Camille Cottin and Matt Damon in duo for an American thriller in Marseille
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Cinematographic crossings between the Old and New Worlds are perilous. We therefore salute the success of the passage for Marseilles (to borrow the title of a film in which Michael Curtiz directed Humphrey Bogart) of Tom McCarthyeclectic director – of the bittersweet romance of Station master (2003) in the quasi-documentary style of spotlight (2015).
He built with Stillwater a solid and yet disconcerting film, a hybridization of French darkness and American bad conscience, which we expected as little as a cinematic romance between Matt Damon and Camille Cottin.
The first embodies Bill Baker, rough neck (worker on the oil wells) from Oklahoma, who has no reason to find himself between Bonne Mère and Panier. But her daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin, formerly Little Miss Sunshine), left to study in Aix-en-Provence and was accused and convicted of the murder of her roommate. From time to time, Bill goes to Baumettes.
A real smell of rust
The journey that opens Stillwater comes after that of the last chance. Allison, who proclaims her innocence, has exhausted all appeals and her lawyer (Anne Le Ny) encourages the visitor to resign. At the same time as he decides to resume the investigation on his own account, the rough neck meets a neo-Phocéenne, Virginie (Camille Cottin), a theater actress who left Paris to try her luck in Marseille.
Also listen Camille Cottin: “I like the expression of feminine power”
What follows – the clash of cultures and the friction of desires, the pursuit of truth and its collateral damage – could be part of the program script of a film that would have once starred Charles Bronson and that would today round off the endings. month of Liam Neeson.
Tom McCarthy is too smart, and arguably too sensitive, to settle for old recipes
But Tom McCarthy is too smart, and probably too sensitive, to settle for old recipes. Dissatisfied with his original screenplay, he called on Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, French screenwriters who give this new recipe fish out of water (“fish out of water”, an expression which designates the stories of diving in an unknown environment) a real smell of rust.
Resolutely turning his back on his past as a nice boy, Matt Damon settles comfortably in the physical mass of his taciturn bad father character, who tries to redeem his past faults by dint of grace at each meal and military politeness. Around him, the French actors, starting with Camille Cottin, often seem to act as if Bill Baker (and especially Matt Damon) were not there, as if they were playing in an indigenous thriller. This discrepancy could be a calamity, here it is the fuel of a fiction that skilfully plays with the expectations raised by the genre.
Stillwater, a film by Tom McCarthy. With Matt Damon, Abigail Breslin, Camille Cottin, Lilou Siauvaud, Anne Le Ny (EU, 2021, 140 min). Available on demand at MyCanal.
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