The Impossible - Criticism

Juan Antonio Bayona, this child-tasting child with peninsular cinema who jumped the entire primary school of directors by starting his career with a Gothic masterpiece (the orphanage), sweeps our distrusts like the waves of his torrential drama take theThai SUV and Grandes-Bretons holidaymakers.Miraculous.

The argument: the story of a family taken in one of the most terrible recent natural disasters.The impossible tells how a couple and their children on vacation in Thailand are separated by the tsunami of December 26, 2004.In the middle of hundreds of thousands of other people, they will try to survive and meet.According to a true story.

Our opinion: Patron saint of the great Spanish -speaking canvas, Guillermo del Toro rarely broods, and even plays it dad Mozart with five -legged eggs, like Wolfgang Amadeus Bayona.But if the orphanage, in 2007, still counted on the support and artistic of his elite tutor to removal from the Spanish the codes of the Haunted House Movie British, The Impossible is a declaration of independence in the form of a falseCatastrophe film, carried by stars for global radiation, but above all built around yet another true story to make the jaws cry and fall into cottages.Nothing appetizing, at first glance, for the fanatics of intimate terror and the sworn enemies of enchanted naturalism.But rest assured, Jean-Antoine Bayon has an author (Sergio G.Sànchez, that of the orphanage), an intact talent and a great plan: make great films.For a man raised in the mystic of the familiar fantastic, the forces of the mind and the unreal at an initiated eye, the story of five survivors brought to confuse together to make his way through the deluge is ultimately ablessing.Savonate the plans of likelihood without disregarding the incredulous, reducing space between faith and resignation without hiring ghost ... roughly, Bayona and Sànchez have given themselves the mission of doing fantastic without fantastic, and not only to convince the delights of thecrèche or the senile fan club lost sight of.Some will move forward, like the press kit itself, that the thing would be, with its ocean-godzilla, of the monster film behind, but a monster must be shown, if only to respect its etymology, andThe impossible endeavors to film its wake rather than its passage.In a wave more than is.Of course, Bayona comes from the genre and quickly knows it when filming the anti-surgical shot of a tsunami actually treated as the first T-rex (fall in palm trees, front tracks, sound design labeled horror)But the exercise of style stops there, and once his legitimacy as a doctor in chills placed on the table, the gifted has no trouble showing what there is below, and proving to the most indelicate than his artnaturally pushes him to dig his characters rather than his creatures.As such, the Bennett family, never too old, and not Fritzl either, is a model of haute couture: the ricore spirit being incompatible with any identification, the catastrophe does not break a quintetideal (we guess,, a parental conflict on the future and the role of each), but does not implose a dysfunctional clan, since it would be too easy to associate the quest for reunion with that of reconciliations.It is therefore above a perilous flotation line, and in defiance of the clichés, that the 18 -carat scenario of Sànchez changes two groups of tourists in a hurry to ward off the mower, even if it means changing the core of the nucleus.No inversion of roles, no vulgar substitutions, but an infinity of small emotional and symbolic transgressions.This is what structures the relations between the eldest son accompanied by his mother on one side, and the two cadets holding dad's hand on the other.Supported by possessed actors (yes Naomi, you will see Oscar), and a script never talkative, the staging nourished obviously - that of the greatest providers of intelligent blockbusters - rises above submerged lands to evokeHere and there, between micro-allegories and delicate friction, the laborious metamorphosis, in the eyes of a son, from the mother to a woman (even if it means making a sequence of arboreal climbing a scene of childbirth), or thePassage of a figure quasi-influence to that of a machine in danger (among the injuries of Mrs. Bennett, there is a pierced breast).Difficult to verbalize (or summarize) the thematic successes of The Impossible without paying into the psychology of PMU, moreover, as this fiction of unilateral learning is played out in frames, movements, and the power of evocation of aScenario that multiplies searches in a hostile environment (that of the fragile balances of the clan) without making heroes all the time.In the same way that Bayona films, with extremely rare grace, a ruthless but beautiful tsunami (literally), with great reinforcements of sequences which mix movement and stagnation (therefore using the vestiges of a city engulfed to perfection), he evokes in hollow this natural, universal and paradoxical disaster that is a modern family, as beautiful and voluntary as it is.The orphanage had almost no other thing.Moreover, the resolution of the plot was not ultimately at the center of our concerns, or those of its craftsmen, a certain number of indices (which we will not ease here) quickly make us doubtHis reality, perhaps leaving the news items to better sing out the baroque point (in the strict sense) of a film braided on several plans of reality.Never blissful, never cynical, the father of the orphanage also allows himself to draw in the precise film excellence written by his elders to better treat the finishes of his corner stone: from the detached page of a book by ConradFilmed as a premonition of chaos, with a red balloon (each his thread) offered by McGregor to his sons, we recognize for example the metonymic gimmicks (the part for the whole) of the Spielberg of the War of the Worlds (and this scene whereFlaws of clothes float above a river after the Alien landing).It is in this court that Bayona now plays, well helped, it is true, by a petrifying photo- incredible underwater scenes- a cutting of goldsmith and a permanent invention (write to us if you know how the animal filmedand mounted the sequences of the aquatic deviation), or an insolent gift for the world plan (of those which contain everything in one image).Impossible is not Jean-Antoine, and we will have to pay dearly to return to see a Roland Emmerich.