The Time to Love begins brutally with archive images showing the shorns of the Liberation before plunging painfully into fiction. Single mother, Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier) meets François (Vincent Lacoste), a bourgeois student, at the hotel-restaurant where she is a waitress. Although she reveals the origins of his son to him, Vincent wishes to marry Madeleine. Soon, she realizes that her husband is hiding a dark secret from her. Inspired in part by her grandmother’s story and the great melodramas of Douglas Sirk (Time to Love and Time to Die), the director of A Violent Poison creates a cruel and powerful love story. against a backdrop of intolerance.
First feature film from one of the screenwriters of La famille Bélier, by Éric Lartigau, this charming sentimental comedy cheerfully borrows from the codes of American teen comedies. Following the advice of her best friend Albert (Pierre Richard), an octogenarian homosexual, Marie-Luce (Brune Moulin) disguises herself as a boy to go to a costume party. However, the unpopular teenager achieves great success with the girls… and with Émile (Loup Pinard), the boy she likes. If La plus belle pour aller danser does not reinvent the genre, it sensitively sketches a touching relationship between a jilted father (Philippe Katherine) and his smart daughter.
At the height of the pandemic, an old man confined to his room at the CHSLD (Martin Naud) has only one idea in mind: finding his lover. As the hours pass slowly, only a volunteer (Sarah Keita) and a concierge (Jean-Marie Lapointe) bring him a little human warmth. In this radical and daring proposal evoking the cinema of Pedro Costa (En avant, jeunesse) and Robert Morin (Petit Pow! Pow! Noël), the director of At the Origin of a Cry bears striking witness to the flaws of health system. A perfect complement to Denys Desjardins’ documentary I placed my mother.
Mathieu (Guillaume Canet), a film actor, and Alice (Alba Rohrwacher), a piano teacher, fell in love 15 years ago. Coming from Paris to undergo thalassotherapy in a seaside town on the west coast of France, Mathieu meets Alice again, married and mother of a teenager. Lulled by the melancholic piano of Vincent Delerm, bathed in a soft light, Hors-saison is based on sensitive dialogues launched in a playful tone and eloquent silences. The great master of social dramas (The Law of the Market) signs an atypical sentimental comedy where he revisits with the same delicacy the themes exploited in Mademoiselle Chambon.
It is not only in North America that racialized people are victims of police brutality. In France, every year, 20 to 30 people die as a result of violent arrest, and 80% of the victims are black or Arab. In this documentary with sumptuous black and white images, the director of Togaether, where she was interested in the Muslim community in the United States, gives voice to people who have lost a loved one at the hands of the police. To support their words, she also collects testimonies from young people who are constantly victims of racial profiling. Sad and revolting.
Beyond feature film screenings, other activities take place at Cinemania. Note a Kino Kabaret Evening (November 2) during which short films will be presented under the theme Montreal Chronicles and the results of the Kino challenge: tributes to American films reimagined in the style of French-speaking filmmakers. For the Great Evening of Quebec Shorts (November 3), Jason Béliveau, editor-in-chief of Séquences magazine and associate programmer, invites moviegoers to discover, in Montreal or Quebec premieres, 11 Quebec short films. And the first four episodes of the FEM series, where Lenni-Kim Lalande plays a young person questioning his gender identity in a musical drama by Maxine Beauchamp and Marianne Farley, will be screened (November 3).
