“In Waves”, by Phuong Mai Nguyen (Critics Week)
Intriguing is the highlighting of In Waves by Critics’ Week. Not that animation can’t feature prominently at the Cannes Film Festival. It continues to gain positions in terms of visibility and positions in the industry. Excluding Disney/Pixar and japanimation, flagship products like Flow (2024) reached new heights at the box office. It is logical that this also translates into the Cannes selections.
The adaptation of the eponymous and autobiographical graphic novel (published in 2019) by American surfer and illustrator AJ Dungo, by the director of Vietnamese origin Phuong Mai Nguyen, could therefore logically claim a place. But why in this particular position as the opening film of Critics’ Week?
In Waves tells the moving story of a Californian teenager (AJ), seized simultaneously by an absolute double love, for a young girl (Kristen) and for surfing to which she introduces him, then her fight against cancer. Moving, sympathetic, full of multicultural notes (these Americans are of varied origins and colors), the film is nonetheless subject in a particularly striking way to the limits of its means of expression.
History of bodies, loving and suffering, history of confrontation with the elements (the ocean), In Waves is totally devoid of any materiality, of any physicality, of any concrete sensuality. Suffice to say that what is missing is what is the specific contribution of cinema to all narration, to all representation: a concrete relationship to the world, an incarnation.
This absence is less inevitable than one might think with animated cinema. There are exceptions, Hayao Miyazaki remaining the most obvious example. Here, everything is so smooth, so disembodied that the sentimental journey of AJ, Kristen, their friends and their parents, which had its place in the pages of an album, gains nothing by reaching the big screen in these conditions.
“Bad Star”, by Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier (ACID selection)
It is extraordinarily the opposite with the dazzling and completely unexpected Bad star. Filmed with handheld camera, up close to faces and bodies, the first feature film by Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier records the fields of tension that circulate between Kiki (Noëmie Édé-Decugis), Alex (Hugo Carton) and their 10-year-old daughter, Malone (Anouk Berlier-Cambourieu).
At the grandparents’ house, at the supermarket, at the sports club, at the fried chicken stand, in the scrapyard where Alex works, but above all in this family home in a small poor town in the south of France which at times feels like a dump, multiple and powerful energies circulate, disturbing and overwhelming.
The most obvious is what we call Alex’s hold on Kiki. This domination is not stated, but deployed in its multiple forms of expression, with an impressive sense of gradations, variations, reactions and ruptures.
Capable of reaching intense forms of violence, physical and mental, it is never shown as an isolated phenomenon. Alex, but especially Kiki and Malone, or the many protagonists who revolve around him and them, have an intense, immediate existence, never reduced to a function or a sign.
Each and every one is there with their world, their contradictions, their flaws, their singular beauty, very far from the dominant canons. The voices, the gestures, the shifts in rhythm, the marks on the skin, the clothing language, everything tells and questions, pulsates with more confusion than enunciation.
Domestic violence is at the heart of what is discussed Bad starwithout any complacency. But the way of filming, the choice of performers, the work of image, sound, gestures and rhythms transform this necessary denunciation into a formidable human experience, which we will avoid drowning in prestigious references – from John Cassavetes to Maurice Pialat – to welcome it in its singularity, with admiration and gratitude.
“Butterfly Jam”, by Kantemir Balagov (Filmmakers’ Fortnight)
Just as “physical”, but clearly more manufactured, appears the third film by Russian filmmaker Kantemir Balagov, revealed at Cannes in 2017 by the memorable Tesnota, a cramped life. Now in the United States, the Circassian director is composing what seems to be a variation within his community of a well-known film model, that of the fate of migrants recently settled in America.
Located in Newark, New Jersey, Butterfly Jam first replays what we saw on the big screen with Italians, Irish, Jews from Central Europe, Russians, in fact immigrants from almost everywhere, but white – it is strange in the case of this film to remember that Americans call white people “Caucasians”.
At the center of the story is a teenager, nicknamed Pyteh (Talha Akdogan), gifted for wrestling, surrounded by his father (Barry Keoghan), a weak-willed cook, his pregnant aunt (Riley Keough), a shapely and energetic head, and a group of compatriots quick to say anything, to grab, kiss, fight and more if the tension rises.
If the addition of a black teenage girl, also a wrestler, with whom Pyteh begins a romance, seems singularly tacky, the description of the Circassian microcosm soon appears more on the side of the fable than the chronicle, with exaggerations and strangenesses which will then come to embody two unexpected appearances – but frequently used as plot tricks.
What Kantemir Balagov really says, beyond the narrative tricks, is that migration makes you crazy. That this translates into excessive behavior makes for spectacle, but there is a heartbroken sadness in what works and haunts these men – women fare better. Whether this is due to the archaism of codes and a machismo that is impossible to overcome is the consensual message of the scenario, but not necessarily of Butterfly Jam.
The filmmaker lets a form of tenderness filter through for these incurable misfits of the first generation, which is the best of a film which plays on too many tables at once and somewhat wastes the obvious talent of its director.
