The first feature film by young director Simon Rieth presented at Critics' Week, Nos Cérémonies is an inspired work about youth, filled with a deep love for its two main characters, who love each other as much as they confront each other. Like a vase repaired with gold using the ancestral Japanese method of kintsugi, the film lets us glimpse a fantastic glow in an evanescent setting with anassumed aesthetic.
We follow the journey, from childhood to adolescence, of Tony and Noé, two fusional but rival brothers, played by Raymond and Simon Baur - brothers in real life - in the natural settings of the Royan region, from maritime pine forests to deserted beaches and steep cliffs. It's only a short step from hand-to-hand games to naughty games, and it's precisely on the edge of one of these cliffs that a drama followed by a miracle will unite the two brothers ad vitam, becoming one of those family secrets whispered in each other's ears under the comforter, at night, by the light of a flashlight.
Back at their childhood home years later, when their father dies, the angelic faces have given way to sculptural, sun-kissed bodies over which the adults, absent from the story, have no control. Simon Rieth films these out-of-time moments at the end of adolescence, interspersed with long discussions between new friends and old lovers - Cassandre, the little neighbor coveted by both sides.
The young men ramble and take their time with a disconcerting naturalness, and adulescent eroticism sets in, reminiscent of the most beautiful naturalistic dialogues in Kechiche's Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno. But rivalry is never far away, and the two brothers fall back into their childish ways of wrestling and horseplay - a magnificent scene of wushu, a traditional Chinese martial art in which the two young actors are French champions, will leave many stunned.
This brotherly interdependence takes on more and more importance, and fantasy seeps into the pores of the skin, like a drug, a need, a necessity. A strange phenomenon that gives weight and body to the word brother, like an incantation, but also brings its share of pain. We navigate between vertigo and reality, the sweetness of summer and the violence of certain crude scenes likely to shock the most sensitive. But poetry is always present, whether hidden in the textures, colors, lights or smiles. To life, to death.
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