Acid rain devastates France, causing panic and death. And a father tries to protect his daughter. The review of Acid by Federico Gironi.
How curious. In the first scene of Acida film that talks about climate change through an intimate family story – or perhaps the opposite, find out – Just Philippot seems to be talking about something else entirely. Acid opens with images shot with a smartphone, showing the agitated and somewhat violent protest of some workers against an employer guilty of not paying enough attention to the safety of his employees. An almost Brizé-style start. Almost.
Of course, it is a scene that serves to introduce and tell the character of Guillaume CanetMichal, father of Selma (Patience Munchenbach) in somewhat tense relations with the ex Elise (Laetitia Dosch), in love with his colleague Karine (Suliane Brahim): who is the one who got hurt at work, triggering the attack on the boss for which Michal is on probation.
But in addition to framing Michal, his personal situation and his psychology, the scene, on closer inspection, also serves to support other subsequent ones, in which the man accuses his daughter of not caring too much about social causes, and she replies that he, instead , doesn’t care enough about climate change. In short, she serves to show how even if committed, and committed to just and twentieth-century causes, there is a generation that does not see the apocalypse that faces it.
In fact, here it is Acid the issues come to the fore when they also hit France, as in other areas of the southern world acid rain. Strongly acidic. Heavily acidic. Able to burn, pierce, destroy. Kill. And around and around, Michal, with Karin in hospital, will have to team up with his ex Elise to save Selma. And from there a whole other dramatic series of vicissitudes in which Michal will have to use the even ferocious determination shown at the beginning of the film to protect and defend Selma.
Disaster movie linked to the dramatic current events of the crazy climate, Acid replicates the quite successful formula of Philippot’s first film, The Swarm, mixing a family and intimate story with natural disasters (here the acid rain, there the locusts that fed on blood) and with a background of important social issues (there the fate of farmers, here much more, from the selfishness of society to the aforementioned differences between generations).
And once again, even more than what was shown in his debut, Philippot shows a particular predilection for framing (well, and with a certain taste) solitary human figures visually drowned by a majestic and at the same time frightening nature.
Of course, those leaden and threatening skies are a clear reference to another disaster film, of much greater caliber, which told of a father’s desperate attempts to save his daughter, the highly underrated War of the Worlds by Steven Spielberg. And in doing so, they highlight how the limitations of Acidas well as in some somewhat mechanical rigidity of the writing, are also in its lack of originality.
And yet it must be admitted that Philippot is capable of use the genre with discreet authorial flairand that his desire to talk about real and concrete issues never penalizes the most immediate elements of the film, his ability to tell a story of family bonds, the most basic emotions he wants and manages to arouse.
AND a cinema aware of its own means and those of cinema itselfthat of Philippot, in which, as in his shots, the human element is central, surrounded by the strength and grip of the genre, of the tension, of the image. And neither one nor the other, human element and cinematographic element, ever end up being crushed or weakened by the themes. Whether environmental or social.
