Stillwater: Matt Damon searching for repentance on the streets of Marseille

Picture of the movie Stillwater © 2021 Focus Features, LLC

 

From Oklahoma’s oil wells to Marseille’s old port. With Stillwater, presented Out of Competition, Tom McCarthy sends Matt Damon on a quest to save his daughter from prison. A film based on the Amanda Knox case, with a Mediterranean crime film touch.

He had never really paid much attention to his daughter. Now he’s going to have to do everything in his power to get her out of this. Bill Baker (Matt Damon) leaves Oklahoma to visit Allison (Abigail Breslin), who is being held in prison in Marseille for the murder of her roommate. She has always maintained her innocence and informs him of a clue that could see her win her freedom back. Bill is going to have to do whatever it takes to bring his daughter back home to Stillwater.

In this role of a father in search of redemption, Matt Damon walks through Marseille accompanied by his old demons. The actor plays an alcoholic with a loutish past in a performance that is introverted and laconic, his eyes hidden by the shadow of his ball cap. Everything changes when he meets the cheeky Virginie (Camille Cottin), who serves as the makeshift translator to this bewildered father, and her daughter Maya (Lilou Sauviaud), a ray of light in what could have stayed a very dark story.

Tom McCarthy was already playing with the idea of Stillwater ten years ago, when he became interested in the Amanda Knox case. This American student was accused of killing her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Italy in 2007. Once he started writing the story, he choose to set it in Marseille, won over by its cosmopolitan atmosphere, and took his camera from the city’s picturesque rocky inlets to its roughest neighbourhoods. To help with the script, Tom McCarthy surrounded himself with two French writers, Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, a double advantage that brought realism and credibility to this journey far from the town of Stillwater.