InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023
on his reliance on improvisation. Following the centerpiece
conversation between Samet and Nuray, they make to go to bed
together, but before they do so we watch as Celiloğlu opens a
door of Nuray’s apartment, the camera following him into the
soundstage where the film is being shot. In a different film, this
rupture would reverberate both forwards and backwards into the
runtime, recontextualizing what we’ve seen, and shifting how we
take what we will subsequently see. Here, though, things simply
resume as before, as if no such break took place. Like most
every scene in About Dry Grasses, the sequence is compelling,
even thrilling in isolation. It’s the bigger picture that disappoints.
— LAWRENCE GARCIA
IT’S RAINING IN THE HOUSE
Paloma Sermon-Daï’
Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï’s 2020 documentary film
Petit Samedi profiled her own family, paying particular attention
to her brother and his drug addiction. Her debut narrative
feature, It’s Raining in the House, shifts focus, instead
considering the way that children are forced to cope with a
mother (Louise Manteau) who’s absent and unreliable for reasons
that are never clearly articulated. Seventeen-year-old Purdey
(Purdey Bloquiau) and her 15-year-old brother Mak (Makenzy
Lombet) have typical sibling conflicts, such as Mak not keeping
the house tidy or Purdey not answering Mak’s calls. But there is a
firm bond between them, because essentially, they’re all each
other has.
Whether speaking with a real estate agent or a prospective
employer, Purdey must continually emphasize that she will be
eighteen “in just a few days,” because it’s up to her to see her
family through until their mother deigns to return from wherever
she may be. Purdey, and to a lesser extent Mak, being thrown
headlong into an uncertain adulthood is the primary theme of It’s
Raining in the House, which takes its title from a broken skylight
above Purdey’s room, an otherwise major problem (in most lives)
here depicted as just another lingering crisis. To its credit, the
film mostly deemphasizes the various troubles the kids face,
since they are fairly ordinary for this poor family, even in the
best of times.
In fact, Sermon-Daï gives greater significance to the
interpersonal and psychological problems the siblings are
grappling with even as they struggle to survive. Purdey must
take a job as a hotel cleaner, putting her ambitions on hold. She
wants to study nursing, and her judgmental, upper-middle-class
“boyfriend” (Amine Hamidou) — who already keeps their
relationship a secret — tells her she will amount to nothing and
is not good enough for him. Mak, meanwhile, has just failed out
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