"It doesn’t matter how we hurt ourselves; if all we needed to do to seal our fates for all eternity was to click our fingers, I’d click my fingers all night, I’d look for your eyes in the mist." These words from Hatik’s song Ma p’tite étoile - which we hear as the closing credits roll on Hubert Charuel’s Meteors [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], a movie presented in the 78th Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard line-up – provide a pretty good summary of the poignant spirit in this stripped-back film, which revolves around a tight friendship in the greyness of a backwater French province that’s so forgotten it’s on the verge of becoming the country’s “dumpster”. It's a region which the director of Bloody Milk [+lee también:
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"I see things I couldn’t see before, it makes you think." For Mika (Paul Kircher) and Dan (Idir Azougli) who are well into their twenties, life is still a game where alcohol- and cannabis-fuelled nights electrified by Dan’s crazy ideas (climb up everything, steal a beauty contest cat worth 2,000 euros, fantasize over a drugs run) help them forget the grip of reality which is tightening around them in the form of a part-time job at Burger King for the more "reasonable" Mika (also a very occasional freelancer for the local paper) and a diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver for the highly likeable and childlike Dan. To make matters worse, off the back of a bizarre escapade, the two friends and flatmates find themselves facing heavy fines and several years in prison. They have six months until the court case to prove themselves and to present clean drugs tests, work contracts and payslips… Will they seize this vital opportunity, get themselves clean and change their lives? To help dig them out of a hole, their entrepreneurial friend Tony (Salif Cissé) hires them as workers on a site run by the National Radioactive Waste Agency. But worried Mika starts asking himself all kinds of questions and their friendship begins to waver…

By anchoring his movie in a crepuscular and fatalistic atmosphere - where continuing to believe in better days to come without chasing after Moby-Dick-style fantasies or blocking everything out and putting off the pain of facing up to reality (on both an individual and ecological level), is an incredibly tall order - Hubert Charuel has embarked on an audacious project (based on a screenplay he wrote with Claude Le Pape), not least on account of how hard it is to transpose feelings of emptiness to the big screen. But his brilliant actors convey the gloomy mood with grace in a film symbolic of a world which is struggling, but where life-saving leaps are still possible.

Meteors was produced by Domino Films in co-production with France 2 Cinéma. Pyramide International are steering international sales.