Before the Collapse: Alice’s Zenith Questions Our Future in Niels Schneider’s Amazing Film

What is it about?

In sweltering Paris, Tristan, a campaign manager for a legislative candidate, receives an anonymous letter containing a positive pregnancy test. Because he may have a fatal and incurable genetic disease, he becomes obsessed with finding the woman who sent him the test. But is it a sick joke, cold revenge, a cry for help or a political maneuver? Tristan decides to investigate, risking his professional and emotional life.

After appearing in literature (The art of loss as an empire within an empire) and in theater direction, Alisa Zeniter comes to the cinema with her first feature film, Before the Collapse.

For this new adventure, he surrounded himself with co-director Benoit Volnay and a very good cast: Nils Schneider, Ariane Labedi, Suheila Yacoub in the lead role, accompanied by talented actors such as Miriem Akhediu and Sephora Pond. From the Comédie Française…Fans of the funny series on Netflix will be delighted to find two young discoveries Younes Butsif and Elsa Guede for a small part.

Before Collapse is a unique film in its form: it takes a very heady and very literary construction, with a sound sequence. The film is very dense and dialogic. It can also surprise you with the tone delays and regular shapes it offers.

“From the brief, we realized that the story we were telling required changes in the narrative mode, so we decided to bring it to completion.“, explains co-director Benoit Volnet. And insists “New stories and new ways of telling must be created“from”Try something in fictionThis bet is successful, to our surprise, sometimes destabilizing.

We’ll keep a sequence of amazing insights, even a form of anticipation, on the topics that are driving the news today. This movie, shot almost 2 years ago, is about, for example, a scorching summer and a strike by garbage collectors!

The starting point of the film was the question of contemporaries

“The starting point of the film was the question of contemporaries. We are convinced that one of the defining aspects of modernity is the increasingly shared belief that the future will be dark, dangerous, that the worst is yet to come. And it renews, we believe, ways of thinking, seeing, loving, timing, working, living, friendships, parenting, etc. We wanted to say that with the means of cinema, the emotions, the narrative and aesthetic bias that cinema allows. And with this character of Tristan, who himself is going through an individual collapse.”

The breaks in tone, which at times tend towards fable, make it possible to take heavy subjects lightly and in very cinematic sequences. “I get the impression that we sometimes qualify as theatrical or literary aspects that are not: the pleasure of language, the work of language and the length of lines. On that front, we didn’t want anything, a ban and that. It was the decision of the cinema,” Alis Zeniter elaborates.

And let’s add a tandem: “The strangeness is due to how we wanted to capture the state of melancholic stasis that awaits and gradually overcomes Tristan. Our cinematic references were on the side of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Gus Van Sant, two filmmakers a priori very distant, but for us very inspiring way to convey and film the complexity of living and being in this world.“

Bring out a political reflection, a large-scale opinion

The film is remarkable in that it offers a political reflection, and here too the assumption is excellent. The project was also “A political reflection, making a large-scale point against the backdrop of the themes of collapse that characterize the film“.

Find all the movie releases of the week

Alice Zeniter and Benoit Volnat will be in theaters this Wednesday before Alice Zeniter’s Collapse.