Presented in official competition at the last Cannes Film Festival, Agathe Riedinger's first feature film, Diamant Brut, hits cinemas on November 20, 2024. The film follows 19-year-old Liane, who lives in Fréjus with her mother and younger sister.
She's what you might call a cagole, a bimbo, with all the trappings that go with it: make-up that some would call outrageous, thick circumflex eyebrows, fake nails, false eyelashes and excessively long extensions. A sort of modern-day Barbie, with vertiginous heels and blinged-out jewelry, she's too much of everything - too provocative, too visible, too free.
Liane is a gogo dancer in her spare time. Mostly an influencer on social networks, she lives for the cameras and through the screens. So, when she learns that she might be selected for the reality show 'Miracle Island', her skies finally seem to clear. So, happy are the simple-minded?
Without ever taking her subject lightly, Agathe Riedinger delivers a true social film, putting her finger on the reality of a fringe of the population, that of'laFrance d'en-bas'.Andrea Arnold 's work is never far away, and Liane could just as easily be an English chav, minus the jogging. For the young girl lives in an intellectual quarter-world, alongside a resigned mother who sent her into care as a child.
It's Liane who takes charge of "educating" her little sister, herself ultra-sexualized for her young age (a moody scene shows her teaching her mother how to arch her back "just right" for dancing), while the older sister makes a living by stealing cosmetics from supermarkets.
Althoughlaughable, the bimbo is never ridiculed. In fact, her pathos and lack of self-esteem are genuinely touching, no matter what she says. "If I don't get the cast, I'll kill myself. You'll really love me when I'm on the show," she assures her fans.
Rather than mocking a part of this generation dumbed down by television and social networks, Agathe Riedinger looks at them with empathy, even tenderness, trying to pinpoint the reality behind these people who have become characters through their online presence, through a sober and calm staging (as well as the use of classical music to dress up the work, when you'd expect to hear EDM instead), in contrast with the specimen studied.
The character of Liane, played with strength and naturalness by Malou Khebizi - this is her first film role - proves to be far more complex than she appears, hidden behind false pretenses of superficiality. A deep malaise (her knife tattoos are pure and simple self-mutilation) and a dichotomy between what she radiates and what she is deep down (she's a prude, maybe even still a virgin) that keeps Diamant Brut from sounding like a banal episode of Confessions Intimes, and lends the work a seriousness and emotion that the synopsis didn't suggest.
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Cinema: which film to see today, this Monday October 14, 2024?
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