Mike Kennedy’s review published on Letterboxd:
It is clear from their ratings that friends did not like Olivier Assayas’s Covid lockdown film as much as I did and, while it is a trifle rather than one of his best films, I did enjoy hanging out for 105 minutes in this autofiction. As Covid lockdown experiences go, this was a very physically comfortable one, shot as far as I can tell, in Assayas’s family home where he and his brother grew up. There is a large house, rambling grounds, including a wood, and the capacity to find spaces where you are not living on top of one another.
The Assayas character, Paul Berger (Vincent Macaigne) is a filmmaker who is there with his girlfriend, Morgane (Nine d’Urso) and his brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), a music journalist, and his new partner, Carole (Nora Hamzawi). The brothers have one of those sibling relationships in which they get on OK together in measured doses without liking each other very much. Being thrown together like this, even with lots of room to move about, causes predictable friction, initially about different levels of Covid anxiety - Paul is obsessive about Covid risk, down to wanting to leave their remotely purchased groceries outside for four hours, while Etienne is much more relaxed.
That friction, of course, masks old resentments going back to childhood and, along with eating and talking (lots of talking), and walking in the woods, Assayas’s screenplay trickles out a fuller and more interesting picture of these brothers who are both creatives, but in very different ways, who know just which buttons to push to get a reaction from their brother.
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