The filmmaker Jonathan Beaulieu-Cyr was only 13 years old when he saw his military father go on a mission for Afghanistan in the mid-2000s. In his film Phénixhe returns with tenderness to this experience which upset his passage from childhood in adolescence.
It is summer, at the Valcartier military base. Jacob (Aksel Leblanc), an anxious boy, tries to lead a life as a normal teenager even if his father, Joël (Maxime Genois), a charismatic soldier, is about to be deployed in Afghanistan.
While her mother, Michelle (Evelyne Brochu), tries to maintain family balance, Jacob has developed a conflictual relationship with her father because of this situation.
“If let’s put that you decided to do the deserter, would you go to prison?” Jacob asks him when the time for deployment is fast approaching.
To try to get closer to his boy, Joël will decide to become a coach of the Phoenix, a team of soccer who has not yet won a match of the season, integrating Jacob there.
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Winner of the Gilles-Carle Prize (given to the best first or second fictional feature) at the last Quebec Cinema meeting, Phénix offers a sensitive and moving foray into the difficult reality of military families.
Unlike several other filmmakers who have focused in their post-traumatic shock films experienced by soldiers, Jonathan Beaulieu-Cyr (Mad Dog Labine) had the judicious idea of telling, through the gaze of a 13 -year -old teenager, the anxiety experienced by the families of the military before their deployment in the war zone.
Based on a refined and very cinematographic staging, Beaulieu-Cyr manages to delve with delicacy in the intimacy of his characters, just camped by a trio of formidable actors. Around the young Aksel Leblanc, excels in the role of Jacob, Evelyne Brochu shines in the guise of a loving mother and Maxime Genois bursts the screen in the shoes of a immensely human and endearing father despite his faults.
- Note: 3.5 out of 5
- Phénixa film by Jonathan Beaulieu-Cyr with Aksel Leblanc, Evelyne Brochu and Maxime Genois.
