The indomitable Mathieu Malinski | Culture
The movies of personal improvement, brilliant but rebellious student, extraordinary talent and adverse social circumstances, make up a subgenre so traveled in contemporary cinema that everything that is not out of the stereotype sounds a thousand times seen and heard. This type of work may find the public that seeks, the pursuer in the room the physical comfort and spiritual rigor, the ethical convention and vital optimism, without nothing to break or bother or make you doubt until that inevitable outcome peliculeo. But works like The piano class, third feature film by Frenchman Ludovic Bernard, are usually a nuisance for the true cinephile, who (almost) knows everything. Above all, if the director seems to have studied his model, and this is not a hidden gem but a well-known film: The unstoppable Will Hunting, by Gus Van Sant.
THE CLASS OF PIANO
Address: Ludovic Bernard.
Interpreters: Jules Benchetrit, Lambert Wilson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Karidja Touré.
Gender: drama France, 2018
Duration: 106 minutes
If we change the mathematics of the movie that gave the Oscar to the best script to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for classical music, we already have The piano class, of structure and sense of the exact characters. Young from the outskirts of the university world and the conservatory, almost self-taught, thanks to the chance meeting with a department director finds a possible way out of their social situation; an aid to which he is reluctant by a misunderstood rebellion, and in which a particular teacher will have a lot to see that will help him understand the importance of work and method, regardless of talent, and a girl coming from the world of intellectuality, to which the protagonist is refractory, and from which he falls in love. All this with the influence and the final protection of his lumpen friends. I'm counting The unstoppable Will Hunting, you already know. But also The piano class.
Regardless of the parallels with the film by Van Sant, Damon and Affleck, which are obviously too many, Bernard, also a co-writer, and who began his career in 2017 with Basque Country Mission, another stereotyped mix between Eight Basque surnames Y Welcome to the North, it is not enough to have an own style in the staging, that lurches between the academicism and a somewhat tacky creative impulse in the sequences of love and sex.
