The Upcoming
  • Cinema & Tv
    • Movie reviews
    • Film festivals
      • Berlin
      • Tribeca
      • Sundance London
      • Cannes
      • Locarno
      • Venice
      • London
      • Toronto
    • Show reviews
  • Music
    • Live music
  • Food & Drinks
    • News & Features
    • Restaurant & bar reviews
    • Interviews & Recipes
  • Theatre
  • Art
  • Travel & Lifestyle
  • Literature
  • Fashion & Beauty
    • Accessories
    • Beauty
    • News & Features
    • Shopping & Trends
    • Tips & How-tos
    • Fashion weeks
      • London Fashion Week
      • London Fashion Week Men’s
      • New York Fashion Week
      • Milan Fashion Week
      • Paris Fashion Week
      • Haute Couture
  • Join us
    • Editorial unit
    • Our writers
    • Join the team
    • Join the mailing list
    • Support us
    • Contact us
  • Competitions
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • RSS

Locarno Film Festival 2018

With the Wind (Le vent tourne)

Locarno Film Festival 2018: With the Wind (Le vent tourne) | Review
7 August 2018
Joseph Owen
Avatar
Joseph Owen
7 August 2018

Movie and show review

Joseph Owen

With the Wind (Le vent tourne)

★★★★★

Special event

Ideas of radical ecology, self-sufficiency and toiling the land offer many narrative possibilities: a well-meaning ode to collective endeavour, a rustic tale of good-natured primitive living, a call to save the planet. In With the Wind Bettina Oberli subverts these expectations, showing the pain of a passion project, the frustrations of a bucolic landscape. In a world of Edenic bliss, ruptures court the surface.

Melanie Thierry and Pierre Deladonchamps play Pauline and Alex, a couple tending to an isolated farm in the Jura mountains. They grimace against weather and strife before deciding to install their own energy source. A stranger named Samuel (Nuno Lopes) delivers a wind turbine, bringing equipment, fresh sexual agency and – for what is a finely honed, high-minded life – shocking pragmatism.

Much tends to tone-deaf melodrama, unfortunate given the earnest explorations of environmental woe. Deladonchamps has an unforgiving role as the idealistic taskmaster, while Thierry is handed an oddly subdued scene with a just-born calf. It fares miserably and anti-climactically. The erotic state of exception consists of an ethereal hotel room, cloudlike and ludicrous.

There’s a sense this was always going to the wall. As an intervention into the perils of egoism, consumption and pollution, the film fares poorly. Perfunctory dialogue aches to be heard. The love triangle has soft edges. Intellectual profundity is a weak spot; emotional investment is oversold and underwritten. Darkness and rain augur doom. We’re anticipating the breakdown, for vicious modernity to triumph over noble ambitions, these still fed through folly and self-interest.

As Pauline and Alex’s romantic love deteriorates, the animals offer a point of unity. But the atmosphere is one of complete helplessness, of minor successes overwhelmed by heart-wrenching defeat. Vices of the city persist, poisoning the pastoral and prefacing a pessimistic end, one that produces a deathly ammoniac smell, both pungent and pointless.

★★★★★

Joseph Owen

With the Wind (Le vent tourne) does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Locarno Film Festival 2018 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Locarno Film Festival website here.

Related Itemslocarno film festivalreview

More in Film festivals

Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.

★★★★★
Matthew McMillan
Read More

“I think I’m kind of a drug addict for image and sound coming together! I’m always putting images to sound and getting high”: An interview with Hlynur Pálmason, director of Godland

Selina Sondermann
Read More

Watcher

★★★★★
Matthew McMillan
Read More

Resurrection

★★★★★
Matthew McMillan
Read More

Sharp Stick

★★★★★
Matthew McMillan
Read More

Leyla’s Brothers: An interview with Saeed Roustayi

Selina Sondermann
Read More

Plan 75: An interview with director Chie Hayakawa

Selina Sondermann
Read More

Falcon Lake: An interview with director Charlotte Le Bon

Selina Sondermann
Read More

“How to make a genuine portrait of life”: An interview with the stars of Leila’s Brothers

Selina Sondermann
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap

Movie and show review

Joseph Owen

With the Wind (Le vent tourne)

★★★★★

Special event

  • Popular

  • Latest

  • TOP PICKS

  • Beauty and the Beast: The Musical at London Palladium
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • Paolo Nutini – Last Night in the Bittersweet
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • St Vincent at the Hammersmith Apollo
    ★★★★★
    Live music
  • The Railway Children Return
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • Netflix Walking Tour: From Bridgerton to The Crown, a free walking tour through the filming locations
    Cinema & Tv
  • The Throne at Charing Cross Theatre
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • “We really wanted to create a cabbage gun”: An interview with David Earl and Chris Hayward stars of Brian and Charles
    Cinema & Tv
  • Paolo Nutini – Last Night in the Bittersweet
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Viagra Boys – Cave World
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Ithaka
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • Paolo Nutini – Last Night in the Bittersweet
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Viagra Boys – Cave World
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • The Railway Children Return
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • Adele lights up Hyde Park for BST Festival
    ★★★★★
    Live music
  • Beauty and the Beast: The Musical at London Palladium
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
The Upcoming
Pages
  • Contact us
  • Join mailing list
  • Join us
  • Our London food map
  • Our writers
  • Support us
  • What, when, why
With the support from:
International driving license

Copyright © 2011-2020 FL Media

Genesis (Genèse): An interview with director Philippe Lesage and stars Noée Abita and Théodore Pellerin
Locarno Film Festival 2018: A Land Imagined | Review