A film by Alex Lutz
With: Mélanie Thierry, Bastien Bouillon, Jacques Gamblin, Bruno Sanches, Eliot Giraud, Grégory Montel, Clémentine Célarié, Anne Charrier, Alexandre Auvergne, Johanna Lauraire
Hélène’s burnout leads her back to rural France. There, she reconnects with Christophe, her high school crush, now representing a life she once left behind.
Our rate: –
After an encouraging start as a director (Guy), it would seem that Alex Lutz is unable to turn his trial run into a more promising future. Strangers by night had already disappointed us with its mannerisms, its pomposity, its insipid dialogue, its tendency to film for the sake of filming (rather than to say something, whatever that might be), or more precisely, to watch itself being filmed. Connemara has the same flaws, even though Lutz has decided to return to a more traditional narrative style, based on a story by Nicolas Mathieu. Admittedly, Mélanie Thierry, and to a lesser extent Bastien Bouillon, struggle to try to lift the film out of the torpor into which the overabundance of music, whether it emphasizes or masks the emptiness, draws us, but to no avail; in trying too hard, Lutz forgets the essential, the artistic and intellectual intention. The insipid and dated form is irritating; at best, we are dealing with “old-fashioned cinema” that pretends but offers very little. The same goes for the content. The few reservations we may have had about Leave One Day, which deals with a similar subject, are multiplied a hundredfold here. The question of territory and the way it is viewed, despite itself, conveys a message that is deeply disturbing and disconnected. Supposed to convey an attachment, a nostalgia for a region and its way of life, which is the opposite of that of the capital, the film instead conveys a low-level snobbery, which would have us believe that tradition rhymes with stagnation and lack of ambition, that simplicity rhymes with stupidity, mixing crass condescension and misanthropy. The very title of the film, Connemara, borrowed from Michel Sardou, that great thinker, chosen to close the unpleasant spectacle as a whole, as well as the numerous “redneck” clichés, starting with the wedding (even if it does exist, reducing the provincial way of life to this is intellectually dishonest, or totally disconnected) contribute to our complete detachment from the film, which otherwise sorely lacks intellectual thought, literature, poetry, aspiration, and a sharp eye. Avoid.