THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Unclassifiable, Julie Delpy has followed, since the 1980s, an eclectic and omnipresent acting career between France and the United States, two countries between which her life and career are distributed. In addition to this, since 2002 (looking for jimmy), a vocation as a director that allows her to tirelessly explore, with freshness, a sense of humor and a pleasant intuition, the intimate crises of couples or extended families.
Even greatly expanded, as in his eighth feature film, The Barbarianswhich tests immigration and coexistence in a small, quiet Breton village called Paimpont (Ille-et-Vilaine). Even if this means that we quickly wonder, given its acidic humour, whether we should not hear “ping-pong”, firemen, the asylum and tintouin.
It starts off very well, with the entire welcoming committee gathered in the main square for the arrival of a family of Ukrainian refugees. At the last minute, the instigator of this wonderful operation explained to the mayor that, due to the shortage of Ukrainians in the refugee aid market, the prefecture had taken it upon itself to send them a Syrian family. A decision that suddenly changes everything and the whole story begins that will sting strongly, with international solidarity, despite everything, of variable geometry.
Great Molière tradition
In the great Molière tradition, The Barbarians It turns out to be a character comedy. The characters control the plot rather than emanating from it. This demonstrates the importance of casting, which is perfectly measured here.
Jean-Charles Clichet (already magnificent in come I’ll take youAlain Guiraudie (in 2022) plays Sébastien Lejeune, the amiable opportunistic mayor who only uses politically correct clichés as language. Julie Delpy herself is Joëlle, a school teacher and left-wing activist who has definitively banned the words “sweetness” and “humour” from her psycholinguistic horizon. Sandrine Kiberlain is Anne Poudoulec, a friend of the former superficial manager of the local supermarket, while her husband, Philippe (Mathieu Demy), regularly loses himself in the voluptuous curves of the butcher Marylin Legall. Laurent Lafitte plays the Alsatian plumber Hervé Riou, an exceptional Breton, an honorary Frenchman, a far-right activist, whose obtuse xenophobic obsession exhausts even his wife, Géraldine (India Hair).
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