Focus invité

AMERICAN BEAUTY

Sam Mendes

United States

1999, 122'

Genre

DRAMA

Recommended Age

16 years

VO. English

With

Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Kevin Spacey

DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES X BLUE VELVET

A crisis-stricken father's obsession with his teenage daughter's friend shatters his life. A relentless satire of the American dream, driven by a joyfully subversive and caustic screenplay by Alan Ball.

Lester Burnham, a forty-something man, seems to have everything he needs to be happy: an immaculate house, a brilliant career, an exemplary family. But behind this perfect facade of the “American way of life,” everything is falling apart: fired from his job, disillusioned, obsessed with a friend of his teenage daughter, he plunges into a devastating existential crisis. Driven by Alan Ball's brilliant screenplay at the height of his art, American Beauty is a scathing satire of the American dream, revealing the flaws of a society obsessed with appearances and success, in which the beauty of roses hides nothing but deadly thorns. For his first film, Sam Mendes deploys a chillingly elegant mise-en-scène that brings to life the poetic yet cynical tone of Ball's screenplay. A lucid and stylized look at the pretense of an America in search of perfection, the film won five Oscars.

Clémentine Mascotto

Direction

Sam Mendes

Screenplay

Alan Ball

Image

Conrad L. Hall

Editing

Tariq Anwar, Christopher Greenbury

Art Director

David Lazan

Music

Thomas Newman