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Rating:
Ok, this is the third review of the film in question (the other two are definitely better!) here on DeB so what?
I have something by Yasmina Reza on my kindle, I need to take a look, just as Rajmund Roman Thierry Polański did to adapt "Il dio del massacro" from 2006 into his direction for the comedy "Carnage" of 2011 (with the screenplay also co-written by YR).
The film is too short for my taste, and last night when it ended, I was puzzled for a few seconds after the cell phone rang, which in the film had ended up underwater and seemed unusable. I was waiting for the continuation of the hilarious performance of the four individuals, two "bourgeois" couples who were saying all sorts of things to each other after drinking several doses of excellent "scotch", when suddenly the credits started rolling, not before a cute hamster made an appearance.
Everything kicks off in a park where an eleven-year-old boy hits a peer in the face with a branch, knocking out one of his incisors and causing nerve damage to another tooth, and I'll stop there to avoid spoilers. To close the circle, the film ends in that very park with the same eleven-year-olds reconciled. Oh, sorry, I had said I'd stop, so I will now.
In short, it's been three nights of watching Polański films, and with this one, I had a lot of fun while I thought it might be somewhat heavy like the excellent "La Vénus à la fourrure" from 2013 or the claustrophobic and unsettling "D'après une histoire vraie" from 2017. Aside from the agile direction, the credit also goes to the performances of Alicia Christian Foster (aka Jodie Foster), perhaps a bit over the top, and John Christopher Reilly, who portray the first couple, that is, the parents of the injured boy, and Christoph Waltz with Kate Elizabeth Winslet who portrayed the second couple, namely the parents of the lunatic (as his lawyer father calls him) wielding the branch.
The film has various sociological morals, and it's up to you to interpret them as you see fit. Beyond everything, once again Roman (with the help of Yasmina) shows us that appearances can be deceiving, and behind people's facades, there's always something else waiting for the right moment to surface and reveal itself, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us."
PS The film was shot near Paris even though it is set in New York (ah, the power of cinema), as Roman Polański is banned from entering the States due to an "arrest warrant for sexual assault” against a minor, dating back to the 70s.
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