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The film takes the posture of a western, plays the subtle game of a psychodrama and operates the fascination of a fiction that feels the lived. After "The Economy of the Couple", where he had watched a family being torn apart, the Belgian filmmaker Joachim Lafosse embarks us in "Continue" in an impressive double portrait that will be released this Wednesday, January 23 th in cinemas in France. A mother and a son riding through the surprising and rarely filmed landscapes of Kyrgyzstan. Virginie Efira brilliantly interprets a luminous fragility and Kacey Mottet-Klein brilliantly expresses the dismay of a young person who has been torn by life and tormented by the loss of his roots.
" This trip is all I have left. For Sibylle, this is the last card to play to prevent his teenage son from falling into delinquency. She had abandoned Samuel after birth, as she had left her son's father and after her husband: a flight forward to seek a freedom that had not been found.
Twenty years later, she finds herself in the role of the mother to save her son. It is decided, she embarks his son to soften his violence by their only common passion: the horse. Together, they cross the plains and mountains of Kyrgyzstan on the backs of two majestic horses to finally give meaning to their failed life and make up for lost time.
Landscapes, horses and men
The film starts at a gallop, screams the men and howls the wolves. And he stays to the end at a steady pace. The genius of the director in this free adaptation of Laurent Mauvignier's novel is to unite the landscapes, the horses, Sibylle and Samuel in an incredible and almost magical way. Deserts, rocks and streams seem to sing, horses murmur, men graze, gallop and panic.
The camera captures the innuendo, makes palpable the rotten relation between son and mother, makes visible their visceral reactions. Everything goes through instinct. Samuel trusts and confides in the horse, his mother is limited to his diary. Everyone stays in a bubble, continues to live their lives, remember their past and think their future alone.
How to continue ?
So, how to continue? How to open to the other? Especially when, until then, everything has failed. The path will go through the weaknesses of one and the other. On the horses' backs, everything comes back. The son, torn between his Russian and French roots, saw again abandonment and wounds. The mother confronts again absence and lies. Today, they can no longer escape the truth of the other.
The camera becomes a privileged witness. She tells us about their inner life in images, turning around, placing themselves sometimes upstairs, sometimes below, as if she were looking for the fault to enter their true buried personality.
In the end, we identify with the two characters and Joachim Lafosse succeeds in giving body to the rages and resentment of the mother-son couple through moving horses. It makes souls vibrate in desert landscapes, winding climbs, stony paths and marshy rivers. The journey will be long, the scenery surprising and the end unexpected.