Jeff Nichols dares to break. He never was engaged in a love story, and even less in a biopic. Less than a year after the sublime Midnight Special, he is back with a topic where it wasn’t expected.
“I’m pregnant”. It is on these words full of meaning, heralding a future happy, that opens the film. Everything seems wonderfully well for the little couple : they love each other, are expecting a child and are going to build a house. It does need a marriage to permanently seal their love. What they will do but this is not to the taste of local authorities. The importance of the connection on the look is established of entry to mean that the whole world is watching this couple. From the first minutes, the threat looms. Suddenly a gang of four white men, of a sudden a saleswoman black. The whole world is watching, the whole world poses a judgment on them. When they are in love and just want to live normally. This introduction of the connector on the gaze takes in the last act of the film to a very beautiful scene where a photographer of Life (Michael Shannon, who happens to say hello) comes home. He also must, through her work, to look. Except that it does not consider. The tenderness that emanates from his eyes when he sees these two beings laugh in front of the tv breaks with what others saw and says a lot about what love should be.
LOVING seems to work in addition to Midnight Special, the two sharing good numbers of links. Not surprising that they have been done one after the other. In Midnight Special, the purpose of the film was the separation, the emancipation of a child leaving his family to join his world. LOVING takes the other end of the situation by putting in scene, not the dissolution but the battle for the creation of the cocoon family. The two films speak of a leak, to continue to move forward, a process in which are engaged of the main characters who have to go to the end. Richard and Mildred are, in their way, the aliens hunted down because of their difference, as the young Alton’s Midnight Special. It is not surprising that we find a scene of a vanishing night in the two projects. In this escape, the characters have decided to believe in their love (the belief, a major theme in Midnight Special), to believe that he was stronger than a simple law. After all, they are simply two human beings. By motives, whether they be narrative, formal, or thematic, it is possible to weave all of the incredible links between these works, see the filmography of Nichols as a whole. What to confirm that it is positioned permanently as an author who continues to work in coherence.
“Loving is a film that is modest, in the image of its characters. “Click To Tweet
Seizing of a true story, Jeff Nichols finds himself blocked by the reality of the facts. The choice of the director to avoid falling in one operation without tension is to look rather to the characters and the story. What he can do superbly and because it features a duo main the top flight (Joel Edgerton surprising and Ruth Negga for her first big role). Its staging classic does not seem to be a virtuoso but it just falls. What is not so simple, the simplicity that rhyme with flatness. Fortunately, this is not the case with LOVING who remains a film in the restraint while the subject is huge and could give rise to endless scenes pulls-tears. The scene of the trial which comes to the end demonstrates the correctness of the american director. He refuses to do the spectacular, to the emphasis – the couple does not like to show off, talk to the media. Nichols made the choice to switch plans on the defense lawyers and the family Loving living trivially. The simplicity of the plans contrast with the value of what he actually plays in the background.
Jeff Nichols takes down the potential scavenger of his subject would have wanted it to start in a film ample. In the same way he did with Take Shelter, by moving the cursor to the intimate. Instead of getting bogged down in a plot litigious classic, it lets talk about its sensitivity. Rather, it is the film the turning point in the life of a couple that the turning point in american History. A detail in a case is immense. At the bottom it offers a film modest in the image of its characters. When they leave the floor, they do not sink into pathos, but still remain in a remarkable simplicity. While he has the opportunity to speak to the judges of the Supreme Court via his lawyers, Richard Loving has nothing else to communicate that a clear : “tell them simply that I love my wife”. Two hours summed up in a handful of words.
Posted on may 16, 2016.
Maxime Bedini
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