After “Titanic”, the other shipwreck of the Kate Winslet-Leonardo DiCaprio couple

OCS – SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 AT 11:10 PM – FILM

Eleven years later Titanic (1997), British director Sam Mendes brought Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio together to marry them in an American suburb in 1955. The Rebel Wedding has in common with its illustrious predecessor only the fact that it is the story of a shipwreck. The cruelty of the setting – adapted from a novel by Richard Yates (The panoramic windowRobert Laffont, 1961) – is heightened by the romantic aura surrounding the star couple.

The term story is not entirely accurate. Although the script follows – with some flashbacks – the chronology of this marriage, its almost theatrical division into symptomatic sequences rather brings The Rebel Wedding of dissection.

The film opens with April and Frank Wheeler meeting at a bohemian New York soiree. She is beautiful and would like to be an actress; he is handsome and doesn’t know what to do with his life. In the next sequence, we find them a few years later. She is on stage surrounded by fans, in front of an audience of neighbors and friends who are forced to applaud. After the show, Frank tries to console April before mocking her poor skills.

Warning signs

The Wheelers, who have taken refuge in a small town in Connecticut because she was pregnant, have promised themselves never to become like their neighbors. April’s failure reminds them of their promises, and the young woman, who now has two children, plans to leave for Paris, dreamed of as the city of all possibilities. Most of the film takes place during the summer preceding the theoretical date of departure for France.

April’s seriousness and determination excite Frank, who has adapted to a profession far below what he considers his intellectual stature. The agitation of the two characters, who feel that life is passing them by, has something of the ridiculous. Yet Sam Mendes films them without irony, erasing the comic traits. The exterior scenes are bathed in summer light, the interiors are all the softer because the wounds inflicted there are bleeding. The rhythm is marked, the paroxysms only occur once all the warning signs have been taken into account.

The forensic precision that the director so loves carries with it the risk of coldness and disengagement. The Rebel Wedding April is protected from this danger by her actors. A little stiff, DiCaprio does nothing to save an indefensible character. Kate Winslet, however, does not turn April into a martyr on the altar of patriarchy. At the end of the credits, nothing remains of the memory of the lovers of Titanicjust a taste of ashes. Perhaps this is the real reason for this film.