family matters is a French drama in which Marion Cotillard and Melvil Poupaud play two brothers who cannot see each other. This new proposal from Galician cinema, with a complicated critical approach, arrives in our cinemas on February 24.
In this our beloved website, Frustrated moviegoers, and especially at your service, we are staunch French cinema fans. We went fervently to the press passes ready to immerse ourselves in this damned gift that usually attracts us: this mixture, natural and at the same time artistically elaborated, of emotional realism and European sophistication. What happens with family matters this formula becomes complicated in its critical management: at times it looks like a film, at others it seems that they want to swim in thick-cut drama.
family matters it plays, of course, for the viewer to anticipate how and when, and with what collateral damage, the two brothers will finally agree. The problem comes when everything that comes to convince us when we follow Alice and Louise, working out of empathy, goes to waste when we enter why they don’t talk to each other. What the hell happened to them. Of course we will not commit the crime of spoiler but let’s say that the film, when it enters this mire, stagnates in a kind of incomprehension due to a lack of empathy. The simplicity of the days surrounding a stay of parents in the hospital, a meeting with a fan to whom you explain everything or the sudden return of a lot of memories, become much more successful than the dramatic influx of fraternal tensions between Alice and Louise.
Somehow this more human side, that of Alice and Louise’s present experiences, transcends the differences. And because Marion Cotillard and Melvil Poupaud look best when they can be themselves and not tied to a complex nervous, irrational state that has led them to hate.