jgcorrea Review of Louder Than Bombs

Louder Than Bombs (2015)

Isabelle, mon amour, tu vis dans la lumière et moi dans les coins sombres

[7/10 · 24 October 2022]

Norwegian director Joachim Trier had already shot a modernized adaptation of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's masterpiece Le Feu Follet (previously filmed by Louis Malle in 1963), and apparently re-imbued himself with the spirit of Drieu in ''Louder than bombs.'' "Le suicide c'est la ressource des hommes dont le ressort a été rongé par la rouille." ("Le Feu follet") - "Suicide is the resource of those men whose spring has been corroded by rust" - this psychoanalytic drama is ultimately honest, reflective, perceptive and intimate. By "suicide", Trier may mean the self-destructive vocation and the sense of a life spent with no real solution apart from the act that is sometimes apparently impossible to keep moving forward. Isabelle Huppert, in achronological flashbacks and dreams, lives the feeling of never being in the "right" place. Everyone has the discreet charm of the cosmopolitan intellectual bourgeois. Everyone feels the will-o'-the-wisp of neurosis, or vice versa. Noisier than bombs are, to be sure, internal repressions more "rusty" than the psyche's springs.