“The seeds of the wild fig tree”, “My life, my mouth”, “The barbarians”, “Rue du Conservatoire”…

THE MORNING LIST

There is a lot of excitement this week, with four films as different as expected: the drama by Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, Wild fig seeds ; Sophie Fillières’ posthumous film my life my mouth ; Julie Delpy’s comedy The Barbariansand the documentary Conservatory Streetby Valérie Donzelli.

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“The seeds of the wild fig tree”: an Iranian family on the embers

Launched in 2002, Mohammad Rasoulof’s oeuvre includes eight feature-length fiction films, most of which were made clandestinely. The latest, Wild fig seedsIt inaugurates what, unfortunately, would end up happening: the pure and simple exile of the filmmaker. What the Iranian filmmaker tries to describe this time are the internal mechanisms of totalitarian thought, an ambition very cleverly made possible through the prism of a middle-class family that is simmering on the embers of an intergenerational conflict.

The drama unfolds in the turn of two concomitant events. On the one hand, the appointment of Iman, the paterfamilias, to the dreaded post of judge of the revolutionary court of Tehran. On the other hand, the birth of the social protest movement Women, Life, Freedom, born in the wake of the death, in September 2022, of the young Mahsa Amini, at the hands of the moral police, who deemed her wrongly covered up. Reducing the totalitarian horror to the dimensions of a family microcosm, Mohammad Rasoulof displays a formidable intelligence in the staging. His closed, stifling and recalcitrant session (we see conflicts and women with hair), seems to tell us: “This is the most I can film.” J.Ma.

“My life, my face”: a bewildered woman

Sophie Fillières’ seventh feature film, my life my mouth comes to us posthumously, concluding the leisurely work of an atypical filmmaker, who died on July 31, 2023, at the age of 58. Inevitably acquiring testamentary value, my life my mouth It also knows perfectly well how to be something else, faithful to the absurd exuberance and language games that characterize the director. Or the endearing portrait of a disturbed woman, Barberie Bichette, who, stumbling against the wall of reality, seeks a way out.

Agnès Jaoui, who plays her, immediately imposes on the character a formidable vocal regime: a murmur in basso continuo, a flow of anarchic thoughts immediately verbalized, shaken by tics and onomatopoeia, which say everything about the inner disorder of this bewildered woman. All the while, my life my mouth thus brings together an impregnable joke with the persistent idea of ​​death. Barberie is certainly more than just Sophie Fillières’ alter ego: a mask to spread discreet signs of farewell and caress something beyond language. mountain

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