This radical integration of fiction yields astonishment after astonishment. When the victor-Hollande-was announced, at 8 P.M., Triet’s crew was there to film the spontaneous celebration that her fictional character Laetitia reports on. Audaciously, she filmed the scenes of Laetitia at work at the actual Hollande rally on that May evening. It isn’t only the characters’ names that Triet borrows from real life. The resulting showdown erupts at the Hollande rally and continues back at Laetitia’s apartment. Vincent protests that his paternal rights are being infringed, and gets his law-student friend Arthur (Arthur Harari) to help him force Laetitia’s hand. Inevitably, Vincent comes by, and when Marc alerts Laetitia she orders him to bring the babies to her at the rally. Laetitia warns him not to let Vincent into the apartment while she’s gone he’s violent and dangerous, she says. She’s had trouble finding a sitter for the evening, and the young man who shows up for the job, Marc (Marc-Antoine Vaugeois), soon learns how strange it will be. But for Laetitia there is a battle all the same, one that begins even before she goes on the air, and which involves her baby daughters, Jeane (Jeane Arra-Bellanger) and Liv (Liv Harari), and their father, Vincent (Vincent Macaigne), from whom she is separated. The movie’s French title, “La Bataille de Solférino,” is a joke, referring not to the crucial 1859 battle of that name but to the Rue de Solférino, where the rally takes place. The film’s protagonist, Laetitia (Laetitia Dosch), is a TV news reporter who’s assigned to cover the rally of Hollande supporters. “Age of Panic” is set in Paris, on May 6, 2012-the date of the final round of France’s Presidential election, in which the Socialist Party’s François Hollande faced the right-wing incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy. It’s still a delight and a wonder, if also now a melancholy reminder of what Triet accomplished at her best and hasn’t yet matched. It’s sadly predictable that the earlier film has remained unreleased here, and if there’s one reason to be grateful for the success of the more conventional “Anatomy” it’s that “Age of Panic” is now available to stream, on MUBI. But, as I wrote when it came out, it is as cramped, tightly scripted, and airlessly directed as “Age of Panic” is open, impulsive, and uninhibited. Her latest film, “Anatomy of a Fall,” has been a hit, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, receiving rave reviews, and taking in some $3.5 million at the U.S. But this promise was short-lived, both in French cinema at large and in Triet’s own work. Other French films that came out around the same time-such as Antonin Peretjatko’s “ The Rendez-Vous of Déjà Vu,” Sophie Letourneur’s “ Les Coquillettes,” and Guillaume Brac’s “ A World Without Women” and “ Tonnerre”-were doing something similar, to such distinctive effect, that the shared spark of inspiration felt like a generational watershed, a collective renewal. Blending fiction and documentary in a daringly original framework, it held out a promise that rough contact with real life could stimulate greater artistic freedom in the filming of fictional dramas. When the French director Justine Triet’s first feature, “Age of Panic,” screened in New York-in 2014, the year after its Cannes première-it felt as if the movie might herald a new energy in French cinema.
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