Director since 2003, actress Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi has shown and renewed her talent in her very personal films. What is worth to him, for this seventh film entitled The Almond Trees, to be in competition at Cannes. A beautiful consecration. She evokes her years of training in the 80s, when she was a student at the school and theater of Amandiers de Nanterre, alongside the late Patrice Chéreau, with tact, but without nostalgia.
Passion
In the mid-1980s, Stella, Etienne, Adèle and others became students at the age of 20 in the acting school that Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Romans had just created at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre. Passionate, they discover the game, love but also the tragedy of life.
Beyond the founding act of Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s vocation as an actress, which the film recounts through the character of Stella, The Almond Trees transmits the passion of actresses and actors for their profession. An investment that occupies their whole life, from morning to night. The director recreates the 80s just as accurately. A setting that counts for a lot in the side events that feed and poison the era, and the commitment of a whole youth in search of itself.
personal achievement
Apart from the sets and accessories, the music plays a big part in it, but also the evocation of drugs, with the exponential influence of heroin, narcotic king of the 80s, of which Stella’s young lover, Etienne, is the victim. . Sofiane Bennacer, who interprets him, is remarkably accurate in the mixture of assurance and fragility that he embodies in his relationship with narcotics.
If the drug is a major element of the script, it is above all the energy that dominates the film. Especially in its first part where the investment and enthusiasm of young people explode, convinced that they are on their way, that of an ongoing personal achievement, infallible and assumed, to achieve their goal. This will prove to be the case for Stella/Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi.
Very fair in its production and its interpretation, in particular of Nadia Tereszkiewicz (Stella), The Almond Trees takes you to the end of a luminous and finally solar night. The film takes us behind the mirror of a vocation, into its intimacy, as if it were confiding a secret to us.
The sheet
Gender : Drama
Director: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
Actors: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Sofiane Bennacer, Louis Garrel, Micha Lescot, Clara Bretheau
Country : France
Duration : 2h06
Exit : November 9, 2022
Distributer : Ad Vitam
Summary: In the 80s, Stella, Etienne, Adèle and the whole troupe were twenty years old. They pass the entrance examination for the famous school created by Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Romans at the Amandiers theater in Nanterre. Launched at full speed in life, passion, games, love, together they will live the turning point of their lives but also their first great tragedies.