The Luxembourg actress plays the wife of Fernand Iveton, a French worker who was sentenced to death in Algeria for joining the cause of the FLN.
Postponed by the pandemic, the release of “Of our wounded brothers” today takes on a new force, as the theme of couples torn apart by conflict is so topical. “The film evokes the beauty of dialogue and understanding of the other in a couple that everything is politically opposed, in a country at war, analyzes Vicky Krieps. And sixty years later, as we celebrate the anniversary of the Evian Accords, nothing has changed. Politicians clash and civilians are the direct victims of a violence that crushes ideals. Our desire for humanism takes a new blow…”
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After the very noticed “Vandal”, Hélier Cisterne adapted the story of Joseph Andras, Goncourt from the first novel 2016 – which he refused –, with Vincent Lacoste in the shoes of the only European executed during the Algerian war. A film written with four hands by Cisterne and his partner, director Katell Quillévéré. “I felt this ‘loving’ writing, it spoke to me through its honesty, continues Vicky Krieps. It’s full of blame and full of love. This feeling is also nourished by confrontation. »
The theme of couples torn apart by conflict is in the news
Ten years after her debut and stints with Éric Rochant, Raoul Peck or Roland Emmerich, this young thirty-year-old mother was really discovered by the cinema in 2018 in “Phantom Thread”, by Paul Thomas Anderson, another love story alongside Daniel Day-Lewis. Suddenly Hollywood courted him. But she quickly returned to Europe and instead accepted the project of Hélier Cisterne, to the great desolation of her agents at the time. “I work without compromise. As an actress, I don’t want to please, she insists. in Hollywood, I felt like they weren’t talking to me, Vicky, but to the image they had of me. To accept Hélier’s film was to close the door to Hollywood. »
However, she has since returned to Hollywood (for new films by Barry Levinson and M. Night Shyamalan), while still touring a lot in France, until her nomination as best actress at the Césars last month for her striking performance of widow lost in “Serre-moi fort”, by Mathieu Amalric. Another story of a broken couple. “These characters speak to me. I have an almost scientific side that wants to understand why love is such a complicated feeling, ”she dares. She refused in advance any personal questions about Gaspard Ulliel, recently disappeared, of whom she was very close. Will follow in the string of films that she has shot other troubled characters, Anne of Austria in “The Three Musketeers” or even Sissi. An evidence. Her strong Luxembourgish accent and her look, both seductive and lost, inevitably bring to mind Romy Schneider. “I admire her for being a free woman in another era. Could she have said, too, “I don’t want to please”? I’m not sure. I just hope to have a happier life than his. »
“Of our wounded brothers”, in theaters now.