By accident ( Camille Fontaine, 2015) France

Reviewed by Pierre Balloum at the Santa Barbara Film Festival

The young director Camille Fontaine signs a first mowed but percussive film, which begins as a social chronicle and gradually takes the form of a psychological thriller and a drama on the theme of bad conscience. “Accidentally” benefits particularly from a leading interpretation, around the three main protagonists, embodied by a trio of inspired actors. The handsome Hafsia Herzi (whom I adore and who does not hesitate to become ugly) puts a young immigrant worker waiting for a regularization, which obliges her to live with her husband (Mounir Margoum, Revelation) in a “heavenly slum”, isolated from the world in a wilderness caravan. As for the stunning Emilie Dequenne, she is the one by whom the scandal arrives, nurse borderline and kleptomaniac, poivrotte and seductress, she opens the heroine to the external mode by giving her a social life under the benevolent gaze of the husband, Probably charmed too. The film starts with a road accident, during which Amra (Hafsia Herzi) strikes a man out of inattention, who finds himself in a coma. Miraculeusement, a witness appeared to innocent the young Maghreb, claiming that the victim threw herself under the wheels of her car: it is the flamboyant Angelica (Emilie Dequenne), true opposite of Amra, which does not prevent Not the two women to get closer …

“By accident” is a good little film, both by the duration (1H15 chrono) and by the budget, which it would be a shame to miss, so there is no shortage of assets (staging, script, writing … ) We simply regret that the ending leaves us on a bad impression, the narrative ending in a final sequence highly unlikely, climax of the tension where the characters unfortunately adopt an aberrant behavior (especially Amra). We will not forget for all that what preceded, letting augur good promises on behalf of Camille Fontaine, whose future work will be closely followed.