An American in Marseille to save his daughter, helped by the natives. But watch out, the good Matt Damon isn’t here to break mouths in Stillwater. Far from the Jason Bourne fights or the sword-slapping of The Last Duel, he roams Canebière to do justice to his descendants, all in favor of human tragedy and a law that is more shocking than meets the eye.

MAT DIAMOND
We’ve left Tom McCarthy in the rain of Spotlight Oscars, an effective, but academic, journalistic drama, without expecting much from an honest storyteller with a slightly too clean style about him. That was until he returned to the Cannes red carpet, where he presented 2021’s Stillwater, a story that was initially reminiscent of a certain Taken, in which he grafted in some elements from real news items. . Matt Damon sneaks into Bill’s shoes, a worker from Oklahoma lands in Marseille in hopes of rescuing his daughter, accused of the murder of his girlfriend and imprisoned in the city of Marseille.

And it was Damon who became the feature film’s main asset. From the opening, while he follows what still resembles an American proletarian naturalist chronicle, the actor imposes a presence, a tempo, far from his most recent appearance. His massive body occupies the screen, just as much as it weighs on this man whose value system we feel has been inexorably damaged.

fast food restaurant that looks like a distressed beehive. Characterized by empathy and never cold or cynical, Bill is perhaps America’s first echo of Donald Trump’s election, which Hollywood treats with no underlying political agenda or satisfying contempt.

Actors perfectly inhabit this massive and limited physiognomy, are simultaneously engulfed in doubt and immersed in contradictions. A hard worker with strong convictions, Bill is also a father who must tear himself apart in hopes of finding his daughter, whose character and life are at odds with him. Before the storyline branches off towards investigation and outrage, the plot is careful to give as much space as possible to this man struggling to make sense of the universe back into his own, and during the first third of the film, the attention with which the camera observes the humble courtesy of the man who This crack is surprising.

Her hunched back, her voice misting with tears as she apologized for being in front of a judge who didn’t understand her vulnerability, ideally echoed another existence humiliated by her surroundings and circumstances. That Virginie, embodied by Camille Cottin was less volcanic than right on the edge. The spectacle of these two beings being opposed by everything, except perhaps their erratic wanderings, is of little precision, both in terms of interpretation and writing.

Her hunched back, her voice misting with tears as she apologized for being in front of a judge who didn’t understand her vulnerability, ideally echoed another existence humiliated by her surroundings and circumstances. That Virginie, embodied by Camille Cottin was less volcanic than right on the edge. The spectacle of these two beings being opposed by everything, except perhaps their erratic wanderings, is of little precision, both in terms of interpretation and writing.

Evidenced by this striking scene, as Bill develops somehow in the heart of the Stade Vélodrome, during the Olympic games in Marseille. Trapped in a crowd, immune to fever, driven by a different regime of tension from the supporters around him, he immerses us in his subjectivity, which taints the sequence filmed on the spot, whose intensity increases a little more with each shot. At this point, directors find the ideal distance to get away from the hopes of a revenge movie, or a paranoid thriller like Europacorp has it in the same dusty motion and caricature. Unfortunately this will be the only opportunity like this that the filmmakers take.

Indeed, and this is a major drawback of this often heartwarming story, Tom McCarthy very rarely gets to the actors or the script. Masanobu Takayanagi’s abundant organic photography is sometimes illusory, as it gives Stillwater an interesting, in turn melodramatic and gooey vibe, but again, the filmmakers and cuts are sadly illustrative.

It is often difficult to detect the true point of view, a point, as if the project manager never questioned himself about what he was filming,about the meaning of the cut. Everything gained in its entirety in readability, loses strength, especially when the story is forced to leave the river of drama to anchor in the old harbor of thrillers.