Director: Mélanie Laurent
Writers: Cédric Anger, Christophe Deslandes, and Mélanie Laurent
Stars: Mélanie Laurent, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Manon Bresch
Synopsis: Tired of life on the run, two expert thieves and best friends recruit feisty Sam to assist them with one last job unlike any they’ve done before
Mélanie Laurent’s directorial efforts haven’t been as strong as her acting efforts. Her last movie, The Mad Women’s Ball, had interesting ideas but was far too scattershot to make an impact despite a remarkable lead performance from Lou de Laâge. However, in her latest behind-the-camera project, Wingwomen, Laurent deftly flexes her genre cinema muscles and delivers her best-directed project, with impassioned chemistry between its three lead stars.
Working with filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Louis Leterrier, Denis Villeneuve, and Alexandre Aja has certainly helped her gain an understanding of how genre cinema operates, with four distinct visions of a more participatory approach for the audience embedded in the filmmaking process. Although the opening action scene introducing us to Carole (played by Mélanie Laurent) and Alex (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is clunkily edited and choreographed, subsequent action scenes are sleek and have a great sense of rhythm.
It also helps that Laurent stages many of its best action scenes with a known track to punctuate its rhythm and tone. One bravura sequence sees Alex fight a bare naked assassin in a bedroom while Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers blares out in the speakers, and the perceptible window in the frame is filled with fireworks. The overall conceit of this scene is ridiculous, but Laurent isn’t afraid of putting her main characters in one gritty situation after the next. There’s an incredible balance operating between uncomfortable (bordering on cringe) comedy and tough-as-nails action that Laurent consistently plays with throughout the movie.
A perfect example of this happens when the trio of bandits, Carole, Alex, and newcomer Sam (Manon Bresch, extraordinary), travel to Italy to kill assassins who were hired to dispose of Carole and Alex after the two told their godmother (Isabelle Adjani) of their intentions to leave the shadowy organization they are working with. The aforementioned assassination attempt sequence plays with the idea that their “hideout” is an invisible bunker in the middle of the forest, rendering the assassins invisible in a vast environment of glass, but the actual Italy assassination begins to play with slapstick comedy tropes until the violence reaches a real – and emotionally cathartic – point. It feels satisfying to watch these women kick major ass and not be afraid to take matters into their own hands, but there’s an added layer of character development in Laurent’s film that makes it stand apart from the usual fare of caper dramedies.
That layer stems from making each protagonist emotionally complex, whether giving weight to Carole’s “final mission” or representing a textured relationship between Carole and Alex, and seeing Sam’s progression from when she gets introduced on a racetrack to her final scene with the trio. We already knew how terrific Laurent and Exarchopoulos are in many pictures in France and abroad, but Bresch is a total revelation here. She is poised to become a massive star in France (and perhaps internationally) after this picture, pulling off the classic tropes of the “newbie” in a Danny Ocean-esque gang with serious aplomb but also giving as much depth as possible to her character’s traumatic past, regarding the death of her girlfriend.
I don’t believe I’m exaggerating when I say that Wingwomen is one of the best explorations (perhaps even mediations) on friendship in any motion picture released this year and one of the main reasons why the film works so well. The chemistry between Laurent, Exarchopoulos, and Bresch fires on all cylinders in the sequences that count the most, and we can’t help but ultimately feel invested in their plight as they reach the finish line in their most elaborate heist yet. It’s also one of the best gay movies of the year, with a not-so-subtle subtext representing a friendship between Carole and Alex that goes beyond a traditional “best friends” schtick, whether intentional on Laurent’s part or not. The ending posits this relationship in an immensely emotional light, giving far more weight to their bond than the previous scenes ever did.
The ending also brings one of the biggest plotholes of the movie, which unfortunately gets resolved far too quickly and in a rather unsatisfying way than another – cooler – approach could’ve elevated. Adjani, a staple of French cinema, is also terribly underused here, with a backstory that gets consistently teased between Carole and her godmother but never fully revealed, despite a stern and confident turn from her. But even amidst those slight flaws, the core of Wingwomen, an exploration of identity and friendship, never lets up. Add some incredibly-crafted action sequences to the mix, and you’ve got a winner. Perhaps if Laurent’s next film operates in genre trappings and elevates its ending and supporting characters more, it’ll be an even better film than Wingwomen.
