Falcon Lake: a familiar dream… –

Something like a reminiscence. Something that would perhaps be a prank, a joke where two cheeky rascals rub shoulders, a joke coming back to our minds as seasoned cinephiles many years later. Something of the order of a “disturbing strangeness”, of an overwhelming Das Unheimliche, this famous psychoanalytical notion so dear to Sigmund Freud expressing so well the beauty of the pangs and secrets of childhood, repressed but unforgotten. This Somethingso simple and so multiple at the same time, so obvious and so tacit at the same time, seems to be the starting point of the first feature film by Quebec actress and model Charlotte Le Bon who – at barely 36 years old – gives birth to a a film setting of a sensitivity like no other: the flamboyant and melancholy Falcon Lake, visible in our dark rooms from this Wednesday, December 7 and which was one of the strong contenders for the Camera d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival…

A moving film literally inhabited by the angels and demons of its director, an ultra-sensitive poem with fantastic and perfectly singular resonances on which our pen will not write in four ways: in a word as in a thousand, in a memory as in several, in its detailed view as in its overview Falcon Lake remains and will undoubtedly remain one of the most beautiful films of this end of the year 2022, a story of unique love with a worthily irrefutable empirical dimension. Clearly inspired by Charlotte Le Bon’s own experience, said film tells with her small – but haughty – voice of film reverie the meeting of Bastien and Chloé in the remote regions of the titular lake. Shy and somewhat taciturn, just under 14 years old, the young Bastien follows despite himself his parents who have come to visit a friend during the summer in a rural estate that looks like a holiday resort… This is where the young Chloé, an adventurous teenager with pronounced beauty three years her senior and daughter of Louise, friend of Bastien’s parents…

Between the two young people stretches Falcon Lake, a body of water haunted by the ghosts that the beautiful Chloe seems to see or invent as she pleases; charmed by the young girl but a little clumsy and not very expansive in terms of feelings, Bastien will fall in love with her while the teenager maintains an ambiguity that is by turns doleful, sincere and pitiless against the boy… And that’s what Something that Charlotte Le Bon films in the most admirable way possible from one end of the Falcon Lakethese unforgettable unsaid belonging to everyone like so many bruised secrets leaving us both happy and unhappy, open and vulnerable, proud to live and devastated.

Love has been – since the dawn of the times of the Seventh Art – a matter of cinema and emotions and the young director seems to have integrated this adage with the maturity of the greatest and greatest. Offering Joseph Engel and Sara Montpetit two roles of disarming dramatic accuracy Charlotte Le Bon also seems to have had the will to perfect her film setting on all levels : splendor of photography and natural settings magnified by 16mm film with a nicely outdated patina, parsimonious musical selection coupled with a sound mix that is quite impressive considering the proposed test, subtle writing and entirely effective editing… A major success of this end of autumn 2022, a real favorite of our editorial staff to live in theaters imperatively. Gorgeous.

Similar items