Press critics were inciting Pierre Salvadori's new film. Undoubtedly, we had to see En Liberté! to make up your mind. Verdict? We come out of it as shot with vodka with the desire to come back!
Every night, Yvonne (Adèle Haenel), a cop by profession, tells her son the same story. The one where his father, in an excellent parody sequence of action movies, single-handedly arrests a gang of drug traffickers.Everyone thinks that her husband, policeman Pierre Santi (Vincent Elbaz) died a hero two years ago. Yvonne lives her widowhood until a raid on a BDSM club opens her eyes. The real opens before her like a chasm: Pierre Santi was a ripoux.
In shock, Yvonne decides to atone for her faults by rescuing her main victim. This is Antoine (Pio Marmai), unjustly sentenced to eight years in prison for theft. But if the latter has just been released, these eight years have obviously reached his psyche. Indeed, the nice boy became borderline and furious at the idea of performing the theft he did not commit.Yvonne follows him, with the somewhat vague project of helping him and without revealing his true identity. She soon finds herself trapped between her complicity in theft and her job as a cop.
A burlesque comedy-drama
The complex scenario structure of En Liberté! in fact a rich work, at the risk of losing a little. It is not only the horror of a woman discovering that she has lived with a stranger and the tragedy of a man surviving injustice as best he can. But it is also those of the collateral victims: Agnès (Audrey Tautou) Antoine's lover, who suffers the full force of "The cruelty of the victims" and Louis (Damien Bonnard), colleague of Adèle crazy in love, who is wandered by his feelings.
In the middle of all these stories, love intrigues are tied and unraveled between the different protagonists in an explosive quadrilateral. The two main beasts, who no longer know who they are, cheerfully choose in a joyful fever the rupture and the crime. The film, almost sadistic, nevertheless knows how to put on its mistreated characters a tender and fair look that makes them strangely endearing.
Carried by the performance of the actors, this subtle balance is achieved between two sequences of running gags, surreal heist and double-level statement scenes.
At large! Poetry first and foremost
This puzzle film stuns by its incessant back and forth between the burlesque and the melancholic, the macabre and the sweet. (Very nice scene waiting for the return of Antoine the garden of Agnes). There follows a strange heroism between the two protagonists who can only go to the ends of their madness, causing damage to the people who love them.
If the mixture of register sometimes remains over-written and if there are certain lengths, poetry comes to save everything. The outcome is played out not in real life, but in the stories that everyone tells each other.
The final sequences become a poetic celebration of this imagination as a refuge.A way, for the main characters, to find the true path of life. This film is not an invitation to face reality. On the contrary, it is an opening to reverie to escape from a reality too cruel and to find in it, the truth.
At large! is a nervous film timed by the melancholy, accuracy and humor of the scenes. A real pleasure to discover urgently.
