Trailer for The Last Hammer Blow (Le dernier coup de marteau).
The eagerly-awaited second film from writer/director Alix Delaporte (Angelé & Tony) is a profoundly affecting drama about a young boy determined change to course of his future.
Soccer mad fourteen-year-old Victor (extraordinary newcomer Romain Paul) lives in a community of trailers and huts on the seaside with his single mother Nadia (Clotilde Hesme). One day after practice Nadia announces she’d like him to go live with her parents. Victor decides instead to seek out his long-absent father, the famous conductor Samuel Rovinski (Grégory Gadebois) who has recently arrived to rehearse Mahler’s Sixth Symphony with the local orchestra. Samuel is less than welcoming, but the initial hostility soon turns to an awkward kind of tenderness, and – possibly – love.
Intimate and emotionally satisfying, Delaporte’s film is a poetic, neo-realist jewel. Hesme and Gadebois deliver wonderful, nuanced performances, but it’s Romain Paul who, appearing in almost every frame, completely steals the show. His mesmerising breakout performance was the deserving winner of the Venice Film Festival Marcello Mastroianni prize for Best Young Actor.