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CANNES 2013 Directors' Fortnight

Henri: the Belgian-ness of things

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- Yolande Moreau closes the Directors' Fortnight with a tender film on grieving and reconstruction

Mainly known as an actress, Yolande Moreau from Belgium, who co-directed a first film with Gilles Porte (When the Sea Rises, César 2005 for the Best First Film), is back behind the camera — alone this time — for Henri [+see also:
trailer
interview: Yolande Moreau
film profile
]
, which closes the Directors' Fortnight 2013.

Henri (Pippo Delbono) runs a café with his wife, Rita (Lio). When she dies, the husband, miserable and resigned, takes on a "white butterfly" to help him out, a young woman with a slight mental handicap, employed for a modest wage. A personal relationship begins to emerge between Rosette (Candy Ming) and Henri, beyond the workplace. She is full of hope for the future, he is gradually getting over his loss.

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This Franco-Belgian coproduction asserts its strong Belgian-ness above all through the actors, the settings (Le Borinage with its slag heaps, the North Sea...), but also in a number of details dear to the director and of a very Belgian nature (the Jupiler beer brand, the chip van, the names of the sauces...). Moreau films with a cinematographic family, in which everyone feels comfortable. Her cinema recalls, for example, that of two soul brothers, French directors Français Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delepine. She takes from their Mammuth (2010) the actress Candy Ming, a rather moonstruck character, very engaging in the role of someone who can't see any evil in human beings. The director puts a little galaxy of characters together around the main pair of actors, many of them handicapped. The way they are directed contributes to an overall tragi-comic state of mind in which the entire film tends to bask. The camera composes shots infused with local poetry, helping to create a world both tender and delicate, far from the socio-economic slump which has given rise to another generation in Belgian cinema, heir to the Dardenne brothers.

All the ingredients are there, but the emotional sauce has a hard time blending together. Yolande Moreau struggles a little, whereas her compatriot Bouli Lanners (another young protégé of the Versus stable, which coproduced the film) succeeded more easily when concocting Eldorado from the same local produce. It's worth noting that the film's music is signed Wim Willaert, the nice carrier of giants in When the Sea Rises. The Flemish actor makes a brief appearance as a policeman, in an appealing scene as Belgian cinema — and it won't hurt for once — makes a modest appearance on the Croisette for its 2013 vintage.

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(Translated from French)

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