For his third feature film, Antoine Barraud follows the destiny of a woman leading a double life between a bourgeois family and another hidden and more modest. Madeleine Collins is a film of liberation, solid in a first part access on tension. But who fishes a little in his resolution. One certainty: Virginie Efira, who radiates the film with her solar charm.
Madeleine Collins : an effective psychological thriller
A luxury store, a hesitant young woman, a malaise and then a fall. In a rather confusing sequence shot, Antoine Barraud stages a tragedy that has, for the moment, no relation to the main story. The first piece of a puzzle that will have to be reconstructed in this female thriller that is Madeleine Collins. 
For his third feature film, the filmmaker follows the character of Judith (Virginie Efira), a translator with a tormented psyche. On the one hand, she is the wife of Melvil, a great composer, and mother of two children. On the other, she leads a more confidential life with Abdel, with whom she is raising a baby girl. Behind it stands lies that are increasingly difficult to assume.
Psychoses without cold sweats
Antoine Barraud explains that he did not want a film "à la Vertigo". An important precision since on board, we could find some similarities: an aura of Hitchcockian thriller, a woman with a two-headed personality and a squeaky tension. But the director is more oriented towards David Lynch and Robert Benton. For the latter, Barraud points out real references to Kramer vs. Kramer. But unlike Meryl Streep's character, Virginie Efira's is deeply filled with love. For his two families and even more for his three children. The meticulous writing paints a wonderful portrait of him. A reckless woman, playing on the thrill of anguish, to excess. Judith wants to be as attached to her little Ninon as to her eldest son (brilliantly played by Thomas Gioria, revealed in Until the Guard), half-brother and sister who ignores each other between two countries. 
Antoine Barraud's camera is of the same precision, with almost millimeter sequences that gradually decant the mystery. At this game, the first hour of the feature film is quite remarkable tension. The filmmaker skillfully handles the sub-layers of his story to maintain a nebulous atmosphere, where it is a question of identity (Who am I among my two personalities? Am I not just a pile of lies? Do I have my own singularity?), of feminine liberation and motherhood. We also take advantage of a magnificent light by Gordon Spooner, to film as closely as possible the impassive faces despite the lies. A work that even surprises, with a cameo by director Nadav Lapid (Jury Prize at Cannes with Ahed's Knee), in the features of Kurt, the forger who delivers false papers to Judith, while being her psychological mirror.
Vertigo of the fall
It is in her final approach that Madeleine Collins disappoints. This spiral of the false extends somewhat in length and the last thirty minutes, where the mystery is solved, transforms a beautiful psychoanalytic film into a fairly nondescript thriller. Despite a powerful revelation by its tragedy, one never feels jostled or cornered. At best amused to have deciphered the enigma that enveloped the feature film. In his favor, he chooses to the end not to say everything, or even not to show everything. And if the crescendo does not work as well as hoped, Antoine Barraud will have managed to make us inquire about Judith's tragic fate. While making a work that does not ape the immense catalog of feature films on duality. More psychological drama than Fincherian thriller, Madeleine Collins has for him real beautiful qualities. In his desire to describe the loving madness of a troubled woman, Antoine Barraud creates a coherent if unfinished work. But its disturbing atmosphere, as well as the solar beauty of Virginie Efira alone are worth the viewing. And to consider some nominations to the Césars? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlAtEvxspCI
