In La Nuée (2020), Just Philippot released a horde of particularly voracious and murderous carnivorous locusts on a corner of the South-West. In Acid, his second feature film, the director imagines a France devastated by relentless corrosive rains. A family in full disintegration tries to flee, like everyone else, while the phenomenon destroys nature, men, homes… Noir c’est noir: more spectacular and controlled than La Nuée, Acid is a work of its time, a crucible of modern anxieties in which Just Philippot, who wrote the script with Yacine Badday, fuses with the faith of an apostle the great fears inspired by a climate gone mad and a society socially on the verge of collapse. In scenes of clashes as well as in those of panicking crowds under scorching downpours (a terrifying sequence on a suspension bridge is not far from evoking Spielberg’s War of the Worlds), this high-tension film excels and will inevitably mark this fall 2023. Produced for around 9 million euros (three times more than La Nuée), distributed by Pathé, Acide reveals an unrecognizable Guillaume Canet as a violent union leader, who punches his management during a prologue filmed on a smartphone and intimidatingly brutal. Separated from his wife (Laetitia Dosch), he will soon be forced to hit the road with her to save their 15-year-old daughter (Patience Munchenbach), while the climate disaster is disorganizing the country. “I wanted to show a social disaster before a natural disaster, linking the two makes sense to me,” the director confirms. We do not have to follow him in this amalgam to appreciate Acide at its true value: that of a good ecological whistleblower thriller, effective and tense like a crossbow § philippe guedj
“Acid,” in theaters September 20.
But how do they do it? There are two of them on stage, but changing voice, posture, facial expressions with fascinating fluidity, Sandrine Molaro and Gilles-Vincent Kapps manage to embody most of the countless characters in L’Éducation sentimentale by themselves. On the tiny stage of the Théâtre de Poche, aided by an electric guitar, a keyboard and a harmonica, they bring to life the revolutionary Paris of 1848, the procrastination of the coward Frédéric Moreau stuck in his sentimental imbroglios, the heroes and especially to the antiheroes of this wonderful comedy of manners freely adapted for the theater. Electrified by never invasive guitar riffs, carried by this frankly inflated staging and these astonishing actors, the language of Gustave Flaubert therefore resonates like never before: pure, cruel, ultramodern, holding up to the public of 2023 the mirror of his little cowardices and his renunciations. Wonderful ! § violaine of montclos
“Sentimental Education”, Tuesday to Saturday, at 7 p.m., at the Théâtre de Poche-Montparnasse (Paris).
Still ill from having recently lost a brother in arms, and a few days before a new mission, a master corporal disappears. To his wife, to his son, not a word: radio silence. However, he’s not a bruiser, “Lulu”, he’s seen the country. Four of his comrades set out to look for him. For her part, alone with her kid and her almost-widow face, the wife endures. “Fifteen years of living together was not the same as ten minutes under fire,” writes Jean Michelin – himself a lieutenant-colonel in the army. Guys knew things she could never approach. » Because she is not in the “body”, Aurélie. She’s the one who stays and never gets a medal at the end. About the reasons for the disappearance or the slap on the last page, we will not say anything here. But let’s remember that “Lulu” had a very sweet nickname for a tough guy. And that this text is not another novel about war, but an unprecedented dive under fatigues and kepis; a laying bare of those who do it, on the front as well as at home § marine by tilly
“Those who remain”, by Jean Michelin (Pocket, 245 p., €7.70).
We remember the witticism of Sacha Guitry who asked the question “What’s new? » replied mischievously “Molière! “. From the playwright of the Grand Siècle to Zep, the creator of Titeuf, the gap could seem abysmal if the designer did not capture, in each of his albums, and for thirty years now, more than the evanescent spirit of the times. Over these decades, like a good comic book character, Titeuf has not aged a bit or grown an inch. But the world around him has changed. Of course, the ingredients that ensured the colossal success of the series (more than 23 million albums sold) are still there: friendship, thwarted loves, the fear of growing up. But Titeuf is also confronted, without always fully understanding them, with climate change and artificial intelligence (motives covered by Zep in his realistic comics), with pedophilia and contemporary monsters, a former American president in the know. blonde, too, in the lead. And the kid misses the harmless and imaginary creatures that populated his closet in his early childhood. Innocence has not yet passed, but it now has a bittersweet taste § Romain Brethes
“Titeuf.Follow the fuse” (volume 18), by Zep (Glénat, 48 p., €11.50).
In the beginning was hatred. No one remembers either the cause or the moment of the beginning of the quarrel, but it is there, tenacious, between the Tafanis and the Rocchinis, who look at each other like china dogs in Porto-Vecchio. The dog, precisely. That of the Tafani, found dead, became the pretext for the assassination of Jean-François Rocchini, of the opposing clan, by virtue of the proverb Chi fell u ghjcaru, fell l’omu (He who kills the dog, kills his master). If this news item fascinated the journalist and writer Antoine Albertini, it is because this affair would galvanize the press at the end of the 19th century and mark the moment when the legend of the “real Corsican”, “hairy to the eyes” , writes Maupassant, crystallizes. So this novel is not only the faithful reconstruction of the trajectory of a bandit; he is THE original bandit and nothing less than the birth of the fascination with vendetta, as it continues today § Julie Malaure
“A very honest bandit”, by Antoine Albertini (JC Lattès, 448 p., €21.90).
After the success of the Emmy Award-winning series Engrenages, it was impossible for showrunner Anne Landois to return to a “cops” project. On the judicial side, however, everything remained to be done. Under title 66-5, like the article of the Penal Code, Landois deploys his new war machine: Roxane (Alice Isaaz, photo). Young, beautiful, brilliant, this lawyer sees her life explode when her husband, the son of a famous lawyer, is accused of rape. Roxane drops everything, returns to Bobigny, in Seine-Saint-Denis, where she comes from, and becomes, by force of circumstances, a criminal lawyer. “I wanted to make a class defector, in reverse,” Landois tells us of his (very) original creation produced by Canal. From polished parquet to macadam, from chic to shit, Roxane switches from Paris to the harsh, but not gloomy, suburbs, moving forward like an icebreaker between money, gunpowder, violence, machismo, with the legal system behind the scenes. Roxane, concrete flower, half-bourgeois, half-caillera lawyer in the land of thugs, is a ball of contaminating energy. Until the very last minute, absolutely enjoyable § J. M.
“66-5”, 8 episodes, on Canal, from September 18.