|
Directed by Alain Corneau. With Gérard Depardieu, Philippe Noiret, Catherine Deneuve, Sophie Marceau, Michel Duchaussoy, Robin Renucci, Roger Dumas, Hippolyte Girardot, Saïd Amadis.
The dream too often is shattered by the reality. When one waits for something for a very long time, and fantasizes over it for months, three-quarters of the time one is disappointed. Hey well, for once, no. On the contrary... When the lights came back up in the room, I was flooded with emotion, my eyes washed by the desert, dazzled to have seen a movie so exceptional. Everything that I had hoped for was in the movie. Absolutely everything. And even more. To the grand adventure movie I'd awaited was added a grand love story, and to the grand love story, a quasi-intimate quest, and to this quest, a big romantic breath such as I haven't seen for some for ages. The dream...
"Fort Saganne" retraces the history of an almost legendary hero, Charles Saganne. This peasant one day left his native Ariège for the dunes of the Sahara in search of adventure, of his adult life, of himself... He met love, friendship, solitude, suffering and, especially... the desert. The desert with its camels, its heat, its nomadic warriors from another century... And since Saganne is from a different world, he shoots against the enemy with an exceptional bravery, and one treats him as a hero. He goes to Paris, meets Louise (Deneuve) and experiences passion. But then he goes all over again alone to the desert, always a hero but lost...
Depardieu translates the character admirably, with an economy of gestures and words, the disarray of this man confronted with himself. With his pride a stiff fire, his searching look, that reveals his trouble inside, masked superbly, and it is only more moving because of it. Besides, in "Fort Saganne", the emotion watches you at every instant. It is an air of cello, a sublime landscape, an exchange of virile friendship or a girl's tears... It is a movie that carries you away from start to finish, all the actors are magnificent and the mastery of Alain Corneau is striking. He plays the scope and the desert in depth and he knows how to translate the immobility and the torpor in a very fluid, very moving production. The whole is a perfect harmony, it is a splendor.
Martine Moriconi
|
|
