[critical] The Meetings After Midnight

At the heart of the night, a young couple and their governess disguised are preparing for an orgy. Are expected The Bitch, The Star, The Stallion and The Teenager.

Author’s Note

[rating:8/10]

• Release Date : November 13, 2013

• Directed by Yann Gonzalez

• Film French

• With Kate Moran, Niels Schneider, Nicolas Maury, Eric Cantona

• Duration : 1h31min

• Excerpt :

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Yann Gonzalez, this is before any of the short films to the sublime, consistently recognized in the higher spheres of art. Intermission, I hate you little girls, Land Of My Dreams or The Stars black, marked already with a footprint, visual, style, and generating a true expectation to the idea of his first feature film. If you read The Cahiers du Cinema, you have probably realized, not a month goes by without mentioned the name of the director of nice.

Personally, I was more than skeptical. If the basic idea and some images arty scattered here and there gave me the urge, the teaser inaugural I foreshadowed the worst. Fortunately, at the end of a meeting rich in emotions, I have to go to the evidence, what I thought film pretentious is in fact a comedy erotic visually sublime.

Between the series A and series Z, this is a show funny that we provides the young filmmaker. We are constantly jostled from laughter to tears, from the sublime manner to the stuffing raw. If it is for example hard to hide his pleasure in the face of a Béatrice Dalle unleashed, whipping Eric Cantona foaming at the mouth and mad eye, It is also hard to suppress his admiration for the inventiveness and mastery emerging from the first film. In effect, each plan and, more importantly each stage shows a stylistic research never superfluous. A cemetery Ed Woodien a futuristic interior, the whole story of the movie seems to be referenced.

I’ve never been a particular fan of French cinema, and even less of actors as Béatrice Dalle, Niels Schneider, Kate Moran, or Eric Cantona, it is yet obvious that they will shine, declaring their dialogues are crispy and absurd with a rightness of every moment. It would also be necessary to support the talent of writer-Yann Gonzalez, as the above-mentioned dialogue to carry the film, and are masterfully equates crudeness and sexual poetry. There is no doubt that the monologue phallic issued by a Cantona depressed will remain in the annals, and will be further cited in dozens of years.

However, we regret the turn taken by the film in its last quarter, transforming precisely what I warned about, a film auteuriste pretentious. The situations unbelievable drama unfold, the narrative disappears, and the long monologues watery flow, sometimes pouring into sentimentality ridiculous, the image of a purpose absurd, and ready to smile through his nonsense.

Ultimately, The Meetings after midnight is a work apart, which it will surely never equal. Genuine curiosity film, he mixes the sublime and the grotesque in a hurly-burly scenes of the absurd, in a good way or the bad. But in a landscape of French distressing, which is struggling to renew itself, we cannot consider this film as a welcome breath of fresh air, and wish all the happiness in the world with Yann Gonzalez for the rest of his career.