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À tout de suite
2004 Crime / Drama / Romance / Thriller
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Credits
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Director: Benoît Jacquot
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Script: Benoît Jacquot, Elisabeth Fanger
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Photo: Caroline Champetier
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Cast: Isild Le Besco (Lili),
Ouassini Embarek (Bada),
Nicolas Duvauchelle (Alain),
Laurence Cordier (Joelle),
Forini Kodoukaki,
Léonor Graser,
Emmanuelle Bercot (Laurence)
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Country: France
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Language: English / French
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Runtime: 95 min; B&W
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Aka: Right Now
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Summary
Paris, 1975. Lili, a 19-year old arts student, comes from a
privileged family and her life so far has been without incident.
All that is to change when she meets and falls in love with a handsome
young man of North African origin. One evening, her lover calls
her and tells her he is caught up in a bank robbery. One of his
friends has already been shot dead by the police and he is preparing
his escape with the stolen booty and a handful of hostages.
Scarcely able to comprehend what is happening, Lili joins her boyfriend
and agrees to go on the run with him...
Review
Director Benoît Jacquot takes us back in time to the glorious
years of the French New Wave with his latest, and possibly greatest,
film: À tout de suite.
With its grainy black and white photography, sparse dialogue, long
static takes and general impression of self-conscious artistic
over-indulgence, the film immediately calls to mind the classic
mould-fracturing films of such great Nouvelle Vague directors as
Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jean Eustache. On the face of
it, this looks like just another director going retro for the sake of
it, but that really isn’t the case in this instance. The style
which Jacquot borrows for the film is entirely appropriate for its
subject and it’s hard to imagine how it could have been made in any
other way and still retain its impact.
In essence, À tout de suite
is a plausible mélange of road movie and coming-of-age drama, in
which a cosseted and very naïve adolescent girl is brutally yanked
out of her cosy middle class milieu and thrown into a sordid and brutal
landscape of gangsters, predatory older men, poverty and
isolation. The loose narrative and somewhat ill-defined
characterisation would be frustrating in a conventional film but here
these work well to put the focus entirely on the central character,
played with an extraordinary intensity and sense of realism by the
magnificent Isild Le Besco.
It’s an uncomfortable, almost visceral kind of film which cuts deeply
into the viewer's consciousness. Jacquot is far less
concerned with narrative coherence than with getting across how his
heroine feels and reacts as
her life is turned upside down. The stark cinematographic style -
reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963) - works
perfectly to draw us into Lili’s private world and get us to
experience, as fully as cinema permits, her excruciating turmoil as all
her childhood certainties are swept away to leave an adult who is
forever scarred by wounds that will never heal. It’s potent and
it’s poetic - a truly haunting piece of cinema.
© James Travers 2008
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