Festivals CANNES
«Le Fils de Saul», «Ni le ciel, ni la terre»:
the shield of Athena
| What are the key points of the offer that has been particularly rich this week-end on the Croisette? If we ask this question in terms of origin, Europe prevails against the United States, the latter not only being under-represented numerically this year, but also with small films. And if we are wondering from the perspective of generations, young directors easily prevail over experienced practitioners. Yet, some nuancing is needed.
Films in comettiton, such as The Sea of Trees by Gus van Sant ( a mystial and orthodox parable set between the US suburbs and Japanese forests, surprisingly heavy from such an author) and Todd Haynes (Carol, a love story between women in the US of the 50s, stiff and predictable), as well as the new Woody Allen out of competition (L'Homme Irrationnel, a return too laborious to a moral story that has already been brilliantly explored by the author of Crimes and Misdemeanors) are among the disappointments. But, we should also add a young European director, Greek Yorgos Lanthimos, whose fantastic tale Lobster (Competition), insisting on cruelty and black humor, quickly proves to be a great vanity. By contrast, praises should be sung to a filmmaker, no longer easily recognisable, Nanni Moretti. On the canvas that could have been simplistic, opposing the reality of a dramatic situation – the imminent death of mother – to the artifice of the universe where the main character evolves, that of film art, Ma Mère (Competition) reveals sequence after sequence an exceptional finesse and emotion. Let's return to the intelligence of the construction, based on this division, as operated by Moretti. |
In fact, he entrusts a function of making films to Margherita Buy (absolutely magnificent), who plays the director while he himself plays a brother in perfect counterpoint, a very subtle diversion. We should especially return to the way in which the film goes beyond the binary opposition on the basis of which it seemed to be built, only to open vertiginously towards what carries us and restricts us, and which is just as real and imaginary, when faced with death and with fiction.
But two films that are perhaps the most important, in any case, the most promising ones of these last two days, are the first films, Le Fils de Saul by Hungarian Laszlo Nemes (Competition) and Ni le ciel ni la terre by French Clément Cogitore (Critics' Week). Although extremely different, the trait they share is their invention, with astonishing freedom, facing tragic situations recorded in the contemporary history, of cinema's answers - cinema as a vehicle of dealing with horror, neither to hide it nor to sugar-coat it, but to continue to exist without amnesia, in the world of "this". In his masterwork Théorie du film. La Rédemption de la réalité matérielle, Siegfried Kracauer compared the cinema to the Theseus's shield, the mirror offered by Athena, which allowed him to look indirectly at Gorgone without being paralysed by her. That is what these two beautiful films do, literally with Nemes, and more indirectly with Cogitoire Jean Michel Frodon |
