Film allemand, autrichien, français (2002).
Drame.
Durée : 1h 53mn.
Date de sortie : 08 Octobre 2003
Avec Isabelle Huppert, Béatrice Dalle, Patrice Chéreau, Rona Hartner, Maurice Bénichou...
Réalisé par Michael Haneke
Anne, son mari et leurs deux enfants, Ben, un petit garçon, et Eva, une adolescente, fuient leur ville à la suite d’une catastrophe pour rejoindre leur refuge privé à la campagne. Mais ils s’aperçoivent que leur résidence secondaire est occupée par des étrangers.
Cette confrontation n’est que le début d’un douloureux apprentissage : rien n’est plus comme avant. Ce qui commence comme une histoire de famille devient rapidement un drame collectif.
(L'avis exprimé par les rédacteurs de cette rubrique est indépendant du travail et des choix du Jury oecuménique.)
20 mai 2003
It helps to have some background on the classical character, Tiresias, the blind hermaphrodite prophet of Thebes, and the various legends that led to his/her being blinded. Perhaps it won’t, because many audiences will not have the patience to stay with the first half - and, if they do, and are satisfied with a forty minute section which enables us to get a hold on aspects of the plot and characters, the ending is so elliptical and rapid, that we are left with enigmas that we may or may not want to take from the cinema.
Written and directed by Montreal and Paris-based Betrand Bonello (The Pornographer), the film opens with a long volcanic sequence of molten lava, spends a great deal of time observing (and ogling) the transexual prostitutes of Paris parks. When an obsessive and grim man imprisons the Brazilian Tiresis, the film is more coherent, the story of a collector, which ends in shocking violence. Tiresia is played by an actress and acts as a woman. In the second part, Tiresia is played by an actor and lives as a man. Laurent Lucas is the collector and it is more than an emotional jolt when we seem him vesting for a baptism. Presumably, the audience assumes this priest is the collector. The cast credits, however, indicate that he is another character played by the same actor (in the same way that Lucas does, as in Harry, He’s Here to Help and Who Killed Bambi ?) What follows is a use of both the Greek mythology and allusions to the Gospels, but by that stage the film has become so studied and puzzling that the temptation is to opt out.
