More Than Yesterday movie storyline. At the heart of the Bresse, the life flows slowly. Françoise, a young teenager, experiencing her first emotions of love while her mother, resigned, to spend his time to make jams and that his father works at the cannery run by his brother-in-law, Maurice.
The little brother of Françoise, meanwhile, demonstrated an insatiable curiosity and tries to understand the non-said, which weighs upon the family. A beautiful day, Sonia, the eldest, being a party to Paris a long time ago, arrives with her husband, her child and her depression. Little by little, the truth : Sonia had once a relationship with Maurice, was pregnant and had lost the child…
More Than Yesterday (French: Plus qu’hier, moins que demain) is a 1998 drama film directed by Laurent Achard and starring Martin Mihelich, Laetitia Legrix, Mireille Roussel, Pascal Cervo, Lily Boulogne, Daniel Isoppo, Vincent Martin, Zakariya Gouram and Nathalie Besançon.
Film Review for More Than Yesterday
Hello sadness, hello families, province and heavy secrets… there is all of this in the first feature film by Laurent Achard. A psychological drama with the French, rooted in its terroir ? Yes and no, because the developer seems to have spent the kind in the sieve to keep only the sensations fugitive. It is on an impressionistic, without explanation, that we meet with Sonia, the thirties brunette, is back in his native village after a few years of absence.
A woman who wears on his face mourning for his first youth or of an happiness old. And that poses around it no one knows what threat. Here it is in the pavilion trivial where his parents reside, neither hostile nor welcoming. Here is his sister, Françoise, teenage exalted dreams of becoming a singer like Vanessa Paradis ; his little brother, Julien, a young boy chubby who smokes in secret, and worries about the prolonged absence of his dog.
All are preparing for the inauguration of the new premises of the cannery family that is headed by the uncle, and where the father’s works. A little later, the ceremony was in full swing, trivial and ridiculous. And Sonia seems to be won by a terrible melancholy. What’s going on ? In a drama on tv, perhaps it should wait until the end to know the secret of Sonia.
One learns here at the end of the first quarter of an hour. This allows Laurent Achard to come immediately to the point : the way in which this secret as it flows from one character to the other ; the effect it produced on the brother and the sister of Sonia, who discover or guess ; the fact that it continues to produce on the adults (parents, uncle) who would like to forget.
Thus, the film, which looked like until then with the paint abraded to a plot of deep France, has been enriched with a new ” pattern “, foreground : a round fluid of emotions and confessions. This second (and main) movement takes place judiciously at the edge of a river during a family picnic and walks and swimming related. The discomfort of Sonia is listed as a wave that spreads from one to the other, and, by the way, changes in nature, of value.
Indirectly, mysteriously, it exacerbates the feelings of some of them (the young Françoise flirts with his cousin, and then the regrowth), wakes up the aggressive impulses of the other (le petit Julien finds herself tied up in a sub-wood), rap – close to the past and the present, little sister and big sister, parents and children… In a climate discreetly pantheistic the river, the nature, the light is decisive , Laurent Achard, adopts in turn the eyes of each.
He manages, in the end, to represent the family as a single body, each member of which is, in consciousness or not, viscerally supportive of the other. Thus, the mother houspille his child so that it “wets the back of his neck” before you bathe, and the child has a silent towel over a car window to protect the nap of his father…
Served by a majority of the faces are new (including that of a child impressive, Martin Mihelich), the table contains bright flashes of truth. And conjures away the Téchiné Reeds wild or even the Eustachian tube of the Small Romantic by its apparent clarity and its murmuring mysterious. It is all the more difficult to meet, then, a denouement where the psychology “restorative” makes the law almost alone. Sudden lack of grace, sometimes occult, sometimes as simple as that, which irrigates the greater part of this delicate film. This grace is attributable only to a power of the stage, testifies to the birth of a genuine filmmaker.
More Than Yesterday (1999)
Directed by: Laurent Achard
Starring: Martin Mihelich, Laetitia Legrix, Mireille Roussel, Pascal Cervo, Lily Boulogne, Daniel Isoppo, Vincent Martin, Zakariya Gouram, Nathalie Besançon
Screenplay by: Laurent Achard, Ricardo Muñoz
Production Design by: Éric Barboza, Laurent Le Bourhis
Cinematography by: Philippe Van Leeuw
Film Editing by: Josiane Zardoya
Costume Design by: Pascaline Chavanne
Art Direction by: Ricardo Muñoz
Distributed by: Les Films du Paradoxe
Release Date: February 3, 1999
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