These are two major filmmakers from what is now agreed to call “the South Global”-in French: neither Europeans nor North Americans. They dominated Sunday, just before the festival entry into its second part.
In short, aside: Until 2017, the Cannes Film Festival began a Wednesday in May and ended on Sunday, according to an almost continuous trajectory. From 2018, he started on Tuesday to end on Saturday, a decision that did not miss good reasons, including leaving Sunday free after the marathon.
This apparently minimal modification has actually changed the experience of the manifestation by those who participate. Unforeseen, it has cut its course in two, there is now a “first week”, the weekend closing the most glamorous phase, that where there is the maximum concentration of Hollywood stars.
From Monday, the “second week”, not less rich in the moviegoer level, is much less in terms of media brightness, many people start to suit their bags, there are fewer people in restaurants, fewer TV teams around the world, etc.
And so this Sunday was also, in official competition, on the day of two major American productions, The Phoenician Scheme de Wes Anderson, a compliant copy of the luxurious childishness of this director since its inception, and Die, My Love by Lynne Ramsay, new complacent plunged into the sick psyche of America, embarrassing uninteresting.
But, therefore, magnificent openings in the second week, a huge filmmaker at work already considerable, not very present in Cannes despite his nourished filmography, the Philippin Lav Diaz, and one of the rare recognized figures of Brazilian cinema, Kleber Mendonça Filho, who was regularly welcomed on the Croisette, where we notably discovered the great Bacurau in 2019.
Whether it is Magellan (presented in the Premier Cannes section) or The secret agent (in competition), each of the two deploys the resources of stylistic bias asserted to evoke a significant historical event of his country.
It will be a thriller on the fringes of the fantastic to Kleber Mendonça evoking the military dictatorship in the late 1970s, a chronicle in apparently hieratic and incandescent vignettes of beauty at LAV Diaz to tell the failed attempt to take possession and conversion to Catholicism of the Philippines Islands by the Portuguese Navigator Fernão de Magalhão, Magellan.
“Magellan”, by Lav Diaz (Cannes Première)
Islands which will soon be called Moluccians by their invaders from the Iberian peninsula, we first see the inhabitants of origin, according to what is more of an imagery of lost paradise than of a precise description of the organization of the sultanats which controlled its power.
But, unusually with this author who has constantly explored the history of his country, especially recent and contemporary, the film is focused on the path of the colonizers, reconstructing the adventures of the long journey of Magellan.
Period film in costumes made up of fixed plans admirably composed, Magellan is very different from most of the twenty-five other films by the filmmaker.
Of a moderate duration (2h36) for a director known for his rivers works, he often evokes more certain films of Manoel de Oliveira, devoted to other colonizations, than sensual and poetic luxuriance, frequently in black and white, of most of the work of the author of Norte, the end of the storyof The woman who left and The devil’s season.
This stylistic renewal does not detract from the intensity of the sequences, where the apparent hieratism of the realization quickly turns out to be a way of welcoming on the contrary a multitude of physical, emotional, political vibrations, in what is both a great adventure film and a meditation which renews, by its absence of agreed lyricism, the very idea of the adventure film.
Magellan’s figure has fed multiple and contradictory imaginations, including readers of Who has toured what? were able to have a puffy and delightful overview. But that is not the issue of the film, despite its title, and despite, made unprecedented at Lav Diaz, the presence of a famous Western actor, Gael García Bernal.
Magellan is not a treaty of historian, it is a mythological tale where the distant islands are comparable to the whale Moby Dick As well as a goal of power and wealth, towards a world to which those who conquer it understand nothing.
Equally obscure are the forms of submission as well as resistance of the inhabitants, resulting from complex, unstable forces, which can have terrifying effects without anyone having been able to control them entirely. Again a theme which is far from being confined to the past.
“The secret agent”, by Kleber Mendonça Filho (in competition)
Forces, and forms of resistance in oppression are also the principle of the fifth film of the Brazilian filmmaker. Alongside a man who hides, finds contacts, conducts investigations while in 1977 the Brazilian military dictatorship was at most violent of his oppression on the country, the film is set up as a puzzle which refers, as much as to the narrative virtuosity of the author, to the uncertainties and the opacity of the situation.
Failmen and misunderstandings, necessary deceptions and deadly manipulations, alliance ties born from the existence of each and each as much as of its choices, are the real material of this film labyrinth.
Without any ambiguity on what it denounces, a regime of terror, the film succeeds in making it a spectacular, moving and uncertain suspense, where the relationship with cinema (a part of the story takes place in a projection cabin) participates in the multiplicity of the narration levels.
And if there is no shortage of action scenes, including an impressive hunt in the city, The secret agent is marked by a sequence of extreme violence where not a drop of blood does not appear, around a very current issue again, the appropriation of university research by private interests and the bags of public services.
Current throughout the film in multiple forms, including humorous or even grand-guignolesque despite the darkness of the context, the figure of the shark finds here its most metaphorical and yet most concrete, much more dangerous incarnation than the special-special-special of the special effet of the special Sea teeth Or the sharks that live near the coasts in northern Brazil.
The hunt for the former leaked professor through the city of Recife, a hometown of the filmmaker and which is much more than the sets of most of his films, The secret agent is also a quest for identity, problematic registration in a long history, which in this case explicit its relationship to current times through the character of the young woman of the 2020s who investigates what happened half a century before.
This circulation of the senses is active enough for the mind to return that the title necessarily designates a person, but also a force (an “agent”) capable of taking many appearances, and many modes of action.
