Variety Critics’ Choice 2017 / Réparer les vivants / France, Belgium 2016
What sounds like a routine episode of “ER” is complicated with rare depths of personal and sensual detail in French director Katell Quillévéré’s sublimely compassionate, heart-crushing heart-transplant ensemble, which boasts beautifully pitched performances from Tahar Rahim and Emmanuelle Seigner.
A 17-year-old car crash victim lies brain-dead in hospital, as doctors urgently pitch the virtues of organ donation to his distraught parents; over in another town, a middle-aged mother of two with a severely degenerative heart condition goes on the waiting list for a transplant. What sounds like fodder for a routinely gripping episode of “ER” is complicated with rare depths of personal and sensual detail in French director Katell Quillévéré’s sublimely compassionate, heart-crushing third feature. More polished but no less authentically humane than her previous works Suzanne and Love Like Poison, this spidering ensemble piece — adapted from Maylis de Kerangal’s internationally acclaimed 2014 novel — boasts beautifully pitched performances from the likes of Tahar Rahim and Emmanuelle Seigner. But it’s Quillévéré’s soaring visual and sonic acumen that suffuses this sad, potentially familiar hospital drama with true grace.
Guy Lodge
104 min / Color, DCP
Director Katell Quillévéré
/ Screenplay Katell Quillévéré, Gilles Taurand podle stejnojmenného románu Maylis de Kerangalové / based on the novel of the same name by Maylis de Kerangal
/ Dir. of Photography Tom Harari
/ Music Alexandre Desplat
/ Editor Thomas Marchand
/ Art Director Dan Bevan
/ Producer David Thion, Justin Taurand, Philippe Martin
/ Production Les films Pelléas
/ Coproduction Les films du Bélier
/ Cast Tahar Rahim, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anne Dorval, Bouli Lanners
/ Sales Playtime
/ Distributor Artcam Films
Katell Quillévéré (b. 1980, Abidjan, Ivory Coast) is a French screenwriter and movie director. In 2003-2009 she shot four short writer-director pictures, and in 2010 she came out with her first feature title Love Like Poison (Un poison violent), which sensitively portrays a girl’s complicated coming of age in a Catholic boarding school; the film won the Jean Vigo Prize. She is highly interested in relationships and emotional bonds, and in her next film Suzanne (2013) what seemed at first to the young protagonist like supportive sisterly and fatherly love becomes an oppressive burden. Her latest psychological drama, with ambitions to philosophy, is based on the award-winning novel of the same name by French writer Maylis de Kerangal, and Quillévéré was nominated for a César for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Artcam Films
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Czech Republic
Phone: +420 221 411 619
Fax: +420 221 411 699
E-mail: [email protected]
Playtime
5 rue Nicolas Flamel, 75004, Paris
France
Phone: +33 153 103 399
E-mail: [email protected]
Sylvie Leray
Distributor, Producer
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