PLAYERS, the first kick-poker – Review

Inspired by his own experience of gaming clubs in paris, Marie Monge was beautiful to yield to the appeal of the facility, Players is a first work burning.

The games of money and all that they were very american, formed today a path paved of gold on the French scene. Not Bellagio, but a roulette and a few neon’s deceptively warm. The adrenaline does not suffer, however, not of this relocation and wins even to be transposed in a Paris city, a city different from the one usually proposed. The streets are familiar, but strained, and they are not the only ones.

Token non-negligible, the actors. The body and the soul of the film, are clearly disarming the duo of head. Stacy Martin in girl next door drifting in the shining of sobriety, she is not the muse of a train and Godard, just the flame in the heart of her lover. She naturally attracts the attention, only it is sometimes that a function, which serves all the more to face the inferno that is his partner. Tahar Rahim, talent in front of the Lord, and even with medium sized hands, had never been as glowing since A prophet. The role of Abel is that of a femme fatale, the one that sucks energy (and money) of his victim, but yet terribly draining. None of his beats of cil does not escape to an intensity that is feverish, there is an urgent need, a restlessness visceral digging up her crack a little more each time. He is so insolent that wobbly, and it is simply impossible to unhook his gaze from him, in all honor. Players comes out in cinemas a July 4, the day of his birthday…

The camera is also unable to resist the magnetism of the couple, she approaches their face and hung onto it the more possible, not granting the same privilege only for the game tables. All the rest is the background, the foreground is just addiction. “The fate of the weak is to be over-dependent,” said Adolphe Thiers, and in fact the plurality of dependencies made the feature film a chorus of perdition. Love and the game are not really different, two forces are immutable, which are disposed in the same way. The euro is not their fix. The thrill they feel in each other’s presence is the worst dopamines, the junkies of the other. Beautiful story of hell and perversion controlled, it becomes even addictive to the image of the couple, especially in its first three-quarters of an hour. The narrative seems to split into two main parts, of which the tipping point is a race car – set-up/pay-off little subtle thing to do. The first is truly thrilling, the heart beats the frantic rhythm of the music choppy during the distribution of the cards. Punctuated accents lynchéens, the polar-fiction works without any doubt on the suspense of the toxicity to come.The second, however, hardly more convincing, to surprise except on a few points at the end (thanks, the real anonymous). The scenario is all the more expected and neutralizes most of the issues. Furthermore, when one falls completely in the revenge of the mafia, the gear rust really. The absence of transition own only reinforces this half to the linearity in the extreme, everything is beautiful and everything is sad in the space of a moment. The verve of the characters being nothing more than a superficial layer of the empathy of the spectator is of that surface ; the events are too manichean. Predictability is mistress of fatigue and the assembly suffers from the impulses of the dead. And even visually, if the saturation of the colors brings a certain amount of vibration in these streets cosmopolitan, there’s nothing here to fundamentally novel, if not a dichotomy warm/cold archi-used. All this is disappointing, especially as the rest is promising.

However, in spite of all of these aspects under-treated, or drafts, a first film has no need to claim in the Pantheon of originality and it has the merit of already well out of the lot. The errors in the outline of plot does not take away a sense of drama and rhythm for sure. This is a real proposal, which manages to capture the tension of a microcosm as it expands. It was risky to choose a context so close but so odd for a first feature, and it is a successful bet. It is well worth a visit, especially as its intentions are so good that it is easy to forgive him his lapses of beginnings. The desire to make films is there, the pleasure of the seventh art is contagious.

Manon

Also check out our interview with Marie Monge and Tahar Rahim !