Showing posts with label Philippot (Just). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philippot (Just). Show all posts

14 June 2021

Just Philippot's Acide | Acid (2018)

A seventeen-minute short. At first we see an abandoned teddy bear by the roadside, then the lower sections of cars as they bump into each other. As it rains, the teddy bear begins to dissolve a little, as the camera moves out we see a man with a much bloodied face, and rotting cars in a traffic jam. It's now dry and a motorbike seems to be on fire: it carries the mother (Maud Wyler), the father (Sofian Khammes) and their son (Antonin Chaussoy). The father stops the motorbike in a field and the three alight and run towards a house which a number of other people are running towards, although they see that the owners of the house, in a frenzy, are shooting the people down.

The rain is obviously deadly acid, and as the family run the man picks up a corrugated sheet for his wife and son to shelter from while trying to escape. The man begins to bleed heavily as it starts to pour down, and he doesn't make it to the cave where his wife and child are sheltering. Here mother and son take off some of their poisoned clothing, they look at the rain dripping inside the cave and suspect that that too is acid. The mother appears to be dying and the boy walks out into the sunshine, into the devastation, the screen goes black and he says a few times: 'Il y a quelqu'un?" ('Is anyone there?'). This film, made three years after Ses souffles, is far more like the horror genre that his first feature La Nuée will be, although the presence of mother and child is also there as in Ses souffres.

Just Philippot's Ses souffles | Breathe (2015)

Just Philippot is very much in the news now due to the release of his delayed horror film La Nuée (Swarm). Stretching things, I suppose this twenty-four minute short could be called called a horror film of sorts, although it's really in the vein of a Ken Loach drama about social deprivation.

We first see a birthday party in a house, where Lizon (Candela Cottis) and her mother Karine (Marie Kauffmann) are at Lizon's young friend Marie's, and Lizon gets so excited about birthday wishes that she tries to blow the candles out on the cake, although she's restrained by her schoolfriends. Lizon's birthday too is coming soon, and she wants to have a birthday party. Unfortunately her living conditions make this impossible as she lives in a car with her ferociously independent single mother. Karine works in a supermarket but would prefer to work as a housekeeper or garde d'enfant.

Lizon wants to plan a birthday party with her 'schoolmates' in the car, although perhaps inevitably they criticise her clothes and the smell. So Lizon has a 'party' in the car with just her mother present, although she refuses to blow the candles out as it's not a real party, Karine gets exasperated and walks away and the next thing the car is ablaze. Karine manages to rescue Lizon but the sight of the car in flames is the lasting image in the film that we have. Obviously a promising beginning to film direction.

The title Ses souffles is lost in English as it can obviously apply to breath but there's a pun on s'éssouffle, not only being out of breathe but out of a number of things, such as hope.