French drama succeeds in combining characters’ drama with an effective denounce of the climate crisis
by Alberto Sclaverano for Citiplat
Acid (2023, original French title: Acide) explores the problems connected to the climate crisis, but in the form of a human drama. Michal (played by Guillaume Canet), a French low-income worker, has problems with the law after taking part in a violent riot. He has also a severely ill girlfriend and a difficult relationship with his ex-wife and teenage daughter. So, the premise of the movie seems to put together a character study of a man whose life risks tearing apart, and a mediation on the most marginalized elements of today’s French society.
But the movie is less a reflection on the negative side of the neoliberal economic model and more a human drama. And then, as the story goes along, what was left in the background and only alluded to through images from the TV and the newspaper, becomes the movie’s central plot. A massive wave of acid rain is heading to Europe from South America and has a range and severity never seen before.
Acid rains are one of the consequences of air pollution, and fortunately for now they cannot reach a level of danger equivalent to the one seen in the movie. But they remain a reason of serious concern, and in general air pollution is one of the deadliest consequences of the climate crisis, being directly responsible for around seven million deaths per year in the world, according to the World Health Organisation’s data.
This is the second movie by French Director Just Philippot. It is based on a 2018 short film of the same name by Philippot himself, who also co-wrote this movie. First screened at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival in the “Séance de minuit” special section, it proves once again that Mr. Philippot is an interesting filmmaker. He has recently risen to notoriety in France. His first feature-length film, The Swarm (La Nuée, 2020) combined elements of human drama and horror, depicting the struggle of a single mother in rural France. To sustain her family, she started to raise locusts for protein (an existing, increasing business), until the insects developed a strange taste for human blood.
Acid is not a Hollywood disaster movie, it chronicles a catastrophe that disrupts the whole of Europe, but only through the eyes of common people like the protagonist, who must act to save his estranged family before it is too late. The movie shows the population of France in desperate need of help and seems to draw parallels with the images of the climate refugees from the global South that we often see in the news.
Philippot’s depiction of the tragedy is closer to the recent British drama The End We Start From by Mahalia Belo than to American films such as The Day After Tomorrow. In Belo’s film, the climate crisis arrived in the developed world in the form of massive floods, this time it is the acid rain that causes destruction.
The film creates a connection between the degradation of the environment and the life struggles of Michal and presents the climate crisis as a tragedy that is always active in the shadows. If we continue ignoring it just like the main characters do in the first part of the movie, it will at some point reach us all, adding new problems to ours. The human drama and the characters-driven approach always prevail, even in the scenes that seem to take the movie into a more thriller-like zone. Philippot’s movie is an example of an emerging subgenre of art movies that also contain elements of genre cinema, and use climate change and the potential consequences of the climate crisis as a narrative tool.
The goal is both explore the human drama at the center of the films’ plots, putting the characters in dangerous situations, and reminding us that we cannot continue ignoring the climate crisis, or it will strike rich countries as severely as it has already done with the developing ones.
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