All of a sudden, three major films appeared on the Croisette. Two are signed by “big names”, Bruno Dumont and Pedro Almodóvar, two are in official competition, Our salvation
And Autofiction. These two also find themselves, in varying proportions, contrasting with another film in the official selection. The third is without equal or comparison and perhaps the most admirable achievement of this entire edition of the Cannes Film Festival.
“The Red Rocks”, by Bruno Dumont (Quinzaine des filmmakers)
Almost entirely filmed in a district of the Var coast (Anthéor, in the commune of Saint-Raphaël), The Red Rocks is a huge film of love and adventure, full of sound and fury, passion and exploits, in which all the characters are 5 year old children.
In the past, we have already seen fiction films in which children play adult roles. We have seen, often for the worse and sometimes for the better (Ponetteby Jacques Doillon, 1996), children – even really young ones – play their own role in what was nevertheless a fiction. But we have never seen very young kids launched like this, with the bodies and behaviors of their age, on such an odyssey.
Three of Bruno Dumont’s recent films –Little Quinquin (2014), Jeannette, the childhood of Joan of Arc (2017) and Jane (2019) – had already shown, in different registers each time, what riches of emotion and intelligence the northern filmmaker could activate with very young performers; he who once said to explain his approach as a director that“there (was) disproportion”.
But, while the brigandage operations of Géo, Manon and Rouben take place, the romance between Géo and Ève, the confrontation with B and Do, it is a tremendous blossoming of emotions, of thoughts, of abilities to play with codes which occurs. For the characters, as for the spectators (including adults).
Courage, cunning, tenderness and humor become active powers, with an unprecedented reality that only cinema can capture. There needs to be a sense of time and light, of reality and artifice, bodies and faces often very close. Children never appear instrumentalized or subjected to a discourse on childhood.
At the top of the rocky massif overlooking the waves, on either side of the gate of a large villa, pursued by the police, these full human beings live and act, feel and express. Without being absent, words are a minimal resource here, especially for this hero named Géo, impressive like John Wayne in John Ford or like Jean Gabin in Jean Renoir. The Red Rocks is a completely crazy, completely simple film, a pinnacle of cinema (its theatrical release is scheduled for September 23, 2026).
“Autofiction”, by Pedro Almodóvar (in competition)
Released in theaters this Wednesday, May 20, Pedro Almodóvar’s twenty-fourth feature film is perhaps his best film in a long time, driven by a paradoxical ambition, including in its apparent modesty.
If there was a Palme d’Or for best credits, it would definitely go to this film. This is in no way trivial, it shows the precision and taste for detail, the inventiveness of forms that the Spanish filmmaker tirelessly deploys. In Autofictionthere is a coherent stylistic universe, no doubt, but also a creativity attentive to what is suggested, implicitly associated with the choice of each accessory, each color, each architectural element.
It’s joyful, it’s seductive, as a twisted story begins which, “on paper” as they say, we’re not sure would be very interesting. “On paper”, that is to say in the scenario, which is precisely written on the screen, with a word processor with colorful letters used by a director, Raúl, who is obviously a double of Pedro Almodóvar – and takes it for his rank.
There is a story in 2004 that Raúl writes in 2024. There are characters, especially female, in both eras, who echo each other. They are played by the same actors and actresses. The longer things go, the less certain we are of who is with whom, console who, to what extent the mourning of a mother here is the transposition of the loss of a child there.
We move, we sing, including two moving songs by Chavela Vargas. We argue seriously, we fall into each other’s arms with affections of which it will remain to be calculated whether they are played – and for which spectators – or sincere, or both, or neither.
And it is a whirlwind, very embodied, thanks in particular to the actresses Bárbara Lennie, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Victoria Luengo and Milena Smit, each of a unique beauty and presence. Thanks also to the search for formal elements, this hurricane gradually reveals a proposition that is both very precise and very sincere, very crazy and very modest, of what it is to be a filmmaker, to make a film. To be Pedro Almodóvar.
An appearance impossible to define, to stabilize, fortunately and which nevertheless resonates at the same time the joyful richness, the laborious difficulty and the melancholy of what resides in an immense 76-year-old artist. Because that’s also what it’s about.
It turns out that Pedro Almodóvar’s film shares with that of another Spanish director, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, a presence in official competition with a film dedicated to the making of a film. The loved one (The querido) aroused a much more massive response on the Croisette than that of Almodóvar, by telling the way in which a great author imbued with his genius (Javier Bardem) mistreats his team and especially his daughter (Victoria Luengo), who aspires to a career as an actress.
Multiplying clichés, the film benefits from the presence of Spanish star Javier Bardem to give a paradoxically dominant presence to the one whose domination it is nevertheless a question of denouncing. Since everyone agrees on the message (criticizing the author-male pairing), no one will ask much else from the film. That’s good, it has little to offer otherwise.
“Our salvation”, by Emmanuel Marre (in competition)
He has a funny hat, Henri Marre. This is not at all important in the history of the film, even less in view of the great history, as it played out in Vichy after the French defeat of 1940. And yet…
During a very worldly and very official cocktail of Pétainist dignitaries, Henri Marre, admirably played by Swann Arlaud, displayed such enthusiasm for Marshal Pétain that a politician told him that doing too much could suggest that he was playing double-deal and was an enemy, and that he should measure the signs of his adherence to the ideology of the national revolution (1940-1944). He could also advise him to change his hat.
These are minimal accessories and incidents, which contribute to the finesse of the evocation of an official of the Vichy regime and through him the mechanisms of submission, of more or less deliberate blindness, of ambition which make a fascist regime work. And that its functioning is not the sole responsibility of its leaders, those whom history, in the best case scenario, will condemn, but also of countless individuals who will have done this and not that, but still made the machine work…
Rigorous and free, the French filmmaker Emmanuel Marre takes care of the period details and throws in English rock or the pop-rock hit “Live Is Life” on the soundtrack, an amused but serious way of saying that everything that is shown there does not only concern a single time and a single place. Into this abysmal evocation of the “great story”, we find the unique relationships of the couple formed, at a distance at first (she remained in Paris, she will join him in Limoges), Henri Marre and his wife Paulette.
The correspondence between the man who not for nothing bears the same surname as the director and Paulette Marre (Sandrine Blancke, exceptional) brings out a critical impertinence from this disappointed and lucid woman, in sharp contrast with the stiff and conservative society described by the film; while the zealous civil servant, at the beginning carrying a managerial discourse more Macronist than Pétainist, drifts towards the organization of convoys to Auschwitz.
Balanced on historical reconstruction as an echo chamber for situations belonging to other times, especially ours, Our salvation appears de facto as a response to the very questionable and contested Rays and shadowsby Xavier Giannoli. But it is also a healthy counter-proposal to the detestable Millby László Nemes, presented shortly before in competition. The evocation of the leader of the resistance, his arrest and above all, this is the essence of the film, his martyrdom in the hands of Klaus Barbie, combines “torture porn”
and historical tinkering that would be laughably stupid in other circumstances.
But facing a Gilles Lellouche who plays less the real Jean Moulin than he paraphrases the character of Philippe Gerbier played by Lino Ventura in Army of Shadowsby Jean-Pierre Melville (1969), it is the character of Klaus Barbie played by Lars Eidinger who is the real driving force of the film.
The taste for using evil incarnate, for spectacular purposes and playing on pseudo-psychological springs, seems to be in vogue at the moment. He was already at the center of the equally disgusting Nurembergby James Vanderbilt (released in January), this time with Hermann Göring as a fascinating figure in his unfathomable darkness. We learn nothing useful or relevant, either about the personalities in question or the system they served, but they are very effective ways of playing with unhealthy impulses – another kind of pornography.
The only true hero of Millit is László Nemes himself who portrays himself as a so-called virtuoso director, in fact a dishonest tinkerer of themes and events that call for a completely different distance. Including under the auspices of fiction, like Our salvationafter so many other great films about this era, demonstrates this admirably.
