This Friday, Arnaud Desplechin presents "Brother and Sister" in competition at Cannes.
The film, which pits Marion Cotillard against Melvil Poupaud, the title's sister and brother, is released in theaters at the same time.
The intensity of this family melodrama already makes this film one of the favorites for a place on the charts.
“Families, I hate you!
“, we know the sentence of André Gide.
In
Brother and Sister
, which he presents this Friday in Cannes and which comes out in stride, Arnaud Desplechin transforms it into a simple: "I think I hate you".
Words which, in the mouth of Marion Cotillard at the address of Melvil Poupaud, have the effect of a detonation.
Why so much hatred between the sister, famous actress, and her brother, teacher and poet?
No one knows and "it wouldn't even be very moral to talk about it", concedes Melvil Poupaud in the film.
His best friend shrink (amazing Timsit against the grain) can only see the damage, powerless even to relieve Marion Cotillard who came to consult him for this resentment that appeared the day the sister saw her brother so proud to win a literary prize.
She offers him to read his texts on stage.
He refuses, using modesty as a pretext without realizing how much he has offended her.
"The more his notoriety grew, the more I was torn," she said.
Beyond the hatred that grows like a weed, a favorite theme of Desplechin since
How I Disputed Myself (My Sex Life),
it is the family that is at the heart of this
Brother and Sister
.
The family and the essential fear it provokes, that of disappearance.
The death that lurks in this film is reminiscent
of Life of the Dead
, when it is the ghosts who orchestrate the passions of the living.
A suicide in
Kings and Queen
, an incurable illness in
Christmas Tale
, an accident in
Brother and Sister…
The fragility of life accentuates fear and the extent of resentment.
A jealousy of happiness
When, in
Terrestrial Foods,
Gide wrote “Families, I hate you”, he continued his sentence by quoting “Closed homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness”.
This is exactly what we find in
Brother and Sister
.
This jealousy of happiness.
And these suffocating walls that led Melvil Poupaud to leave closed homes to repair a lost farm in the Occitan hinterland while his sister continued to cultivate her hatred for Roubaix.
Nothing will be said about the adventures that dot this story, except that they are particularly cruel.
And that the question of forgiveness arises at some point, “the end of hatred” as Desplechin calls it, emphasizing, as any family who suffers from it can do, “hate is always a waste of time”.
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