Did you know? At the Cannes Film Festival, there are lots of films to see. This year, 110 unpublished feature films, not to mention other formats. Very beautiful, very ugly, long -awaited, some signed by great authors, or interpreted by large stars, dealing with major subjects, etc.
And then it happens, not often, that a perfectly singular object arises in the middle of this profusion, of which we know nothing before, and even which we are still not sure to know what we are dealing with when the projection started.
Who is this Pedro Pinho? He doesn’t do so unknown. We should at least remember that his preceding film, The factory of nothinghad been shown in 2017 to the fortnight of filmmakers.
But we continue to know little more than on this casual olibrius who goes in socks and hands in his pockets in the middle of the desert after having met a customs officer who demanded a book to read for any prebend.
The olibrius is called Sergio. He landed in an African capital. It is unknown first where, but people speak, among others, Portuguese. He is sent by an NGO to make a report that seems likely to disturb a lot of people. He will meet men, women, less precisely defined, African, Brazilian, European, in town and in the countryside.
We’re going to move, laugh, dance, kiss furiously, risk your skin, fight, flee, lie. Understand and not understand. The country is Guinea Bissau, its violent colonial past, its struggle for heroic and tragic independence, its misery and its vitality, the incandescent and opaque fusion of a multitude of inheritances.
As not very assignable to an immediate meaning as its title, the film follows Sergio, but also a band of trans and quaers of all colors, an adventurer with faces decorated with jewelry and lightning pellet. You have to go see the rice plantations, in danger of drought or submersion, and a site from the end of the world led by ex-colons, or their descendants, and where proto-slaves are necessarily vintage, even if completely African.
Africans, what is it? The film does not know, but it multiplies, laughing, crying, by being fashing, shuddering with desire, the ways of asking the question, on the edge of sensuality, at the corner of avenue Fanon and avenue Guevara. With politics, economics, sex, fear, exoticism and hatred of exoticism, you have to make cinema. So the film does it. And it’s staggering.
Here it is, it lasts three and a half hours, which is downright unreasonable in a large festival where (almost) everyone has something to do than to meet an almost unknown director.
And each plan is a wonder, their arrangement, the jumps in time and in the story are like dance steps to better capture secret signs, unknown scent. There are, of course, a hundred other reasons for being in Cannes. But would it only be the possibility of discovering Laughter and knife That it would be worth the trip, and the whole barnum of the Croisette.
But also … Richard Linklater, Christian Petzold and Hafsia Herzi
Enthusiastic about the film by Pedro Pinho does not prevent from enjoying other proposals gleaned from the festival.
To start, therefore, with the delightful New wave by Richard Linklater, in official competition. Save time: if you don’t like Godard, if you don’t like the new wave, if you refuse the evidence that HAS breath
is both one of the most beautiful films ever made and one of the most important films in the history of cinema, first, go and secondly, do not go to this film.
Meticulously reconstituting, that is to say also legendary, the conditions and adventures of filming of the first feature film of the critic of the cinema notebooks, New wave Figure with actors who look enough at the multiple protagonists of this story to imitate their presence, without it being possible to take them for the real ones – and especially not looking for this illusion.
Likewise, the film has the happy approach to make a lot of fun with its main character, its pontifying tone, its abuse of quotes, its uncertainties raised to the rank of revolutionary theory.
It is to better love and Jean-Luc Godard and what he did-that they did, him but also Belmondo and Jean Seberg, the head operator Raoul Coutard and the producer Georges de Beauregard, Pierre Rissient and Jean-Pierre Melville, Truffaut, Rivette and Chabrol in accomplices of the beginnings of their critical colleague becoming immense filmmaker, back and mad.
In black and white which never imitates the plans ofHAS breathirreverent humor and historical precision nourish the evocation of a turning point in the history of global culture (but yes but yes) by avoiding any pump and all emphasis about the one who was the incarnation. And it’s extraordinarily joyful.
Another thing with Mirrors n ° 3the new film by Christian Petzold, presented by the fortnight of filmmakers. Nineteenth feature film by this experienced director, he continues rigorously in the vein of the two previous very nice successes of the German director, Ondine
And The red sky.
The scenarios are nothing in common – here what is played out between a student Berlin in music, victim of a road accident, and the family in the countryside which they were welcomed without them and they know each other before. It is the finesse and precision of emotions, the vibration of plans and beings that are in unison.
Modest fable on hospitality and ways that different people may need each other, even without knowing the motivations of each and everyone, Mirrors n ° 3as delicate and rich in echo as the piece of Ravel from which he borrows his title, is embodied with a grace on a flower of skin, in particular by the two actresses who work for so long with Petzold, Paula Beer and Barbara Auer.
As for the third film as director of Hafsia Herzi, The little last (Official competition), he touches by a kind of frontal component in the way of telling the journey of his heroine, a young Arab and Muslim woman living in the Paris region, discovering and exploring her lesbianism.
It is beautiful that the film is neither a file or a pamphlet, which he accompanies without discussing, with a somewhat worried affection, this character at the same time full of energy, and on the occasion of rage as much as passion, and yet uncertain of himself.
Fatima (Nadia Melliti, impressive presence that is both fragile and vigorous) will make a way, hers, in part suffered, as a party chosen, partly granted to the world in which she lives and partly out of rupture.
She is neither right nor wrong, she has an existence to invent. When she juggles alone with a football ball at the end, nobody, and Hafsia Herzi no more than another, knows if she did well or not, and what will result. But it existed, oh yes! And always has life in front of her.
