If you are fed up with women’s films, with too many women who talk about their women’s problems, and given the unleashing of social networks against All for a,, It is a strong trend, then, to wash your head, you will go to see two films with that men, as in the good old days. The first, The damnedis a war film that takes place in America during the Civil War (1861-1865), an era when women were not called on the battlefields. Directed by Roberto Minervini, Italian-American filmmaker “considered one of the most important narrative documentaries in activity”, the film was shot in winter, under the snow, so it’s beautiful.
Minervini is one of the filmmakers who have understood that bad weather is their best allies. There is always something happening in a film shot in extreme weather conditions. The philosophers who have glossed on temporality in the 7th art hardly took into account the time it has on the sets. The good weather is useless, in the cinema, but the wind, the cold, the rain, and if you have the chance to shoot during an earthquake, my word, it does not guarantee success but the interest of the film is raised.
A principle that Jean-Luc Godard had theorized: “Good cinema, he said (from memory) is never something other than a documentary on cinema.” Hollywood understood it long before him (Through the stormDavid W. Griffith), even if it means reconstructing the bad weather in the studio (Let’s sing in the rain, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen), or staying on the spot that Typhon Olga invites himself on the set and rotting an atmosphere that Coppola, his actors and the scenario could not create (Revelation Now).
The weather takes precedence over the scenario
In The damned From Minervini, the story told is not that of war, not even that of a battle. In fact, there is not really a story, just a question that the spectator arises: have the actors not died of cold? Slowness makes style, emotion is aesthetic, boredom arouses analysis, with this new question, more deep: what is this film? If it is a documentary on war, produced at a time when cinema did not exist, it’s great. The problem is that the way the old soldiers speak, comment on the war and teach the kids of 16 years to load a weapon, it sounds as false as a document turned by a TF1 team in immersion at the Center d’Aguerrement de Collioure (Pyrénées-Orientales). One cannot believe that the soldiers of this war were able to make such pompous remarks on life and death. If the oxymoron of the docu-fiction is the subject of the film, it is successful and magnificent, the pitch would be: a director makes his actors walk under a snowstorm until the weather takes precedence over the script.
The second film with (practically) that men is called Mates (Les Copains). You will find it on Prime Video. This is Arno Crous’s first film. At the start, three boys between 18 and 20 years old who do not ask themselves the question of what it rhymes, war, and if God protects them. These three contemporary blessed people do not know what to do with the luck they have, so they go hiking. Rafe Bird performs the role of the big guy, beautiful and sporty who protects his little neighbor (James Wiles) who plays the shy twink and not at all sporty, so different from the third (Sam Law) who only thinks of drinking beer And talk about girls (we only see them ten seconds, don’t panic).
The protected twink is disappointed not to be alone with its protector. While the beer drinker wonders why his friend invited this soft chife to their hike. Rotten atmosphere. Until the arrival of a fourth guy (Jonathan Cobb) openly in love with the twink. There, things become serious. And deliciously comical.