A new generation of French-speaking directors who move with astonishing naturalness on the edges of fantasy cinema. The most paradigmatic and radical case is certainly that of Julia Ducournau, who with Raw (2016) year Titanium (2021) was able to adapt the depiction of cannibalism and fetishism Cyberpunk to a new reality characterized by gender fluidity.
For his part in The Five Devils (2022), Léa Mysius constructed a dysfunctional family portrait that revealed its secrets with the help of a girl who traveled back in time thanks to her olfactory superpowers. Now French-Canadian actress Charlotte Le Bon is making her film directing debut Falkenseea film that, like those of Ducournau and Mysius, The initiation story leads into an area of deep alienation emancipating it from realism and giving it a strong sensual component.
Filmed in the Laurentides mountain and river region of Quebec. Falkensee brings the graphic novel to the screen A sister by Bastien Vivès, in which A boy and a girl experience a sentimental and sexual awakening during a few days of vacation at a lake.
Parties and walks
The method could invite you to imagine a youth drama about traditional seams, and there’s something to be said for that In the familiarity that the day passes through nature, the viewer will awaken to the fights between the young protagonists and their parents or the nightly parties transformed into codified initiation rites.
Sin embargo, the good, that masters a lethargic pace and a fascinating quietism at will, decides to break up the story’s realistic roots with images that oscillate between the uncanny – a “drowned” Barbie doll, a run-over deer – and the ghostly. In one extremely disturbing shot, the young protagonist (a magnetic Sara Montpetit) remains motionless and seemingly unconscious for a long time in the center of the frame, while in another scene she asserts that “there are ghosts who do not know that they are dead .”
Falkensee announces its commitment to fantasy and horror in the first bars, in which the arrival of one of the families at the film’s isolated location is presented as an homage to The Glow (1980) by Kubrick. But the cinephile wink doesn’t stop there The young protagonists decorate their rooms with posters of psychosis (1960) year Magically gone (2001) a cocktail of references that offers space Falkensee under the influence of the psychological density of classicism and the tendency of oriental fantasy cinema to blur the line between life and death.
Packed as a Gothic fable about the end of innocence, Le Bon’s debut film manages to give shape to a moody reality in permanent transformation, a universe in which screams of joy resemble howls of panic and in which children’s games lead easily and without transition into the delicate representation of incipient sexuality
