Hélène Louvart brings remarkable precision to Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, occasionally threading in a touch of dreamlike quality to accompany a story that’s often difficult to hear. Johansson tackles themes still too rare in cinema: old age, loneliness, friendship between 90-year-old women, but also that gray area where lies become acceptable in the shadow of grief.
At 95, Eleanor watches her daily life crumble after losing her best friend. To escape solitude, she leaves Florida and returns alone to New York, a city laden with memories she hasn’t seen in decades. There, between reminiscences, small protective lies, and encounters with a grief support group, she weaves new connections and rekindles forgotten parts of her life. Gradually, Eleanor must confront what she left behind and find an honest way to reinvent herself.
Hélène Louvart’s cinematography, understated and elegant, reveals the characters with restraint. Her visual signature, confident yet never intrusive, places the camera at the level of empathetic emotion without heavy-handedly underlining what the protagonists are experiencing. Through composed and crafted frames, Hélène first highlights the foundational friendship between Eleanor and Bessie, both widows and long-time friends, then the unexpected bond between Eleanor and Nina, a woman in her twenties. The frames that magnify the emotion on these women’s faces played a major role in drawing our first tears of the festival this morning.
The parallel editing, accompanied by subtle luminous transitions, connects these temporalities and allows us to fully immerse ourselves in these pivotal moments. The light evolves subtly between Florida and New York, never falling into the clichés of a bright, colorful seaside opposed to a gray, monotonous city. Instead, Hélène manages to “make New York more personal, a city where its inhabitants can have an intimate, everyday life just like anywhere else.”
This film at times evokes the spirit of a documentary presented last year at Camerimage, Echo of You, as it too seeks to capture the sensitive traces left by those we lose and those we meet.
Elie Leber & Stella Liber
