Browse Movies : 2016 : Rating Not Available : Drama : D

At the dawn of the 20th century, a multigenerational family in the Gullah community in the Sea Islands off of South Carolina -- former West African slaves who adopted many of their ancestors' Yoruba traditions -- suffers a generational split. An older group of sisters return after migrating north to New York with intentions of bringing the rest of their family back across the water to the mainland with them. But, tensions arrive when the newly Americanized sisters view their homeland’s way of living as backwards, all while Nana, the family elder who embodies the traditions and folklore of their African roots, is struggling to keep the family together and to pass on the knowledge of their ancestors.

Léa Sedoux follows in the footsteps of Paulette Goddard and Jeanne Moreau as Célestine, a resentful young Parisian chambermaid who finds herself exiled to a position in the provinces where she immediately chafes against the noxious iron rules and pettiness of her high-handed bourgeois mistress (Clotilde Mollet), must rebuff the groping advances of Monsieur (Hervé Pierre), and reckon with her fascination with the earthy, brooding gardener Joseph (Vincent Lindon). Backtracking past the fetishism of Buñuel’s version to Octave Mirbeau’s original 1900 novel, Benoît Jacquot has one eye on contemporary France: the sense of social stiflement, Célestine’s humiliating submission to Madame’s onerous terms of employment, Joseph’s virulent anti-Semitism. But the turn-of-the-century setting saw the rise of Freud ideas about the human unconscious and so Jacquot takes care to look past the characters’ outward behavior and appearance to the repression and compulsions that lie behind.