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- Short Film Review: Si Fan (The River Will Carry Them) ( by Keyi Zhang
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Needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding. His brother, who won’t be coming back, his mother, who is about to do the same thing, and his father, with whom nothing has ever been possible. He finds there everything from which he had fled twelve years earlier.
When he arrives, all the cows of his childhood are gone. In their place, he sees the cute Alex , his 6-year-old nephew whom he has never met before. Mona , Alex’s mom, also doesn’t immediately recognize the man with the curly blond hair, though he is the older brother of Mathieu, Alex’s late father and Mona’s late boyfriend.
Short Film Review: Si Fan (The River Will Carry Them) ( by Keyi Zhang
But alas, this is a quiet, pastoral, contemporary French drama, so none of that is likely. A destitute farm family beset by misfortunate and grief is visited by their eldest son Thomas, who escaped the family's entropic field, to Montreal, many years prior. Thomas, a young man, returns from Montréal to the farm in the southeast of France where he grew up. His mother is terminally ill and his father is staying with her in the hospital and seems unable to cope with day-to-day chores. Thomas' first impression of the farm is discouraging; livestock have been sold to cover debts, irrigation pipes are in disrepair, and rooms are cluttered and in need of tidying up.
Her quiet life, however, is thrown into turmoil one day when she receives a phone call from the police saying that the man who allegedly raped her ten years ago has finally been caught, an incident which she has so far hidden from Sang-u. Jeong-won struggles to decide whether and how to tell him after all these years, while her adoptive parents, Sang-u’s employees, who are aware of what happened, try to convince her to not keep her husband in the dark for too long. Victims of sexual assaults may report the crime against them to the police, but often the perpetrators walk away unscathed, never caught. The victims try to push forward with life as best as they can, never really forgetting what happened to them but trying to lock up the incident in a remote part of their minds. But what happens if, years later when the victim has seemingly moved on, they find out that the perpetrator has been caught? This is the central idea behind Park Sun-joo’s debut film “Way Back Home” (not to be confused with the Jeon Do-yeon starring 2013 film of the same name), which premiered at Busan International Film Festival.
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These sentiments began to make further sense once Jeong-won’s younger sister features more prominently in the film’s second half. Jun Suk-ho is an actor mostly seen in much smaller, throwaway roles (most audiences might know him as the magistrate with the hots for Bae Doona’s character in Netflix’s “Kingdom”), so the gravitas he brings to Sang-u catches you off-guard and is praise-worthy. His transition from the loveable, doting husband to the confused yet supportive partner who wants to be his emotionally struggling wife’s pillar of strength but never quite gets to be is noteworthy, particularly in the aforementioned car scene. Seasoned supporting actors Yoo Jae-myung and Yum Hye-ran provide decent company to the two as Jeong-won’s uncle and aunt but it is Jung Da-eun’s understated performance as Jeong-won’s sister that surprises. Given the premise, this could easily go full-on forbidden love story. It could also turn easily into a turgid exhibition of inner-family quarreling.
It is the first feature from Paris-born filmmaker Jessica Palud, a former assistant director who has worked on several features from one of France’s greatest humanist filmmakers, Philippe Lioret . Lioret actually produced the film and also co-wrote the script with Palud and mono-monikered screenwriter Diasteme . For as long as I can remember, I've been watching movies, but my introduction to Asian cinema was old rental VHS copies of Bruce Lee films and some Shaw Bros. martial arts extravaganzas. But my interest in the cinema of the region really deepened when I was at university and got access to a massive range of VHS and DVDs of classic Japanese and Chinese titles in the library, and there has been no turning back since. Drawn Back Home is one of the best gay themed films that I have seen in a very long time. I have watched this movie at least a dozen times.
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It all seemed very operatic to me - I almost thought the story could be adapted to an opera. The central character, Fausto, even looked like an Italian tenor. The plot evolves from his selling his soul to the devil (i.e. some local crooks) to save his estate from bankruptcy.
Former Xavier Dolan muse Niels Schneider andBlue Is the Warmest Colorbreakout Adele Exarchopoulos, who earlier this year co-starred in the Cannes competition titleSibyl, compellingly bring their sweaty, hard-shelled characters to life. But there is a sense throughout that this fleet, 77-minute tale could have used a little more nuance and depth and a smidgen less armchair-analysis-level psychology. Back Home premiered in Venice in the Horizons sidebar and should see interest from other festivals and French film week-type events, as well as from broadcasters and VOD platforms.
And, once again, Sarah Lancashire was outstanding. There are no featured reviews for Back Home because the movie has not released yet (). Tensions rise and old wounds resurface when a man returns to his family's farm in France. Verified reviews are considered more trustworthy by fellow moviegoers. I thoroughly enjoyed this very Italian crime thriller/family drama now streaming in the U.S. on Acorn TV under the title "Back Home." It's all great fun and kept me bingeing through the twelve episodes.
But she has her heart in the right place, as becomes clear when she suggests why she wants to stay at the farm when Michel has finally come home after having spent several nights at the hospital. Her earthy presence as a complicated but good-hearted woman is a believable and welcome one in this tough world. The early going, in which Thomas slowly immerses himself again in life at the family homestead, is beautifully written. Small conversational details convincingly sketch in the various backstories and offhandedly suggest what has changed since Thomas flew the coop all those years ago. The reason Thomas is back at all is because his aging mother, Catherine , has been hospitalized, though his hardhearted father, Michel (Patrick d’Assumcao), didn’t think that eventhatwas reason enough for Thomas to either come back or even be told. A Frenchman in his early thirties returns to the farm of his childhood in the rural family dramaBack Home , a suitably down-to-earth adaptation of a work by French novelist Serge Joncour.
He’s not quite Charlize-Theron-in-Monster-level unrecognizable, but Schneider’s full-bodied performance really does manage to take center stage here because his appearance has been taken out of the equation. He also has a laid-back kind of chemistry with Exarchopoulos as his sister-in-law, even if a late scene with the duo underneath some olive trees feels like an unexpected swerve into genre complacency that’s somewhat icky in hindsight. But these changes to the fabric of rural France aren’t the only explanation for either the frosty relationship between father and son or for Michel’s misguided political leanings. Conversely, if one were being highly critical the only minor issue that the movie faces is with the character of the husband.
The appropriately stripped-down look fits perfectly with who these characters are, which is why the few instances in which music is used feel somewhat out of place as they pull the film in a more melodramatic direction. While a lot of the complex Michel-Thomas relationship has long and semi-obscure ties to the past, Thomas’ connection with Mona takes place entirely in the present. As she explains, in another bit of blunt dialogue, she finds it hard to be gentle with Alex, who, like most children can be patience-testing at times.
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