THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
Léa Mysius captures the weight of secrets in Histoires de la nuit (The Birthday Party)
Four years after Les Cinq Diables (The Five Devils), her most recent acclaimed feature film, director Léa Mysius has adapted Histoires de la nuit (The Birthday Party), the noir fiction novel by Laurent Mauvignier published in 2020. Presented in Competition, the film paints a portrait of a family whose troubled past suddenly comes back to haunt them over the course of a very long night.
In Histoires de la nuit (The Birthday Party), Léa Mysius reunites with Bastien Bouillon and Hafsia Herzi who play couple Nora and Thomas who live on a farm with their daughter in an isolated village deep in the French region of Limousin. Their only neighbor is Cristina (Monica Bellucci), an Italian painter who lives alone. Very quickly, the film transforms into a thriller, when three men gatecrash Nora’s birthday party and expose all of her deeply buried secrets to everyone.
In this claustrophobic setting, the director progressively ramps up the tension, tension that made Laurent Mauvignier’s book so successful when it was published. But in and amongst this tension are also moments of brief reprieve, like the scenes with Cristina and her attacker where they are listening to music and discussing art in the middle of a hostage situation. The leader of the malevolent group is Franck, played by Benoît Magimel with an impressive mix of softness and chilling authority.
In Les Cinq Diables (The Five Devils), Léa Mysius portrays an Adèle Exarchopoulos confronted by a murky past and a dark secret: a terrible mistake committed years prior, and this mysterious event looms over the whole narrative. Histoires de la nuit (The Birthday Party) will keep you in suspense right until the end and leave you wondering:
Whether the stories that we invent are sometimes better than a truth that’s too painful to bear.
