“At the Chandelle glow” by André Gil Mata
Gently, the camera moved from the clock dial at the top of the bell tower, the wall, the rock, the garden, the flower bed, the dog in front of its niche, the house. It is a small simple ritual which will be repeated four times, four hours of the day different, from dawn after dark, four different seasons.
It is so simple, we could say naive and yet … so many details make sense, in these journeys that chant this film inhabited by a relationship with time and places that this visual chorus and its variations prove to be a movie gesture of an astonishing power.
Power? We hesitate to use this word when everything apparently is in the register of delicacy and modesty. Or it would be necessary to speak, like physicists, weak strengths, of apparently minimal resources and which are so rich in suggestions, emotions, beauty.
The new film by André Gil Mata, a Portuguese filmmaker, each realization of which is a singular discovery, is a fresco on the scale of an entire life where dramas, impulses, anxieties, anger. The peaceful way of filming an elderly lady who gets up and performs everyday gestures, in her room, in the corridor that leads to the bathroom, the preparation for breakfast in the kitchen: this way of filming is amazing fertility, proportional to what it seems to have trivial.
Class violence, gendered violence, hopes and trahies loves, suffering and death circulate under the quivering epidermis of this film, each plan of which vibrates. The objects, the lights, the noises, the rare words take care of echoes which constantly meet, while the assembly organizes a circulation between the eras, circulation which could be the logic of a dream, or that of the memory of the very old woman whose The Chandelle glow tell the story.
It is the life of Alzira, which it is a question of childhood – and its relationship which has become unlivable with the servant as elderly as she and with whom she cohabits in the big house.
But it is also the sacrifice of a talent for music, a taste for paint left fallow, of a change in the ways of living, of a marriage imposed by the circumstances and the time even more than by the parents, of rhythms of an existence which has become so little alive.
It is the life of the house itself and the space-time in which it is part, which will only be seen the immediate surroundings shown by the panoramic repeated four times and four times different. Behind closed doors to the dimensions of a century, a country, in collective and individual ways of living, The Chandelle glow is like an immense closed mouth song, which, seeming to say very little, expresses immensely.
By André Gil Mata
With Eva Ras, Márcia Breia, Olívia Silva, Luísa Guerra, Gisela Matos, Dinis Gomes, Catarina Carvalho Gomes
Sessions
“The village at the gates of paradise” by Mo Harawe
It is unfair and quite unpleasant, but it is so. A Somali film presented in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival is not tied with the other titles. The village at the gates of paradise In addition, must prove that it is not just there to check the box that we no longer call “Third World”, but which still designates the considerable areas of the Global South which do not have “naturally” right of city in a large international cinema festival.
Discovered in the spring of 2024 on the Croisette, in the A certain Locat section, the first film by the Somalo-Austrian filmmaker Mo Harawe immediately baits such a suspicion. The intelligence of the assembly of the opening sequence, spraying the dominant gaze on this country which exists for the rest of the world only as a space of obscure confrontations in which high-tech cleaning operations of the great powers are involved, succeeds the sensitive precision of a scene at ground. A scene of pain and effort, of singular presence of individuals watched and listened to for themselves and inscribed in a geographic and historical context otherwise nuanced.
In this town between sea and desert, threats from jihadist groups and hazardous American strikes. In this country also in the grip of misery, disorganization and so -called natural disasters, Mamargade, fatherless father, fights to survive and provide for the education of his son, cigar.
The boy also fray his way, makes his own decisions in this environment which is not limited to the extreme harshness of the conditions. Araweelo, her recently divorced aunt, builds answers to her, fruit of her skills and her energy, when everything seemed to condemn her.
The quality of the look that the filmmaker has on people and their ways of not giving in to the dictates of a sinister reality finds the paths of a form of cinematographic beauty, made of human presences, rhythmic compositions, attention to materials, colors, lights. These formal choices are the path to a meeting that undertakes all complacency with the spectacle of misfortune.
Of Mo Harawe
With Ahmed Ali Farah, Anab Ahmed Ibrahim, Ahmed Mohamud Saleban
“Her Story” by Shao Yihui
Having become a phenomenon at the Chinese box office, this wacky comedy surprises by the mobilization of codes which usually correspond to stories located in Los Angeles or in a trendy arrondissement of Paris.
This is the first joke of this story of a mother, Tiemei, who raises her daughter Molly alone and settles in an old building of the former French concession in Shanghai. Her neighbor, Ye, is a young woman who, between songs, alcohol, drugs and multiple lovers, tries to maintain a teenage lifestyle and is not doing very well.
The mother, entirely tense towards the fulfillment of her role as mother and her professional career, at the risk of endangering both, does not get better. The two women who have become friends multiply the clumsy attempts to improve their existence, under the mercilessly critical eye of the kid, a sort of gifted zazie of which each replica is a punchline.
Comedy assuming its artifice as to the reality of the situations of middle class women in Chinese mega -cities, Her story Affirms an approach that makes the three male individuals appearing on the screen secondary, weak and often ridiculous figures, including in their way of overlaying the questioning of male privileges.
A good part of the pleasure aroused by the second film of Chinese filmmaker Shao Yihui is due to this telescoping between a well -established mechanics in other contexts and the Chinese situation, or the idea that we have, on the occasion of incursions on the side of the alternative rock scene, with the dating applications or in the functioning of the hyper mercantile health system.
The playful inventiveness that unfolds around the little girl is the lubricant which allows the dynamics of this singular machine, where enough unexpected and strangeness circulates to exceed the only skill of this immersion of experienced diagrams elsewhere. The bright presence on the screen of actresses does the rest.
