Paris (AFP)

The American Casey Affleck returns Wednesday with a personal work, "Light of my Life", where the actor and director comes up against the pangs of raising a young girl in an apocalyptic world where women have disappeared.

"Light of My Life" is the first achievement of Casey Affleck, 44, since his Oscar in 2017 for his performance as an actor in "Manchester By The Sea". The following year, he had given up on awarding the Oscar for best actress due to accusations of sexual harassment which targeted him, and which were the subject of an amicable settlement.

His feature film lasting 1:59 is one of the few American films to be released on French screens this summer, but has already been broadcast in the United States, before the health crisis.

The brother of Ben Affleck, who has long made a career in his shadow, delivers a distressing story: the wandering of a father whose little girl is one of the rare survivors of a mysterious pandemic which has decimated women, little before his birth. The danger is everywhere, all solidarity has disappeared.

The father tries to protect his daughter, to whom he tells stories in the evening in their tent, during their long wandering in a hostile, cold and humid forest, in search of a refuge. Until this one, played by debutante Anna Pniowsky, opposes him and wants to come out of the cocoon.

Above all, "Light of My Life" is "the story of a parent and his child" rather than a film "with a political message", explained during the presentation of his film at the Berlinale 2019 Casey Affleck , who built the film bit by bit, telling stories in the evenings to her two children.

Faced with a father who protects her but sometimes suffocates her, the little girl "wants to tell her own story, and in the end, she gets there," added actress Anna Pniowsky. As an echo to this message, the actress Elisabeth Moss, who marked the spirits with her character in the series "The Scarlet Handmaid", a metaphor for the exploitation of women in society, makes a few appearances in the film.

Shot in dismal landscapes and abandoned homes in Western Canada, "Light of My Life" also plays with the codes of science fiction and horror films, genres Casey Affleck was a fan of in his youth, and to which he assumes to make winks.

© 2020 AFP