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In the heart of violence. It has just won two Valois awards at Angoulême. A knockout! Also showing: “Three Farewells,” “Salvation,” winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the last Berlin Film Festival, and “The Good Sister” by German director Sarah Miro Fischer.
There are films that leave you speechless. And those that leave you in silence. The Strike clearly falls into the latter category. You leave feeling somewhat stunned, “stumaged” as they say here, by what you’ve just experienced. And the film continues to haunt you long after the credits roll. The subject matter pulls no punches: incest, control, violence passed down through families. And that question that grips you by the throat: how do you stop loving someone who has destroyed you? Enzo, 19, and his sister Carla, 20, have been fending for themselves for years. The day their father, Anthony, is released from prison, Enzo sees it as a chance to mend fences, while Carla refuses to even consider it. Director Julien Gaspar-Oliveri could have plunged headlong into melodrama. He chose the opposite path. “The real question is why we have so much trouble no longer loving our parents,” he confided to journalist Marilou Duponchel for Critics’ Week. ” Family ties, the inheritance that’s thrust upon us whether we like it or not, parents who are gods before becoming our executioners: it’s always obsessed me.”
A film about the impossibility of saying
His camera never leaves his characters. Nervous, it clings to glances, silences, and outbursts of anger as well as gestures of tenderness. A mise-en-scène that stays close to bodies and faces, with something reminiscent of the Dardenne brothers —the director makes no secret of his admiration for their films, particularly Rosetta with the late Émilie Dequenne. “The zoom allows me to go beyond the script, to where things aren’t said. Everything is under the skin. We laugh, we argue, but we never articulate the real problem.”
One sentence sums it all up, according to him: “It’s a film about the impossibility of speaking.” With his actors, he plays the card of total freedom. “I try not to separate my desire as an actor from my directing. I like to leave space .” No rehearsals, little to no makeup. Completely natural. ” I give them the filming conditions I would have dreamed of having myself, as an actor. ” Shot in just 22 days with limited resources, the film also relies on its trio of actors. Bastien Bouillon portrays a father of unsettling gentleness. Romane Fringeli , who had never acted before, is deeply moving in her raw fragility. And then there’s Diego Murgia . A revelation. The director spotted him in a simple video. ” I loved his naturalness, his smile, his candor ,” he told France Inter. With that slightly childlike and frail look, the bright eye, a smile that escapes him despite himself. “A disarming charm, crowned in Angoulême with the Valois for best actor , after having “turned upside down” the Croisette .
Looking for love, despite everything
Yet, La Frappe is anything but a film of despair. ” I wanted to make a film that seeks love, healing, and that is luminous ,” summarizes Julien Gaspar-Oliveri. Beyond an impossible reconciliation, it simply explores the possibility of continuing to live, even when some things seem impossible to repair.
Discovered at Cannes, confirmed at Angoulême with two major awards, La Frappe establishes the signature of a director to be reckoned with. With this debut feature of astonishing mastery, he never tries to be flashy. But he hits the mark.