During the Cannes Film Festival, Konbini tells you about her favourites. What is Falcon Lake? 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 the eyes and a great insomniac, went 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 had been able to present at the Cannes Film Festival thanks to the Talents Adami Cinéma program. , we therefore waited impatiently to see the result of her passage to the long run, for which she chose to adapt the subversive and sensual comic strip A sister, by Bastien Vivès. She recounts, in pictures, the family holidays of Antoine, 13, and his sexual awakening by Hélène, 16, the daughter of the couple of friends of her parents. For this trial run, the Quebec director therefore did not choose the easy way. , by Romain Gavras, 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. And it is in the heart of these long summer days far from the adults, between the dampness of the room he shares with Chloé and the shores of Falcon Lake, that Bastien will experience a unique vacation thanks to the impetuous teenager. Why is it good? Like Judith Hôtel, who embraced her influences to compose a unique short film, Falcon Lake also brings together the best of teen movies. Bastien, this little hero mistreated 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 hotheaded young boys who, at the during a long, boring summer, 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 erotic 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. And in the sometimes threatening tranquility of the great Canadian spaces, Falcon Lake oscillates between the sweetness of summer holidays and the violence of adolescence until its tragic and poetic conclusion. : Joseph Engel, here a follower but already seen as a leader in Louis Garrel’s The Crusade The main quality: The modesty and delicacy with which the film deals with adolescent sexual awakening The main flaw: A few lengths A film that you will like if you liked: 90’s , Stand by Me, A Ghost StoryIt could have been called: Remember last summerThe quote to sum up the film: “A tragic story of love and ghosts”
Leave a comment