At Cineuropa, Fabien Lemercier reports that “the 63rd Jean Vigo Award has been bestowed upon Eat Your Bones by Jean-Charles Hue. The jury, comprising former winners, critics and exhibitors, was won over by ‘the pace and the aesthetic energy with which this immersion in a community never before seen in films crosses the power of a documentary, and the physical and metaphysical elements of film noir and of a rite-of-passage western.'” When it premiered as part of Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes last month, Lemercier called the film “a real UFO barging into the panorama of French cinema, a kind of strange and distant successor of Mean Streets by Martin Scorsese, and a film whose energy blows away everything in its path (flaws included) without abandoning a certain artistic quality.”
It’s “a gritty Gallic noir set among the slang-spouting trailer park gypsies of Northern France, whose love of beer, barbecue, crime and God are about the closest thing Europe may have to the gun crazy communities of America’s Deep South,” writes Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. “Reminiscent of Bruno Dumont’s The Life of Jesus in both its setting and cast of colorful (and colorfully looking) locals, but sticking closer to genre conventions while offering up moments of reckless fun, this third feature from writer-director Jean-Charles Hue (The Lord’s Ride) meanders too much in its documentary-style first act before hitting the right stride in its action-packed final stretch.”
“The color palette is sun-blanched yellow by day,” writes Notebook editor Daniel Kasman, “and xenon-glaring headlight yellow by night, canted angles, camera crammed in racing cars, echoes of Michael Mann on the cheap. The bodies and lingo are that of non-professionals, the same Hue used in his previous film La BM du Seigneur (2011), real Yeniche, real brothers, with thick, fulsome bodies and piercingly naive faces, words said forcefully and repeated because the actors want to get the lines right, and when they aim they fire like a shotgun, one blast, many bullets…. Not perfect, but certainly a dusky gem of a film.”
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