Cannes. Retour en Normandie.

"Any documentary is an act of remembrance," writes Allan Hunter for Screen Daily. "Back To Normandy [Retour en Normandie] has a special personal significance for director Nicolas Philibert because it allows him to return to the scene of his earliest filmmaking experiences and also to pay homage to his mentor René Allio."

"The film's no wallow in nostalgia, but a warm, funny, lively exploration of all manner of interlinked themes: history, documentation, madness, memory, family life, and so on," writes Time Out's Geoff Andrew. "It's an amazingly subtle film, and possibly a bit too tough for those who found little Jojo the most interesting element in Etre et Avoir [To Be and To Have]; but it's also a treasure trove, with rich pickings galore."

In 1975, when Philibert was 24, he "worked as an assistant director on René Allio's true-crime costumer I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother....," explains Variety's Lisa Nesselson. "Young Philibert scoured the countryside for non-pros to play the central roles in 1835-set drama. Thirty years later, he returned to the village in question to interview the civilians who were cast."

"A deferential and convivial enterprise, Retour... is not so much an entertainment or even an illumination, but rather a personal cinematic scrapbook, which should be stamped 'return to sender,'" grumbles Duane Byrge in the Hollywood Reporter.

Posted by dwhudson at May 25, 2007 3:54 PM