LA TEÌ‚TE HAUTE de Emmanielle Bercot LES FILMS DU KIOSQUE
LA TEÌ‚TE HAUTE de Emmanielle Bercot LES FILMS DU KIOSQUE
Screening next week at the Whanganui Film Society is Standing Tall (La tête haute).
This is the first of three films this season featuring French cinema icon Catherine Deneuve. However the real showstopper in Standing Tall is newcomer Rod Paradot, the delinquent at the heart of the story. Paradot wenton to win Best Promising Actor at the Cesars for his portrayal of the wayward teen Malony.
Standing Tall opened the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and screens in Whanganui courtesy of the Embassy of France.
"Bercot's inspiration to make the film came from an uncle who worked coaching delinquent youth for years, and spent long hours observing juvenile coaches and judges alike before writing the script (on which Marcia Romano collaborated). The research shows in its dramatic detail and the dialogue itself, which is dense with technical terms and legal slang. Apart from a romantic subplot involving a girl named Tess (Diane Rouxel, first seen in Larry Clark's The Smell of Us), nearly everything that happens could have been lifted from a real kid's case file - serial carjackings, spontaneous outbursts, the little brother also remanded to a children's home after his mother's pot habit results in secondhand intoxication. Taking a page from the Dardenne brothers' brand of social realism without going so far as to attempt such documentary naturalism, the film unashamedly leans on music (the overused Arvo Part, for example, or a heavy-handed Bach cantata) to underscore emotions, while keeping things pseudo-realistic via discreet handheld lensing. Despite such crutches, Bercot studiously avoids the sort of catharsis-oriented pop psychology the genre so often peddles: She doesn't pretend that there's some secret trick that can "fix" kids like Malony, allowing the character to be volatile and inconsistent. One moment, we glimpse the promising soul hidden behind his furrowed brow and want to help, the next, he's erupting into a feral rage, as the movie dares us not to declare him a lost cause." - Peter Debruge, Variety
Standing Tall (La tête haute) Monday, July 24, 7pm Davis Theatre, Whanganui Regional Museum Emmanuelle Bercot • France • 2015 120 mins • HD • R16 Violence, sexual violence & offensive language In French with English subtitles
