En Corps movie storyline. 26-year-old ballet dancer Élise (Marion Barbeau) sustains an injury during a performance and is told she will probably never be able to dance again. She has lost her purpose and has to change her life. With the help of friends, she finds other work. This takes her to Brittany where she meets a company for modern dance. The new experiences and friendships rekindle the fire in her. Will she be able to dance again?
En Corps is a Franco-Belgian film co-written and directed by Cédric Klapisch, released in 2022 and starring Marion Barbeau, Hofesh Shechter, Denis Podalydès, Muriel Robin, Pio Marmaï, François Civil, Souheila Yacoub, Mehdi Baki, Alexia Giordano, Robinson Cassarino and Mathilde Warnier. The screenplay was written by Santiago Amigorena and Cédric Klapisch. The film was released on March 9, 2022 in the United States (Rendez-vous with French Cinema) and on March 30, 2022 in France and Belgium.
Film Review for En Corps
Before returning to his Spanish inn with the sequel to his cult saga (soon to be a TV series for Amazon Prime), Cédric Klapisch takes a detour into a world he particularly likes: dance. From his first short film (Un, Deux, Trois, Mambo) to his viral video made during confinement with the help of the dancers of the Paris Opera (Dire, Merci) through his documentary on the star Aurélie Dupont or passages from his films evoking this world that fascinates him (in Les Poupees Russes, Paris), dance has always been a recurrence for the filmmaker.
En Corps, his fourteenth feature film worn by the dancer Marion Barbeau, whose first appearance in the cinema, is completely immersed in it. The star of the Paris Opera plays Élise Gauthier, a talented ballerina whose promising career is hampered by a serious fall during a performance. Forced to imagine another vocation because her chances of finding her level are more than uncertain, she seeks to rebuild herself and is interested in contemporary dance. Metaphorically, the story echoes recent confinements (the film was shot at that time) since it is about a forced stop preventing the practice of a passion. Exactly what live performance artists have experienced.
Cédric Klapisch is no longer a promising young filmmaker. Active for almost 40 years, his career has already led him to sign several cult films, Le Péril Jeune or L’Auberge Espagnole to name a few. But if some might believe that his greatest feats of arms are behind him, the director proves today that he still has some in his stomach (or rather in his head). With En Corps, he signs one of his best films. His “ode to dance” is marked by flashes as Klapisch had not testified for a long time. All it takes is a prologue as intense as it is fabulous to be convinced.
The start takes us behind the scenes of a ballet (La Bayadère) that we live passionately on stage and behind the scenes through immersive round trips. Almost no dialogue, just the energy behind the scenes and the grace on stage sublimated by the beauty of the images of a Klapisch that we discover in a style very different from his, more documentary, almost experimental at times.
Then there is this shock, this brutal fall which opens a new chapter, the story of a personal and artistic reconstruction filmed by a director driven by a desire for extreme authenticity. The language used, the accuracy of the universe, the choice of actors where we find, between two professionals such as Pio Marmaï, François Civil or Muriel Robin, the ballerina Marion Barbeau on the one hand, but also the Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter or the dancers (or ex-dancers) Germain Louvet, Alexia Giordano, Damien Chapelle, Mehdi Baki, Léo Walk… From one end to the other, we feel Klapisch’s immense respect for his subject and this stubborn will to want dancing, the real star of his film.
The start, with its over-licked aesthetic, suggests that the filmmaker is going to venture on the steep lands of a French-style Black Swan. The dramatic knot (the accident against a background of sentimental vexation) could have given rise to fears of a drift towards a cinematographic version of the television novela Un, Dos, Tres. Nothing will ever be.
Klapisch knows his subject perfectly and after a feverish prologue eyeing that of Gaspar Noé’s Climax, the filmmaker draws a magnificent film painting the moving portrait of a journey between rebirth, perseverance and resilience. If the staging then becomes more classic (as well as the story), Cédric Klapisch never loses the essence and the essential of his story. Moments of extreme artistic delicacy (generally when it comes to filming dance, whether classical, urban or contemporary) punctuate a solar film bathed in a feel good spirit where the will appears as a weapon to fight the ills to body and soul.
The neophyte Marion Barbeau is fabulous, Muriel Robin surprises in a superb role all in benevolence, the rest of the cast (from François Civil to Denis Podalydès via Pio Marmaï) ensure and all, with Klapisch as conductor, make this En Corps, a pure moment of happiness, an accomplished work carried by grace, poetry, positivism and above all energy.
En Corps (2022)
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Directed by: Cédric Klapisch
Starring: Marion Barbeau, Hofesh Shechter, Denis Podalydès, Muriel Robin, Pio Marmaï, François Civil, Souheila Yacoub, Mehdi Baki, Alexia Giordano, Robinson Cassarino, Mathilde Warnier
Screenplay by: Santiago Amigorena, Cédric Klapisch
Production Design by: Marie Cheminal
Cinematography by: Alexis Kavyrchine
Film Editing by: Anne-Sophie Bion
Costume Design by: Anne Schotte
Set Decoration by: Marie Cheminal
Art Direction by: Stephanie Laurent Delarue
Music by: Thomas Bangalter, Hofesh Shechter
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Blue Fox Entertainment
Release Date: March 30, 2022 (France), June 2, 2023 (United States)
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