Edith, 45 years old, a factory worker in a textile plant, sees her life upended by a corporate downsizing. Far from her son and without any other ties, instead of unemployment, she is the only one to choose to join her relocated factory in Morocco…
The factory stops, but she continues. A textile worker, Edith chooses to go to Morocco to keep her job after the relocation.
This film explores the outsourcing of the French industry, with the surprising decision of one of its employees to refuse dismissal and continue her work near Tangier.
Both pragmatic and not at all realistic, she is the only one who doesn’t see the challenges that await her. Her career plan, determined and desperate, resembles a wandering…
By leaving, the worker starts a new life and perhaps finds the family she couldn’t form with her son. But she also remains steadfast, to the point of impressive harshness, in her obsession: work at all costs.
Here is a beautiful character, halfway between social cinema and the novelistic.
Nevertheless, in “Prendre le large,” there is a noticeable attachment to its characters, a sense of modesty and a fitting delicacy. The Tangier in the film, which no longer resembles the sultry and romantic one of great writers, is akin to a harsh but always sea-blue-flooded one.
Of Sandrine Bonnaire, it has often been said or written that she is luminous in her roles.
That is not the adjective that comes to mind for “Prendre le large,” as the woman she portrays, defeated and unhappy, seems to have extinguished all the lights of her soul.
To describe Edith’s courage as well as her vulnerability, filmmaker Gaël Morel and actress Sandrine Bonnaire strike the right note, in a beautiful surge of mutual generosity.
