“About Joan”: In The False Memories of Isabelle Huppert

The meaning of “the world” – to see

To cast Isabelle Hooper in the role of a woman looking back on her life is to immediately introduce a mystery that creates salt.about joan Laurent Lariviere’s second feature: Throughout the film, the viewer can’t help but glimpse, through the character, the actor’s flashes of the strongest roles of his career. It should be noted that Isabelle Hooper portrays Joan at various stages of adulthood, and another actress, British Freya Mavor, portrays the heroine in her 20s, her round cheeks reminiscent of Hooper’s. Valseuses (1974), by Bertrand Blier.

Documentary fog comes to the fore, with Joan behind the wheel of a car talking to the camera to say a few words about herself, particularly insisting on the fact that her name is pronounced in English – neither John nor Joan. Therefore, Joan is a publisher and lives in Paris. One day, she crosses paths with the love of her youth, Doug, a hooligan she met in Ireland and suddenly had to break up with. They drink coffee together, but Joan does not reveal that she had a child with him.

This chance encounter prompts Joan to dive back into her memories, a risky exercise in cinema but one that the film pulls off with some finesse thanks to editing and screenplay: cliffhanger moments hang on the character’s mental thread (her feelings, her traumas) while avoiding assigning easy explanatory meaning to the past.

Nice actor

In other words, Joan’s haunted memories are more like sketches whose colors clash with each other: we discover Nathan, the son she raised alone – played by three actors, including Dimitri Dore (discovered Bruno Reidal, Confessions of a Murderer, by Vincent Le Porte) and Swan Arlod – but also his new companion, Tim, a whimsical and madly in love writer – adapted from the role of Lars Eidinger, a German actor and director from the theater scene and the Berlin Schaubun. Through these two characters, the life of Joan emerges, a woman who copes with life’s adversities and relies on her creative memory to resist the emptiness.

Laurent Lariviere, director I am a soldier (2015), selected in Cannes (in some respects), screenwriter Pearl (2019), by Elsa Amiel and Continental drift (to the south), Lionel Bayer, which just hit theaters, offers an excellent cast here. In About JoanThe supporting cast acts like ghosts, all comforting but part of the tragedy: let’s add Joan’s mother (Florence Loiret-Kyle), who tries to reinvent her life and tells herself stories too. Isabelle Hooper’s era-skipping performance, with the false air of a rock blonde Debbie Harry, a middle-aged woman on the arm of Tim, her eternal lover, is not the least of the charms of this romantic film, certainly a classic, but where every image counts.