Having the honor of inaugurating the Cannes Première selection at the 2021 Cannes Festival, “Serre moi fort” marks the return of Mathieu Amalric as a director, four years after his previous feature film.
The director has adopted a non-linear style that often favors the implicit over the explicit, which can bewilder the audience. This parallel editing, which plays with two different timelines, causes some issues with following the story.
Clarisse (Vicky Krieps) has experienced the death of her family and imagines them while following the wrong person. Indeed, with this vision, the film is more seen as a work about grief, with emotions that are more effective.
To complement it all, the director and screenwriter has superbly chosen his cast. Vicky Krieps, already featured in two films this year, M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old” and the Netflix thriller “Beckett,” performs excellently in this role of the lost mother, on the verge of madness, and she succeeds in bringing emotion into her performance.
The rest of the cast does their job very well, with special mention to the children/teenagers for whom this is their first role; it’s not always easy to do what’s asked of them, and the result isn’t always good, but here it is impeccable—there’s nothing to criticize. Moreover, although this is a completely superficial argument, the film was shot in Rochefort, Niort, and La Rochelle, and it’s very delightful to recognize certain places, which doesn’t happen often.
