“A few days in Nagi”, by Kōji Fukada (in competition)
It is only very indirectly that the question of the author seems to be addressed by the fourteenth feature film by Japanese filmmaker Kōji Fukada. The two main characters are in fact one a sculptor and designer, the other an architect; each confronted with what interferes with her practice and what really comes from her.
But this is not the center of what the director ofGoodbye summer (2013), from Sayonara (2015) and The Nurse (2019). Besides, the film doesn’t really have a center. The singular richness of its proposal is partly due to the way in which it is composed of small blocks of space-time, each of which could almost be a very short film.
A young woman from the city, Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi), comes to the village where she has established a very close old friend, Yoriko (Takako Matsu). Around them gravitate a young widower and two high school students united by a bond that continues to strengthen.
It will be about taking portraits and planting vegetables, telling truths that are not necessarily happy to hear and taking note of feelings hidden from others and from oneself. It will be about images of oneself beyond years or death. It will be everyday and mysterious, very simple at times and dizzying in the succession of a walk in the forest and a confession in the violence of a hurricane, in search of roaming cows or in the silence of poses in the sculpture workshop.
Very smart who will say what “tells” A few days in Nagibut there is activated a vast assembly of emotions, relationships, vibrations linked to memories, desires, the weight of social rules and the courage of each day. The countless ways of activating these tones without making a speech, much less a proclamation, have been the very characteristic of Kōji Fukada’s cinema for almost twenty years.
In this, his new film is indeed the affirmation of what characterizes a cinema author, in the inventive continuity of a way of looking at and sharing the world thanks to the camera, to sounds, to editing. Kōji Fukada’s work has experienced ups and downs in the accomplishment of his activity as a filmmaker. She remained totally coherent, while finding new stories and new ways of telling them. A few days in Nagi constitutes an undeniable accomplishment.
“Fatherland”, by Paweł Pawlikowski (in competition)
This time, the author is the subject of the film. The subject – and the question – of the seventh film by Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski. We should even write “the Author”, the character of Thomas Mann (1875-1955) embodying a capital version of the great German national writer, reinforced by a Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.
Exiled since Adolf Hitler came to power, notably in California since the end of the 1930s, he returned to Germany in 1949, accompanied by his daughter Erika, to receive a double Goethe Prize, in Frankfurt where the author of Faust and in Weimar where he lived and died. That is to say, while the Cold War is in full rise of tension, in the West and in the East.
The 1/33 black and white image amplifies the documentary aspect of this reconstruction impeccably interpreted by Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller, while the questions of political allegiance, the choice between work and personal life and the weight of external comments and perceptions crystallize around the return of the great man.
The success of the film by the director of Cold War (2018) is keen in its way of staging all the questions raised by Thomas Mann’s journey to what is his native country, but not necessarily his heimat (his “homeland”). The title, in English and not in German, emphasizes the relationship with the father, which controls the tensions between the author of The Magic Mountain (1924) and his daughter Erika, but also between him and his son, the writer Klaus Mann.
Meticulous reconstruction without sleeve effects, Fatherland is a chronicle and a mediation on the possible place of authors in the course of history. It gives access to various ways of considering this place, its possible effectiveness or its vanity, questions addressed to the characters and to the spectators.
For the characters, the questions are intensified in the very charged context of symmetrical exploitation by the Americans and the Soviets, of the non-denazification of West Germany, of the Stalinist terror in force in the East. But to the spectators, they are offered gently, leaving the ways of responding to them wide open. The role and importance of culture in the city? This is certainly not ancient history.
“Thank you for coming”, by Alain Cavalier (Quinzaine des filmmakers)
The author is this time both in front of and behind the camera. In his twenty-fourth feature film, French director Alain Cavalier returns to the technique he developed from The Meeting (released in 1996), being alone in recording the images and speaking on the soundtrack at the same time as he films.
If he is also “in front of the camera” this time, it is not so much that he is filming himself, but that this film is dedicated to him. Or rather devoted to his activity as a filmmaker since Pater (2011), where he was both director and actor, sharing the handling of his camera with his partner Vincent Lindon.
Alain Cavalier is 94 years old. Here he signs what appears to be his last film. Retracing his own journey as a filmmaker and some of the multiple encounters that are part of it – many already shown in previous films, others not – he easily identifies both the proliferation of signs of vitality, joy, childhood at all ages and the omnipresence of death.
It is there, the death of humans, of animals, of plants, the death inscribed on the living insofar as it is alive. Nothing less funereal than this often amused, often admiring, sometimes enthusiastic attention to the inventiveness of the forms and effects under this unstoppable influence, without watering down anything of the reality and absolute character of death, which he has also already filmed head-on.
Thanks for comingwhose title is addressed to each spectator who has – once or another, or often – chosen to cross the very personal path of the one who has self-designated as “the filmer” is a lucid and happy goodbye to what has happened.
Able to arouse multiple echoes in those who are at all unfamiliar with the universe of this author who films constantly, without arrogance or narcissism, but in full awareness that it is only from one’s own place that one can watch and listen to others, one dreams that the film will also be discovered by those who have never seen an image by Alain Cavalier.
In the light and unfathomable mystery of what is active between humans whose paths cross, it would again and forever be the occasion of what he so precisely named as hope and accomplishment, an encounter.
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” by Jane Schoenbrun (Un Certain Regard)
Presented at the opening of the Un Certain Regard section, the new feature film by Jane Schoenbrun, a young American (non-binary) filmmaker, is dedicated… to the first film by a young American director (who wears the same glasses).
The one present in the film, a nerd fascinated by slashers from the 1990s, undertakes to film the reboot of a horror franchise in which the young occupants of a holiday camp are massacred by a hermaphrodite killer armed with a spear, who emerges from the bottom of a lake when he smells fresh flesh.
Jane Schoenbrun, who challenges gender assignment, plays with humor and virtuosity on the stupidity of horror films for teenagers, the phenomena of addiction that they arouse, their explicit relationship with the developing sexuality of the vast majority of its spectators.
While her heroine finds, on the location of the filming of the girls of yesteryear, the aged actress who was the deflowered and murdered teenager of the first episode, Jane Schoenbrun circulates between kitsch irony, submission displayed to these fascinations formatted by the capitalist industry that we call pop culture and second or even third degree in the mobilization of queer references, “meta” criticism and even meta-meta in an endless abyss.
The mirror effect between the author and the character, as well as the different registers of anguish, burlesque, melancholy and theory that the film agency allows to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma to walk on a fairly tight and unstable wire.
It circulates between “unfooled” satisfaction of the infantile impulses that the Z series activates in the wake of the franchise Scream,
parable on the mystery of the female orgasm and a true update of the way in which the bloody horror film, a prolific and ultra profitable genre, made pornography possible as a business in a country – the United States – and in a puritan world.
