It's a hotchpotch of clips and cameos stitched together with no real sense of Simone's amazing career or achievements. We get snippets thrown at us like custard pies. The steady cam is annoying and the music doesn't add anything to the images.
There are huge indigestible speeches thrown at the viewer and no drama to them, and the horrors of her life are sketched over with far too much pathos and not enough horror. People died in the camps but the screen does not touch us. Even the tragedy of her mother or father are just presented to us like cakes in a window. We don't really know how Simone is touched. I get the feeling they tried to do too much in what is already a very long film at 2h 20. This probably works better as a mini series. The actress who plays young Simone is great, but alas the older actress misses the mark somehow, something is missing and the makeup looks weird. When you lack imagination, you have wigs, but here both are terrible. Its far too French, at the end her French Academy Sword is shown but this means nothing unless you're in the know. The director forgets she was first and foremost a European. At the end a speech to the camera about how history and memory are the same for two generations tries to patch up this films failures but this isn't a smooth film. At the end, the audience applauded this film, but it was half hearted and short lived, almost as if we were applauding Simone and suddenly realised she isn't here to hear it. At a time when Europe slides towards another facist disaster with Brexit and extremism in Italy and France as well as Hungry and a war in Ukraine, we really need this film to work and it doesn't. Instead we realize that the glue that holds Europe together, the future that includes everyone is still a distant dream.
There are huge indigestible speeches thrown at the viewer and no drama to them, and the horrors of her life are sketched over with far too much pathos and not enough horror. People died in the camps but the screen does not touch us. Even the tragedy of her mother or father are just presented to us like cakes in a window. We don't really know how Simone is touched. I get the feeling they tried to do too much in what is already a very long film at 2h 20. This probably works better as a mini series. The actress who plays young Simone is great, but alas the older actress misses the mark somehow, something is missing and the makeup looks weird. When you lack imagination, you have wigs, but here both are terrible. Its far too French, at the end her French Academy Sword is shown but this means nothing unless you're in the know. The director forgets she was first and foremost a European. At the end a speech to the camera about how history and memory are the same for two generations tries to patch up this films failures but this isn't a smooth film. At the end, the audience applauded this film, but it was half hearted and short lived, almost as if we were applauding Simone and suddenly realised she isn't here to hear it. At a time when Europe slides towards another facist disaster with Brexit and extremism in Italy and France as well as Hungry and a war in Ukraine, we really need this film to work and it doesn't. Instead we realize that the glue that holds Europe together, the future that includes everyone is still a distant dream.