Since the opening of the festival, mainly devoted to horrors, disasters and dramas of the contemporary world, the interaction of the films of this edition with the news has not stopped being mentioned.
But films, including fiction, also interact with reality in many other ways. This is the case of two of the titles in competition, which mobilize the experience of recent eras that we already tend if not to forget, at least to repress in a bygone past, when what they mention greatly influence our present.
The time gap between the facts mentioned and the moment to project stories rebuilt by fiction for the big screen, encourages – or should encourage – to try to better understand what is happening at the moment, or even what is likely to happen soon.
Dominik Moll’s “File 137”
The effect of this time difference is obvious from the first minutes, montages of photos taken on the scene. What? Did we experience this? With us? Less than ten years ago?
“That” is the movement of “yellow vests”, and in particular the riots on the Champs Élysées and surroundings in December 2018. Since then, the covid, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the pension reform, a dissolution, Betharram and the election of Donald Trump contributed to relegate to a “before” which already fade, all of the extraordinary events Different forms everywhere in France but among others in the capital.
Documentaries or fictions, there is a substantial filmography devoted to “yellow vests”-this site lists twenty-three, all documentaries, and it is not exhaustive. But a part of the effect produced by Dominik Moll’s film is due to distance in time and especially in the collective memory, and to the force which it prints to what it is necessary to call a return of the repressed.
The other major spring, and infrequent in this kind of politico-polician film, is due to the way in which the investigating inspection of the National Police (IGPN) interpreted by Léa Drucker is told in this “Fiction inspired by real facts”,, As a box warns at the start.
Even if it feeds on many other more classic springs, political comments, psychological relationships, emotional tensions, dramatic twists and turns, the investigation into the conditions in which a young demonstrator was seriously injured by a flashball shot impresses and fascinated by the details of the procedures and the technical means mobilized.
The multiplicity and heterogeneity of the sources, the ways of power or not to use it and link them, the levels of interference of heterogeneous forces, not falling under the same domain and yet entering in resonance or conflict, is the most effective fuel for the trajectory of the film.
And it is to have given access to it which allows, at the end, what the investigator says to his superior, explicitly unfolding the springs which are not only those of the story, or of a specific event, but which are in the very principle of what makes society, or should do it, and succeeds less and less.
The film of the author of The night of 12 is carried in particular by Léa Drucker impressive, for the second time at the top of the bill an important film of this edition of the festival after Adam’s interest.
She embodies a person less, or even a character (fiction) than an idea – the truth, justice – and it is indeed necessary all the strength of the actress so that it does not seem too abstract. In this, even more than as a reconstruction of the famous “real facts”, File 137 Both described and questions a state of things which is quite contemporary.
Ari Aster’s “Eddington”
This time it is no longer the “yellow vests” earthquake on a French scale, but the Maelstrom Cavid on the scale of deep America whose fourth film of the author of Midsommar
Ranies memory, in a large, dumpy and hyper violent guignol mode.
In a village in the new Mexico, where the mayor’s election or re -election must soon take place, the port of the mask imposed by the authorities but refused by the sheriff serves as a first detonator for a succession of clashes which will go by rant to the slap, and a shot to a massacre with heavy machine gun.
By the way are summoned the conspiracy delusions, linked or not to the pandemic with a passion for pedophilia and for mysticism, the Black Lives Matter movement, the excitement of social networks, the delirious use of firearms, the invasion manipulated by local interests of the predatory data centers, the conflict with the Amerindian communities, the bottomless abyss Groups and under groups, including against themselves …
Made with the resources of the contemporary western and the hallucinated thriller, Ari Aster’s film makes the Covid crisis a sort of turning towards the generalized disaster, which does not lack humor or energy. But it is inexpensive because that at that time Donald Trump had already been elected by a majority of Americans. Or to put it in VO, that we had not waited for the virus for deep America to be completely fucked-up.
This is also what indirect and formally more complex, indirectly, The chronology of water, The first feature film as director of Kristen Stewart, presented to a certain look.
Unstructured biopic of the writer Lidia Yuknavitch, she describes, beyond the violence suffered at home and then excess to the university of the young woman, a state of brutality and collapse of human relationships which, for this film, concerns the whole last half century.
But even more than this depth of historical field much larger than what it seems to evoke, Ari Aster’s film suffers from what we could call the bidding of the present.
The pandemonium it stages today appears less spectacular and less delusional, Trump II regnans. Designed and made essentially under Joe Biden, Eddington Tells as we could project it then, what a nightmare a continuation of what had manifested itself more delusional and destructive at the time of the Covid could generate. Since then, it has still occurred.
