[CRITICAL] SERIOUS

Whether it’s staging or his scenario, Serious is a film not to be missed, even if it is better to see it with people who have the strong stomach… or the sense of irony is highly developed !

Our interview with Julia Ducournau

 

SERIOUS starts with a plan very trivial, of a silhouette walking on a roadside, it is difficult to say whether it is a man or a woman at this distance. Two plans later, it is the shock (which we won’t divulge the details). This skillful management of the mundane and the unexpected, Julia Ducournau will use throughout the film, at various scales : script, staging and direction of actors. GRAVE tells the story of the first year of Justine’s school of veterinary medicine. Vegetarian convinced, just like his parents and his sister, also present in the establishment, Justine undergoes the hazing of the first years and must ingest meat. Then begins a mutation, dangerous as well as unstoppable.

The essence of fantastic cinema is to create a porosity between the everyday and the strange… But with time, you eventually get used to these recipes, and it becomes difficult to surprise us. The director turns away continuously our knowledge of genre cinema, with a use unexpected of gore effects or the instillation of a climate-provoking, carefully-dosed. If it was merely to show the absurdity of the system of hazing, Julia Ducournau would have already made a very good film, but it was impossible to suspect the real turning point of the story, the first third, which takes us much further in the darkness of the human soul.

In turn cruelly funny and awfully cruel, the SERIOUS eyeful at the level of its staging. That this is the nature of the totalitarian of hazing put in place by the second year, or the impulses of Justine, Julia Ducournau always happens to enhance the quality of the script by a perfect management of the tempo, a great sense of colors or a choice of framing to the original. Sometimes this is just, as when Justine observes (only in the fixed frame, center), his roommate, playing football, bare-chested (it is filmed in motion, his body mixed in with a zillion other students). The eyes of Garance Marillier betrays very precisely the desire, but the framing reveals that the desire of the isolates from the other, its nature is therefore suspect.

SERIOUS is a great entertainment : funny, scary, and unpredictable

The face that expresses the transformation of Justine is that of an angel diaphanous, a young girl still not quite woman which, far from having eyes full of cruelty poses rather on the world, a look of melancholy. Garance Marillier doesn’t just play fair, it is the true revelation of SERIOUS. The direction of the actors is impeccable, but Garance Marillier stands out from the crowd by taking the opposite of our expectations : we believe out of fear, she becomes a seductress in the next scene ; she takes a liking to her transformation, here it is now almost sad to this revelation.

SERIOUS concentrates on a series of themes that would have all been the subject of a film, discovery of sexuality, self-affirmation, parentage, parental, etc The polysemy of the play of the actress cuts so that the movie. But these aspects are also correlated to a more insidious, which is only revealed very gradually over the course of the story : the Evil is by nature intrinsic to our condition. Or at least that of Justine. If one can take offence to this idea, it is not totally consistent with all the events in SERIOUS. To combat this Evil is innate, we can only try in vain to impose safeguards, in the hope of the contain, to the extent possible.

Thomas Coispel

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