Primrose Hill, the second medium-length film by Mikhaël Hers, the director of Amanda and Les Passagers de la nuit with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Noée Abita, currently in theaters, is available for free on MK2 Curiosity. He will extend this film in the form of a preamble made in 2007 in Memory Lane, his first feature film released in 2010. In Primrose Hill, a bit like Rohmer in Le Rayon vert, the filmmaker films, for an hour, the wanderings animated by Stéphane, Joëlle, Xavier and Sonia, a group of musician friends. Here, the cold light of winter has replaced the Rohmerian summer and the protagonists tread neither the grass of the London hill, from which the film takes its name, nor the Parisian asphalt, but the cobblestones of the western suburbs of Paris. .In long traveling shots in the park of Saint-Cloud, the four friends, whose ties we do not immediately understand, talk about music, love, sex, idleness and accidents of life while a voice-over, of which we do not know not identity, evokes the lack that these four young adults inspire in him. In Primrose Hill were born the foundations of the cinema of this precious director: the cigeny of the city and the lack of loved ones. In Memory Lane, Mikhaël Hers will once again give pride of place to this suburb of western Paris that we see little in the cinema and in This feeling of summer, his moving second feature film made in 2015, it is between Berlin, Paris and New York that the summers will follow one another. In Amanda, the filmmaker will pay tribute to the bruised City of Light by the attacks, with great realism. Hand in hand, the two young heroes will not stop running until the conclusion of the film, where they will catch their breath in London, on the heights of Primrose Hill. the maze of the Round House and the towers of the 15th arrondissement of Paris, frozen in a sort of nostalgia for the 1980s. thus the loop of a corpus of medium and feature films that respond to each other. If we do not immediately understand who is the protagonist in Primrose Hill’s voice-over – a sister on the run or disappeared –, Mikhaël Hers will pose here the first stone of his exploration of mourning, which he treats with constant modesty and dignity in This feeling of summer and Amanda, and of lack, at the heart of Passagers de la nuit. Throughout his films, Hers is part of as the Norwegian Joachim Trier’s alter ego, the director of Julie (in 12 chapters), himself obsessed with death, illness and Oslo, his city of heart, which he films to perfection. The two filmmakers also shared an actor, Anders Danielsen Lie, sick at one and bereaved at the other. Primrose Hill is to be discovered here.
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