Michaël Dichter's first feature film, The Fantastic Three, opens in cinemas on May 15, 2024. Max, Vivian and Tom are 13 years old. Inseparable, the three friends live in a small working-class town in the French Ardennes, a stone's throw from the Belgian border. At the start of summer, Pollux, the town's last factory, is preparing to close its doors, despite a strike by the workers and protests from the majority of the town.
In this setting so characteristic of working-class housing estates, Michaël Dichter paints a portrait of a small town in struggle - one thinks, of course, of the workers' struggles against the closure of ArcelorMittal in Lorraine - and of the solidarity that weaves itself between the little people. But while the film could have stuck to this social struggle, which would have benefited from more exploitation, it quickly turns to another register... and gets lost in it.
The same goes for the three boys' peregrinations, inspired largely by Stand by Me, which could have carried the film on their own, as they are so full of tenderness and so perfectly acted by the three novice actors - despite the outrageous use of music, which makes some of these scenes rather silly.
But then Seb(Raphaël Quenard), Max's older brother, gets out of prison and imposes himself on this already unstable family, where the father is absent and the mother(Emmanuelle Bercot) has clearly given up. It's easy to imagine that Seb's schemes will gradually lead the three boys to their downfall, and to do this, the film relies on situations that are improbable to say the least, veering towards the thuggish while forgetting what made the beauty of its script: those adolescent moments in the heart of the Ardennes forest.
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