😍 2022-10-22 01:59:23 – Paris/France.
Netflix: Les Papillons noirs is an atypical, dark and fascinating French mini-series full of traps and secrets
black butterflies (black butterfliesFrance, 2022). Creators: Olivier Abbou and Bruno Merle. Cast: Nicolas Duvauchelle, Niels Arestrup, Alyzée Costes, Axel Granberger, Alice Belaïdi, Sami Bouajila. Available on: Netflix. Our opinion: very good.
At the end of his life, Albert Desiderio (the always impeccable Niels Arestrup) decided to tell his story. Reclusive in a villa in the region of Rubaix, near the Belgian border, Albert suffers from an illness that threatens his memories, his eternal love for Solange (Alyzée Costes), the woman who was the center of his life. To cherish this memory that escapes him and also to confess what he has kept for years, he hires the writer Adrien Winckler (Nicholas Duvauchelle) to be the voice of his autobiography.
Day after day, they meet, and the story of the past begins to take shape, while Adrien wonders about the truth of the story and the traps Albert sets for him as the intimacy between them becomes painful. . Adrien also lives with his ghosts, the creative impasse after his best-selling novel, the pressure from his publisher, his prison past, the jealousy that undermines his relationship with Nora (Alice Belaïdi). Sitting every evening in front of the recorder, Albert and Adrien look at each other and measure themselves as if they were in front of the mirror itself.
Created by Olivier Abbou and Bruno Merle, black butterflies It is an atypical, sinuous and intoxicating mini-series, carried by its different chronologies like in a strange puzzle, with colorful shapes and psychedelic environments, full of traps and secrets. It all begins with Solange, the daughter of the war in occupied France, the bastard child of a German soldier, and of a mother identified as a collaborator. Albert meets her in a Catholic orphanage, and from the start, her auburn hair and big eyes imprison her in an air of insistent love, a kind of crazy Love cultivated in the ravines of this land still smoking from the bombs, resisting the contempt of those who point it out.
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The 1950s pass and Albert and Solange form an indelible love alliance until the sexual assault of a tourist on Solange, on a beach, when they thought they were touching paradise with their hands, precipitates them into crime. . Crime and sex, two passions that intertwine in Albert's story and in the fraternity he forges from memory with Solange. The 1960s discovered them owners of a hairdressing salon, followers of free love on the Côte d'Azur, dedicated to the debauchery of crime as a form of revenge and satisfaction.
black butterflies
This past appears on screen bathed in intense color and with a playful amorality that the miniseries neutralizes in the dark and sinful present, marked by guilt and punishment. Albert stands, with his voice and his presence in his old age, like an eternal mystery, the perfect abyss of history, the one Adrien tries to peek into without being consumed. The writer's life begins to bend to the memories of these others: Albert's draft memoir becomes his winning card in front of the editor, his relationship with Nora cracks under the sticky ghost of Solange. Each clue that Albert slips into his narrated biography and that Adrien captures in his writing allows for a new plot shortcut: a tattooed woman who arrives unexpectedly one afternoon of Albert's confession, a baby abandoned in a cemetery, a photographer murdered in his Riviera mansion.
black butterflies
But Adrien also carries his ghosts, the complex relationship with the legacy of his powerful family, the failed attempt to have a child with Nora, the shadows of his prison past. And as an additional seasoning, a policeman (Sami Bouajila) pursues the track of Albert and Solange, this trail of blood which still seems fresh in its wake. Despite all these edges and the dark tones of the staging, Abbou and Merle produce an unusual detective story, which avoids platitudes and cautious approaches, venturing into terrain as cumbersome as that of memory traps.
If the criminal roundup of Albert and Solange evokes that of explosive couples like mad gun (1950) -substituting the fascination of firearms in the first for that of scissors in the second- or that of Murderers by nature (1994) by Oliver Stone, both imbued with a brutal and bloodthirsty eroticism, Adrien's destructive fascination with his client recalls the curse of many detectives in the film noirtempted by the precipice of their inevitable fall.
black butterflies
In a genre so conditioned by the current pre-eminence of true crime and the use of the investigation as a plot to keep the platform viewer excited, black butterflies he ventures down a thornier path, flirting with the visual forms of fable, with the tense divergences of all memory. Before the real crimes, what Adrien's pen captures in these long sessions of intimacy with his character are the fantasies behind the act, the enunciation of desire before its materiality.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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