Coming out of Thomas Cailley’s film, The Animal Kingdom, I wondered if the essential merit of a director was not to choose his actors well, in this case Paul Kircher. I subsequently wondered if an actor could become the muse of several directors at the same time. Because I remembered that after around fifteen films in twenty years, Christophe Honoré had made the best of all thanks to the same Paul Kircher who played the title role of the High School Student, stuck, ungrateful, and overwhelming. By moving from the autobiographical auteur film to the blockbuster blockbuster, Paul Kircher achieves a transformation in which he also manages to lead Thomas Cailley who, to be up to his standards, had to get rid of the emphatic terrors of the future which had served him of stencils in The fighters (2014) as in the mini-series broadcast on Arte, Ad Vitam (2018). Before knowing if Paul Kircher is really endowed with supernatural powers, as suggested The Animal Kingdom by Cailley, I await with suspicion the adaptation of Nicolas Mathieu’s novel, Their children after them (Goncourt 2018), directed by the twins Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma. With suspicion and anxiety, because this time he will literally have to perform a miracle for the Boukherma brothers to make us forget their Year of the Shark, the saddest French comedy of the post-Covid year. It is true that when it comes to comedies, French women are almost all, year after year, Covid or not, the worst of the year. After Anatomy of a fall And The Goldman trial mentioned here last week, The Animal Kingdom stunned me, and almost reconciled me with horror cinema. It was a no brainer, because I no longer like films of this type since the release of The Blair Witch Project, seen in 1999 in Guadalajara in the company of a young deaf and mute Mexican woman; she wasn’t afraid for a second, which made me understand that everything in horror films comes down to decibels, sound effects and music. I then considered this fear industry a scam.
At Cannes where it was presented at the opening of the Un certain regard section, Thomas Cailley’s film was criticized for jumping from one genre to another, horror, police, medical, political-ecological, animal, and so on. This is precisely its interest, its originality, and the source of its success. If this juggling disconcerts us, that’s so much the better, it forces us to perform some intellectual gymnastics exercises which can only be profitable. The suspense of this tightrope film, what allows it to advance between the precipice of fiction and the abyss of reality, is the father-son relationship. I am, I confess, overly sensitive to it. I can be made to swallow a lot of nonsense with a father who lays down his weapons, a son who gives up his weapons. The attachment we feel for the hero of this Animal Kingdom is essentially due to the integrity of Paul Kircher who, clinging to his role as a problematic teenager, resists all the clichés set by his partner father, Romain Duris, an overly seasoned actor whom the tragic teenager constantly brings back to simplicity, to naturalness , quiet. Paul Kircher is the son of Irène Jacob and Jérôme Kircher, who is himself an actor and the father of Samuel Kircher, the star of Catherine Breillat’s latest film, Last summer. The privileges of the children of the ball make people jealous, furious, they are wrong, because it is the same everywhere, in football, in science, in business and… in the animal kingdom. This is how last Sunday, at the Vincennes racecourse, a grandson of Ready Cash won the Critérium des 3 ans, beating a son of Ready Cash. The harsh law of this competitive universe did not, however, prevent Josh Power from beating Just A Gigolo, a grandson of Ready Cash, in the Critérium des 4 ans, the favorite from the previous race. His merit was all the greater.