C mon C mon

"What began as an attempt to document and reflect on my life with my child also became a portrait of the relationship that developed between Joaquin and Woody. I tried to embrace that relationship and let the camera capture its truth. That's when I'm most excited as a filmmaker: when things are vivid, unpredictable, surprising." - Mike Mills

We have to admit that we are rarely surprised at the cinema, not because the current cinema seems to obey certain predefined rules and miracle recipes to obtain excellent results at the world box-office and thus fill the funds of film studios taking less and less risk, but especially because seeing a film after discovering its trailer takes away a certain aura. It is therefore appropriate to discover the new film of the writer and director Mike Mills without having seen its trailer and knowing as little as possible about it. 

C'mon C'mon establishes Mike Mills as a director apart, outside of fashion and who makes films that want to be different. Whether it is the excellent Beginners (2011), 20th Century Women (2016) (for which we had the chance to interview him), each of Mike Mills' films proves to be an undeniable success and confirms an innate gift for directing actors and allowing them to give their best. C'mon C'mon is certainly not an easy film, but it was designed to capture the difficulties of communication between adults and children, of finding one's place in our society.

Nos âmes d'enfants (C'mon C'mon) is a film about human relationships, about family ties, but also a way to better understand our current world through the eyes of children. We discover a radio journalist, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) who works on portraits of young children by traveling the country and interviewing them on what they think of the current society and how they see the future. After being estranged from his sister due to their mother's life-threatening illness, Johnny is reunited with his sister after her husband is committed to a facility and she asks him to watch over her son Jesse (Woody Norman). Johnny is separated from his girlfriend and has never been a father, so he must not only become a surrogate father to his nephew but also learn from him and his way of seeing the world. 

Our Children's Souls (C'mon C'mon), shot in a majestic black and white between Los Angeles and New York, paints two very moving portraits of a man who has lost his bearings and a child with a vivid imagination who has built a world for himself in the face of a father with difficult mood swings and a mother who has lost her way.  The great strength of this film is the perfect alchemy of a great actor who never ceases to surprise us (Joaquin Phoenix) and a young actor Woody Norman who proves to be the real revelation of this film. The care given to the dialogues as well as to the will to capture our daily life and to make a realistic cinema is as much a daring bet as a risky one. While we go to the cinema to have a good time in the same way that we go to an amusement park to have thrills, we also like to discover independent films that have their own language and show us how much a film can open our mind on the current world as well as touch us in the heart as this film does so well.

Even if at times Nos âmes d'enfants (C'mon C'mon) is one of those rare films that allow us to grow up and see the world in a new light. While we all dream of a life with the person we love and one day becoming a parent and seeing his or her work appreciated and recognized, we cling to these small pleasures of life every day as we have to find a reason to keep fighting and hope for a bright future. In this sense, Our Children's Souls (C'mon C'mon) is certainly a great film to discover in the cinema and whose end will remain in your memory long after you have seen it.

C'mon C'mon
Written and directed by Mike Mills
Produced by Chelsea Barnard, Lila Yacoub, Andrea Longacre-White
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffmann, Scoot McNairy, Molly Webster, Woody Norman
Cinematography : Robbie Ryan
Edited by Jennifer Vecchiarello
Music by Aaron Dessner, Bryce Dessner
Production company : Be Funny When You Can
Distributed by A24 (United States), Metropolitan FilmExport (France)
Release dates : September 2, 2021 (Telluride), November 19, 2021 (United States), February 26, 2022 (France)
Running time : 108 minutes

Seen on December 25, 2021

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