Between her drawings, her exhibitions and today her first feature film, Charlotte Le Bon is a compulsive creative. Even at night. In 2020, she put her dreams and her overflowing imagination at the service of a short film, Judith Hôtel, halfway between The Lobster, Donnie Darko and Shining under the influence of David Lynch.Thomas, suitcases under his eyes and a great insomniac, was going to the Judith Hotel, a very popular establishment, for “a new start”, where he will mostly meet incongruous people, from a repentant mythomaniac to a Bic pens chewer. A story to sleep on your feet straight out of the director’s dreams, which she was able to present at the Cannes Film Festival thanks to the Talents Adami Cinéma program. Charlotte Le Bon’s very first short film will blow your mind See also on Konbini After this shot promising test, we therefore waited impatiently to see the result of its passage to the long, for which it chose to adapt the subversive and sensual comic strip A sister, of Bastien Vivès which tells, in images, the holidays in family of Antoine, 13, and of his sexual awakening by Hélène, 16, the daughter of a couple of friends of her parents. For this trial run, the Quebec director therefore did not choose the easy way. Monia Chokri, and decided to transpose the story to Canada, to Manitoba, on the shores of Falcon Lake. Besides its enigmatic name, this lake was also the scene of a strange encounter. In 1967, a Canadian mechanic claimed to have encountered a UFO there. If there is no question of an unidentified flying object or any extraterrestrial in Falcon Lake, the film will on the other hand deal with friendly ghosts who will haunt the film and its little heroes. Falcon Lake, Our ceremonies, The Five Devils, etc. . We have seen – and appreciated – this year at Cannes, the fantastic serves very well the purpose of childhood and adolescence in cinema. If it is less assumed than in Judith Hôtel, a feeling of strangeness nevertheless infuses this initiatory adolescent story, and this from the arrival of the family in the shed that they will occupy during their holidays. It is in the heart of these long summer days far from adults, between the dampness of the room he shares with Chloé and the shores of Lake Falcon, that Bastien will experience a unique vacation thanks to the impetuous teenager. a tragic and poetic apprenticeship story Like Judith Hôtel, who embraced her influences to compose a unique short film, Falcon Lake, a modest teen movie bordering on fantasy, also brings together the best of the genre. Bastien, this mistreated little hero, but fascinated by Chloé, evokes the prepubescent Stevie, the 90’s hero, a magnificent learning film directed by Jonah Hill, ready at all costs (in the literal sense) to acquire a reputation with a gang of skaters from Los Angeles. Their peregrinations, in gangs, in the heart of the Canadian landscapes, sometimes disturbing, sometimes exhilarating, remind us of Stand by Me, Rob Reiner’s best film, about a small group of young boys who are both heads burned and sensitive who, during a long summer of boredom, go in search of the body of a child their age who recently disappeared in Oregon. Finally, on the form, the phantasmagorical bias, both dreamlike and pictorial, would rather lean towards A Ghost Story by David Lowery.River Phoenix: portrait of a dark cinema cometOn screen, Bastien’s awakening will be less sexual than on the boards of Bastien Vivès and will go through all the experiences that Chloé will make him live. If the teenager gives Bastien his first erotic emotions, she pushes him above all to his limits, forces him to fight his shyness and his fears (of water as well as masturbation), takes him to his first parties (we has rarely seen such pretty scenes of evenings at the cinema) and offers him his first cooked. It’s not so much Chloé’s body – much less eroticized than in A Sister by Vivès – that fascinates Bastien as the freedom she embodies from the height of her 16 years. Because in adolescence, three years is an eternity. If the sex scenes are therefore less present, with the exception of a delicate sequence of masturbation in Chinese shadows, Falcon Lake is based on the same economy of words as the comic. If Chloé is rebellious, Bastien is constantly discreet and their relationship is made more of actions and truths than grand speeches. In the sometimes threatening tranquility of the great Canadian spaces, Falcon Lake oscillates between the sweetness of summer vacations and the violence of adolescence until its tragic and poetic conclusion.
Leave a comment