“Don Juan”

In Serge Bozon’s new film, Don Juan is an actor, Laurent (Tahar Rahim), who is rehearsing Molière’s play of the same name, and who was abandoned by his fiancée, Julie (Virginie Efira), on the day they were going to get married. . And when the female protagonist of the play renounces her role, it is Julie herself who appears to replace her. This reinterpretation of the Don Juanesque myth for the 21st century and post-#MeToo, brings us (as expected…) a vulnerable and defenseless male character, obsessed with the woman who left him and whose advances the others resist. After the curious “Madame Hyde,” Bozon creates in “Don Juan” a pedestrian and disconnected film, clumsily “poetic”-fantastic (here and there, the characters begin to sing arbitrarily, like a Jacques Demy film from the 1990s). poor). ) and sometimes unintentionally ridiculous, which never finds the right tone to express itself, between the light and the serious.

“The novelist and her film”/”Above”

Two of the most recent films by the prolific Hong Sangsoo, the most French and “artistic” of South Korean directors, are released simultaneously this week, and both his fervent devotees and his unrepentant disbelievers already know what they can count on: ultra-miniaturist cinema. (and in highly contrasted black and white, in both cases), emotionally stunted and as static as it is verbose, in which the characters relate and reveal themselves over many small talks (often at the table and with many glasses in the mix) and not by action and behavior, and various formal idiosyncrasies (more in “Lá em Cima”, full of almost imperceptible time jumps, than in “The novelist and her film”). This duo of tapes will be a delight for the members of the “Hong Sangsoo Club,” and almost as boring as watching a freshly painted wall dry for the rest—of which I include myself.

“Mystery in Venice”

For the third time, after “A Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile”, Kenneth Branagh returns to the role of Hercule Poirot in this film inspired by the book “The Witches’ Festival”, which takes place in a sumptuous house located in rural England, and whose plot by actor and director and screenwriter Michael Green only continued to take place during Halloween. Poirot is retired and lives in Venice, where he is visited by his friend Ariadne Oliver, who invites him to a Halloween party, followed by a seance, at the palazzo of a famous opera singer whose daughter later committed suicide. of her fiancé’s breakup. with her, throwing herself from a balcony into a canal. “Mystery in Venice” was chosen movie of the week by Observador and you can read the review here.