Francis Ford Coppola’s new gothic thriller ‘Twixt’, starring Elle Fanning and Val Kilmer has opened in France to great reviews.

Le Monde said:

“Some say it’s ugly. That this crude picture, these effects cheap, Val Kilmer bloated face emerged from purgatory for the occasion of Hollywood, are a depressing poverty. And yet that’s the beauty that endears this film. A fragile beauty, poignant, totally romantic. Twixt is a Gothic poem shot in digital and transfigured by the sheer gravity of the young Elle Fanning (this amazing child star revealed by Sofia Coppola in Somewhere, recently updated in Super 8, JJ Abrams, who has just blown its thirteenth candle).

The images have the metal texture of raw pixel, but in the hands of the great goldsmith sensual what Coppola, this material becomes gold. This is because it sparkles so, because it might upset too, she calls a counterpoint some patterns ugly.

Third film of Francis Ford Coppola since his conversion to digital five years ago and his new credo of artistic independence and financial Twixt thus combines the beauty and ugliness, the trivial and the sublime, the comic and the tragic … It could be so inept, since this second birth, the author of The Godfather was not floating in a wonderful state of grace.

Desiring, against all logic, to remake films like if a student, he arrived there in a sense. Twixt the cool done well reminiscent of his early films of the era Corman (including Dementia 13). Only she has been enriched by the wisdom, experience and memory of man ageless what has become its author.

With Youth Without Youth and Tetro, his two previous films, Twixt form a trilogy in which there is a damaged relationship between father and child, a dizzying reflection on time, the systematic use of still shots and frequent in black and white. .. Of the three, however, it is the most moving, most original, most successful.

The original film, as the filmmaker evokes, is to find in a dream he had where he appeared to a young girl with her mouth full of metal rings and the American poet Edgar Allan Poe. And also in the interpretation he has made, combining these visions to the death of his son Gian-Carlo (in 1986, in a speedboat accident), and the guilt he has himself designed.

Twixt begins when Hans Baltimore (Val Kilmer), writer of novels of witchcraft poor languishing in alcoholism since the death of his daughter, arrives in a U.S. town to sign his latest book. The town has nothing notable if the belfry of his church was not flanked by five clocks displaying different times, if a group of young Satanists had not installed the other side of the lake, and if Edgar Allan Poe had not stayed there during his lifetime. For the rest, nothing to report, not even a bookstore. In front of the book section of the hardware that Hans Baltimore moved to autograph his book.

Disgusted with himself, he wants to end his career as a writer station. But his wife calls, videoconference intermediary, a new novel. To pay the bills, she says, if he did not comply, to sell its most valuable asset: a first edition of poems by Walt Whitman. To stage these conversations, Coppola chooses the split-screen, thus isolating his characters on either side of the screen, separated by a border, fixing both the camera instead of watching. How better to suggest the lack of communication within the couple deliquescent? The film is full of fun little finds like this (including a particularly hilarious on the writer at work), which gives it its bright and sparkling tone.

Baltimore therefore yield to pressure from his wife, and it is in this small town that is the subject of his new novel.

The sheriff, an oddball who engages in his spare time to writing thrillers, it furnishes the starting point. He tells a group of children was murdered and claims, in exchange elements of its investigation, to be recognized co-author of the book.

Faithful to the precepts that Coppola lavishes publicly in recent years, Baltimore appropriates the idea without the slightest intention to compensate the sheriff. In fact, it is conducting its own investigation into a series of dreams and alcoholic medicated, where he meets the ghost of a murdered child – “a” young vampire teeth of steel played by Elle Fanning – and Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin) who serves as his literary coach.

Coppola’s personal story, and those of his anti-hero characters he invents himself in his novel are reflected in a complex game of mirrors. To the point, to represent the death of the daughter of the writer, explosive return of the repressed to which advance the film, the filmmaker recreates precisely that of his own son.

Between fiction, dream, memory, where lies the truth? These three terms are they really disjointed? How to distinguish them in a world where we live several time frames at the same time? These questions were already running in his two previous films, but who find in this story of grief, creative and lovely ghosts reflected the most successful, the clearest, the most overwhelming.

The film currently has no US release date.