A film festival is not just films taken one by one after being chosen by selectors. It is also a set (programming), which is available and also produces effects in the particular temporality in which it is possible to discover them.
This generality has found a singularly disturbing, even difficult declination, with the succession this Monday, May 19 of the film of the Nasser brothers, Once Upon a Time in Gaza (Once upon a time in Gaza), in the a certain look section, and that of Julia Ducournau, Alphain competition. What each of them is likely to inspire does not really change, but the rapprochement intensifies their differences, which are both on the relationship with the world and on the relationship to cinema.
“Once Upon a Time in Gaza”, by Arab and Tarzan Nasser (a certain look)
Although it was designed and produced before the trigger of the genocidal war waged by Israel in the native region of the Arab brothers and Tarzan Nasser, the film has been in several echo titles to what has been going on for 591 days.
In short, the last minute addition, he opens with the voice of Donald Trump announcing his monstrous project of “Riviera du Middle East”. He brings to a tragic level of delirium one of the principles carrying fiction that clearly claims the third film of the twins Gazaouis and that his title has.
This principle is that of the report to the romantic, which has become a crazy machine at the service of the oppression of what was already, and for decades, a concentration camp for two million inhabitants, before becoming the field of ruins and corpses by tens of thousands today. Like other films shot before October 2023, Once Upon a Time in Gaza Also de facto has the merit of recalling what the Gaza Strip looked like, one day not so distant.
Fiction as a fuel poisoned with the functioning of the system is everywhere. It is used in the way of telling the story, from the very neo-polar conflict between a trafficker of assurance drugs and a cop (Palestinian also) manipulator who seems to be out of a film by Martin Scorsese or Abel Ferrara. And she is in the shooting of the film in the film, a project designed by Palestinian propaganda to exalt a glorious, even triumphant, completely mythological resistance.
Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay), a student and seller of falafels, finds himself propelled actor, performer of an invincible hero in a very close supervised production by the authorities, having to play scenes more edifying than the other, in a context where nobody distinguishes the fiction from reality. This confusion is reflected in particular by the fact that, for lack of accessories, the clashes are shot with real weapons loaded with real ammunition. With effects ranging from burlesque to drama and especially to the absurd.
This set of devices and strategies, which gives a brief and tense film, paradoxically without making anything forget, is part of the means that have chosen, even in their appearance, the Nasser brothers to make Palestine exist in the world by cinema.
Including with a dimension of black humor and derision in the importation of Hollywood codes in this context, which is a way of not collapsing, even surrounded by real violence, that of bombs, like that of the words to the Donald Trump and Benyamin Netanyahu.
Secondarily, with this film, the Cannes Film Festival which, last year, had banished until the right to mention Palestine in the official framework, completes its inscription in current reality, already mobilized both by the opening speech of Juliette Binoche and by the presentation to ACID, but which has amply exceeded the limits of this single selection, of the film devoted to the Palestinian photojournalist Assassiné Fatima Hassouna. It’s not much, it’s not nothing.
“Alpha”, by Julia Ducournau (in competition)
If the previous film finds a way to invent a possibility by retaining any emphasis and overbidding in the pathos, the dystopian fable of the director of Titanium (Palme d’Or in 2021) does exactly the opposite. The result is all the more strange since it is obvious since everything that makes up Alpha is emotional, staging ideas, parables capable of touching and questioning.
It is out of the question to believe that it is a awkwardness, an uncontrolled excess of cries, dramas, time swings, battered body, crying, violence, pompous music, disatuated colors, themes, allusions to various recent events …
This is an assertive and claimed choice, plan after plan, including in the outrageous game of main performers (Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim, Mélissa Boros), which we capture how much he would be excellent if they were not constantly asked to accomplish extreme performance.
At the credit of the film, we will still pay the great idea of translating the assumed pandemic circulating into the city in the form of a progressive transformation of the bodies into veined white stone, plastic objects as beautiful as they are afraid.
The pandemic context and the requisitioned hospitals crisis when the dramaturgy needs it mingle with a stack of themes around family ties, drugs, the right to die, registration in collective stories, denial of reality in the face of trauma … with even a small layer of environmental crisis figured by the beautiful effects of sandstorm that open and close the film.
The repeated overdoses of the junkie interpreted by Tahar Rahim, as excessively lean as Vincent Lindon was excessively large in Titaniumbecome the metaphor of overdoses of effects of all kinds that the film accumulates.
Consequently, the fate of the teenager Alpha and her mother appear less as the result of a succession of acts, of choice, contradictions from inside the story, than as a distraught quest for the filmmaker.
This is part of a tradition, that of convinced films that to take the measure of the darkness of the world, and especially to reach its spectators, it is necessary to shake them like plum. We are not forced to love this, nor to be convinced that beyond the concussion activates anything.
