Great talent, great cinematic craft. The Quinzaine des cinéastes was just the place for Patricia Mazuy.
Just two years after the release of her much underrated previous film, Bowling Saturne, Patricia Mazuy (Thick Skinned, Of Women and Horses, Paul Sanchez is Back! etc.) presents, at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes, Visiting Hours which also marks Mazuy’s reunion with Isabelle Huppert, twenty-four years after the splendid The King’s Daughters – where Huppert, in one of the best parts of her incredible filmography, played Mme de Maintenon in her last era: that of the pious woman.
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Visiting Hours depicts the unlikely meeting and friendship between Alma (Huppert), a middle-class woman from Bordeaux whose husband, a brilliant doctor and art collector, has ended up in prison, and Mina (Hafsia Herzi), a young immigrant woman whose thuggish husband is being detained within the same prison as Alma’s husband. This is how they get to know each other, in the visitors’ waiting room, in the “airlock”, as the prison administration calls it, between freedom and confinement. The film could be summed up as this: a film about airlocks. Alma is quick to suggest to Mina, who lives far from Bordeaux, that she move into her big house downtown to be closer to the prison. Mina hesitates, but accepts and arrives with her children.
Despite Alma’s smiles and efforts to get used to the presence of children in her home, and Mina’s gratitude towards her, this utopian airlock where social boundaries could disappear with the flick of a hand is only illusory, and reality is about to catch up with the two women.
Mina-Alma, Alma-Mina: the two « friends » will never be equal, because they don’t belong to the same social class, and the underworld has demands that bourgeois women cannot meet. You can pass each other in an airlock, but only pass each other there. Not mingle. More than a psychological film, then – a psychology that the performance of the two actresses never ceases to break down (Huppert once again excelling in shifting from coldness to insane laughter) – Visiting Hours is a fine, ambiguous and romantic film, a political film noir – one of the screenwriters is novelist and essayist François Bégaudeau – brought to us by Patricia Mazuy, once again immensely gifted at superimposing levels of understanding, narratives, perception. Great talent, great cinematic craft. The Quinzaine des cinéastes was just the place for this born filmmaker.
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