White as snow, the review: between eroticism and suspense, a modern version of the fairy tale

The review of Snow White, an adaptation of Snow White that updates the story to the present day, between eros, tension and comedy. Tonight on the first tv on Sky.

Following the death of her father, the young and beautiful Claire was left to live with her stepmother Maud, with whom there was never good blood. The two women work together in the family hotel in Toulon, but in recent times Maud’s jealousy of that stepdaughter, whom she sees as her rival, becomes increasingly heated.

As we tell you in the review of White as snow, the straw that breaks the camel’s back is the interest from Maud’s lover towards Claire, secretly snatched during a phone call left on the answering machine. From that moment on, the older woman takes it into her head to eliminate what for her is now more than a simple nuisance, so much so that she hires someone to kill her. Kidnapped and taken to the woods, Claire is saved by the providential intervention of a man who lives on a farm and from that moment she decides to move to that small country community, where she will have the opportunity to meet other strange characters and give them all her love. that it has inside. But when Maud discovers she’s still alive, she sets out to track her down…

Another version of history

The film inaugurates the new thematic cycle of Cielo entitled Her gaze, which every Friday will broadcast films dealing with love in 360 degrees, where sexuality is treated without filters. The first date, introduced like the others by clips with Rocío Muñoz Morales, actress and TV presenter, is with White as snow2019 French film starring Lou de Laage e Isabelle Huppert. We are faced with a modern reinterpretation of the classic fairy tale by snow-whiteturning towards a passionate and uninhibited approach where eros soon becomes the dominant factor of the almost two hours of vision, where all the classic passages of the tale are updated in a modern but in any case surreal perspective, between evil witch of ordinance – the magnificent Huppert – and dwarfs who are here individuals of normal height who revolve around the irrepressible protagonist.

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Start over from scratch

Lou de Laâge brings an irrepressible enthusiasm, grappling with a character who does not judge and does not intend to be judged, the free exaltation of a girl power to the nth degree where a sort of role reversal takes place: in fact it is not the predatory man, but this girl who seduces everyone, with no intention of seriously binding herself to any of her lovers. A deliberately controversial figure, able to underline the liberation from those patriarchal rules but also uncomfortable in her excesses, so much so that above all the management with some of the secondary characters can be forced if not downright paradoxical even if seen in a metaphorical perspective. On the other hand, the best way to approach an operation like this is not to take it too seriously, letting yourself be infected by the lively and frenetic atmosphere of the story.

The dark and the light

Divided into three chapters, White as snow acquires charm especially in the second half, when Maud’s nemesis becomes Claire’s real counterpart: envious and cruel the first, free and full of joie de vivre the second.
Anne Fontaineformer director among others of the biopic Coco avant Chanel – Love before the myth (2009), about the funny Gemma Bovery (2014) and the dramatic Agnus Dei (2016), runs the risk of getting too carried away at times, getting lost in delays so much that a twenty-minute shear would have ensured greater slenderness to the whole. In the same way, the choice of male figures far from the prototype of beautiful and damned risks clashing with the sparkling beauty of the protagonist, making the events unlikely even in their pro-visionary context.