extent of the terrible reactions of the husband but on the rhythm of the story as well. The more time passes, the more our breath is taken away. A real tour de force by Valérie Donzelli, painful to watch but certainly no less impressive. What do we remember? The actress who stands out: Virginie Efira, as usual the beauty of the staging The main flaw: Melvil Poupaud who, at times, perhaps seems to be overdoing it A film that you will like if you liked: Mon roi by Maïwenn and War is declared by Valérie Donzelli It could have been called: Leaving the seaThe quote to sum up the film: “A very hard but extremely clever and truly cinephilic film, with a great Virginie Efira”
