OPINION / FILM REVIEW – Louis Garrel signs his third feature film with “La Croisade”. An ecological fable which mixes love and self-mockery with which the director finds Laetitia Casta and Joseph Engel, already present in “The faithful man”.
The crusade : the rebels of the year 2020
Louis Garrel’s third feature film after The two friends and The Faithful Man, The crusade opens with a masterful scene. In a large Parisian apartment, Abel (Louis Garrel) finds his partner Marianne (Laetitia Casta) and their son Joseph (Joseph Engel). In the course of their conversation, the teenager reveals to have sold a number of family businesses in order to finance a mysterious project.
Very quickly, Abel and Marianne discover with dismay that they have been relieved without realizing it of their luxury watches and clothes, their best bottles of wine or even collector’s books. Faced with this big household, they try to find out more about the enigmatic enterprise that Joseph sets up with children from all over the world. While their secret group had promised not to expose their objective to adults, Joseph breaks the rule and explains that they are working to save the planet, urgently.
During this introduction during which the spectator finds the characters of The Faithful Man, the dialogues co-written by Louis Garrel and Jean-Claude Carrière fuse. The camera does not let go of the two parents, lost when their son involuntarily confronts them with their materialism. Hindsight and humor with which the director and actor observes his bourgeois condition, immediately remove him from the moralizing tone into which the film could fall. This first sequence also brings The crusade a radically different feature film, In pursuit of tomorrow, by drawing up a similar observation: children represent hope and the solution to the breathlessness and decrepitude of our planet.
A fascinating subject forgotten along the way
But where Brad Bird’s film defends this thesis by offering its heroine a fascinating journey, The crusade rest unfortunately on the surface. Once the secret project is revealed, Louis Garrel sets it back to develop other elements. He continues in particular to make fun of his condition, in particular during a meal where the verb as well as the accumulation of lessons and clichés allows adults to fill their lack of knowledge about ecology, and to legitimize their need to comfort.
In the second half of the feature film, the filmmaker compares two sentimental developments. The first is that of Abel, who stagnates in his relationship with Marianne and struggles to question himself, realizing that his obtuse temperament contributes to the problem, not the solution. An awareness that leads to pretty scenes of wandering in the empty streets of Paris, where the visibly “wild” shots, however, clumsily contrast with the aesthetic treatment of the rest of The crusade.
For his part, Joseph is in the age of the first experiences and in the discovery of love troubles. There again, it offers beautiful moments, including a dance sequence where the boy’s freedom and energy are communicative. The environmental emergency and the fear of the future do not thrill the youth of the adolescent, which on the other hand crushes the ecological purpose of the film.
After his first half hour as funny as it is relevant, The crusade therefore put his subject aside. It only comes back through over-explanatory or ironic dialogues, with which Marianne and Abel remind us that their son’s fight is necessary and that it is important to use low-consumption light bulbs. But for Abel to part with his high-consumption vehicle, we will have to wait.
Louis Garrel, economic director
The filmmaker certainly points to paradoxes with humor and lightness that work perfectly. However, in the awareness he offers and the open doors he pushes, The crusade seems almost vain. The fault is too short (1h07), which unfortunately leaves the feeling of an expedited conclusion.
While he had deviated from it, the film returns to its original idea in its last minutes, during which the evocative face of Laetitia Casta is well worth a speech. However, it does not erase the impression of having attended a feature film that goes to the economy and only does fly over a barely visible crusade. This frustration does not, however, make us forget the many qualities of the work, starting with the chemistry between its three main performers.
The crusade…
