Palace intrigues, the intoxication of power, ambition and fall: what more intense human matter, more subject to passions than politics, its ideals and its betrayals! Power, the relationship to decisions, to citizenship, this arena is still little exploited in French cinema.
There have been the more or less recent successes of Quai d’Orsay or of State Exercise. But, these films evolved in the high spheres, the ministerial cabinets.
What is happening at the level closest to people: the cities?
Can we do politics differently? Reinvent it? Is it at the municipal level that lives the beating heart, and moreover etymological, of politics?
Two great films, on view next Wednesday (January 26, 2022), shine their spotlight on local life, and the way city councilors, or candidates, try to work for the common good, without getting carried away by their passions, their ego or their ambition.
We receive Thomas Kruitho, the director of The promises, fiction featuring the town hall of a suburban town, camped by the always excellent Isabelle Huppert, whose ambition is precisely going to be activated by the possibility of a ministerial appointment. And thomas paulot, the director of a documentary, a very astonishing docu-fiction, Municipal, which shows an actor, Laurent Papot, campaigning to run for mayor of a small town in the Ardennes Revin.
Also showing in our cinema this week : Maimouna Ndiaye, currently in Burkina Faso to accompany the release of the film The song of guns.