CANAL+ – THURSDAY MAY 25 – 9 PM – SERIES
It’s a good example of the strange power a series can wield: reuniting with the Yellowjackets women’s soccer team after the offseason., more famous in the annals for the scent of cannibalism that surrounds him than for his sporting results, one feels the comfort that familiarity provides. While, frankly, we shouldn’t feel at home in the company of a gang of teenage girls stranded in a remote cabin in the Far North, between Canada and Alaska, starved to the point of madness. Nor should we associate with the group of nifty psychotic girlfriends that the survivors formed a quarter of a century later.
Shauna’s (Melanie Lynskey) reaction to the robbery of the family car, for example. While her husband, poor Jeff – if he existed, we would only call him that, “poor Jeff”, Warren Kole incarnates him with abnegation –, remains speechless, Shauna seizes the weapon of the ‘aggressor. Or the way in which Misty (Christina Ricci) thinks she is leading an amateur detective (Elijah Wood, very distressing) who has joined her by the nose.
More generally, we remain amazed by the virtuosity of the cast. It is she who makes the singularity of the series. Within the couples formed by the young actresses who play the starving and hungry survivors and their elders who play the women they have become have forged mysterious bonds that carry conviction, starting with the Shauna played by Sophie Nélisse and Melanie Lynskey and Misty by Samantha Hanratty and Christina Ricci. In this second season are added the duos of the characters of Van (Liv Hewson and Lauren Ambrose), the love of youth of Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Tawny Cypress), and Lottie (Courtney Eaton and Simone Kessell), the young schizophrenic who has become the mistress of shipwrecked people’s thinking.
We must of course maintain a balance between this familiarity and the need to move the story forward, to connect wire by wire the two periods over which it unfolds: the months following the air disaster and the present which, in this second season , sees the survivors pass, after decades of resistance and repression, under the influence of the power which governed them this winter, in the forest.
transgressive feast
It is no longer really a question of staging the resilience (or lack thereof) of a group of young girls. Perhaps as a result of their reunion, the Yellowjackets find themselves on the other side of the looking glass. Whether they self-destruct like Natalie (Sophie Thatcher and Juliette Lewis), whether they dispose of the lives of others with a certain casualness – Shauna and Misty – or whether they no longer distinguish reality from their visions – Taissa and Lottie –, the team of 2023 has little chance of finding a place in the society of the living.