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The fire test: a bright film on the cruelty of adolescence [critique]
A first long that reveals both the talent of its author, Aurélien Peyre and that of his incandescent main actress, the beginner Anja Verderosa.
Hugo (Félix Lefebvre, remarkable) has always spent his July-August vacation on the island of Noirmoutier. But in the summer that Aurélien Peyre films in his first feature film, that of his 19th birthday, will not look like any other. First of all because he arrives there with Queen, his girlfriend whom he met there, aesthetician whose verve and eccentricity detonate with her shyness. Then because Hugo was physically transformed to the point that his friends struggle to recognize the one they always mocked, to the harassment, overweight. Author in 2018 a medium film Whooping (awarded at the Brive-la-Gaillarde festival) based on an identical starting point, Peyre tells here with great finesse the violence of the group in the face of the individual entangled in his complexes and the latter’s inability to heal his victim status, ready to do anything to be accepted by people who do not like him, even if he really likes.
And the filmmaker manages to make Noirmoutier the ideal playground for this open -air camera, where a dull tension dominates the story. Without guessing when the non-saying, the small and the big humiliations will implode the varnish which covers this summer which is also the shock between two social classes, that popular of Hugo and the big bourgeoisie of its real false lovers. But The fire test Facts above all by the quality of writing of his characters and his way of shaking up the priori, including among spectators. Starting with Queen, apparently locked up in an archetype of bimbo whose true nature, deeply melancholic. But it was necessary to find an actress capable of giving birth to all these details which will gradually reveal who is really this character, without never erasing her colorful side. Anja Verderosa, for her first role on the big screen, is used with a talent that is matched only by her charisma. A capital revelation.
From Aurélien Peyre with Félix Lefebvre, Anja Verderosa, Suzanne Jouannet… Duration 1h45. Released on August 13, 2025
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