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Cannes proclaims its faith in the future of cinema between zombies and TikTok

2022-05-18T03:51:47.570Z


The edition of the film festival opens its doors with an imitation of a Japanese comedy about a 'gore' horror shoot


The poster for the 75th edition of the Cannes festival, which opened its doors yesterday, Tuesday, after two very difficult years due to a relentless pandemic with movie theaters, shows the horizon of a false and perfect sky.

The image, taken from

The Truman Show,

Australian Peter Weir's 1998 film is an accurate metaphor for the world we live in today.

Jim Carrey, the leading actor in that disturbing and visionary film, climbed the stairs to a heavenly paradise that hid a hell, the prison of an endless and live show.

Almost 25 years have passed since then and the insatiable cloud of audiovisual hypnotizes the daily lives of millions of people, increasingly dehumanized by the countless screens we carry in our pockets.

And the cinema, like Jim Carrey climbing the ladder of that disturbing poster that now announces this new edition of Cannes, needs to break the wall and rebel.

More information

The war in Ukraine, Tom Cruise, the lack of parity and other keys that mark the start of the 2022 Cannes festival

Cannes likes to swim between contradictions and paradoxes.

Perhaps because at this point there is no other choice and the eternal pulse of art with industry is becoming more and more complicated.

The opening film of this first post-mask Cannes,

Coupez!

(which in Spanish will be translated as

¡Cut!)

is the perfect example of that incoherence.

A very clever and entertaining

remake

of the brilliant Japanese film

One Cut Of The Dead

(2017), directed by Shin'ichirô Ueda and with a successful run through festivals specializing in fantasy and horror films.

In other words, the imitation of a French director as mediocre as Michel Hazanavicius opens the doors of a festival that once again fills the streets and the halls with accredited press, guests and the public.

There is almost nothing in

Coupez!

that isn't in the original film, though Hazanavicius, who

won every possible award with the middling

The Artist , shakes off the blame with a few sympathetic nods to the Japanese film.

Coupez!

follows to the letter a story of zombies and metacinema starring a "fast, decent and cheap" director who begins to understand neither the world he lives in nor his own daughter, an aspiring filmmaker who is looking for her place in the future.

Between the crazy comedy and the paternal-filial love letter,

Coupez!

He talks about zombies —those “victims of globalization and the capitalist system”, repeats a character madly— and about a job that oscillates “between garbage and miracle”.

A scathing satire of that planetary audiovisual system in which we live, which claims a generational change of young women complicit in their past.

A future that, if we stick to the statements of Thierry Frémaux, general delegate of the festival and its main brain, could even be on TikTok, the new sponsor of Cannes and the only social network that will be able to broadcast one of the most dazzling red carpets in the world.

Faced with the complex and exciting challenges facing cinema, Frémaux launched some rhetorical questions that should find some answer in the coming days.

“Is the language of cinema being lost?

Is it perhaps a dying art?” Frémaux said in welcoming him to accredited journalists before answering himself: “Nothing dies, least of all cinema.

It just transforms."

The general delegate of the Festival de Cannes, Thierry Frémaux, yesterday before the opening ceremony of the contest.

CLEMENS BILAN (EFE)

But this Tuesday in Cannes, for a moment, cinema and war have gone hand in hand, as they have so often.

It happened with the intervention of Volodymyr Zelenski, the president of Ukraine, who in a teleconference pointed out the importance of cinema in the context of the Second World War and, quoting

The Great Dictator

, by Charles Chaplin, said: “The film did not destroy the dictator real but thanks to her the cinema was not silent”, and added: “We need a new Chaplin who shows that in our time the cinema is not silent either.

And the dictator will be overthrown."

With its incalculable legacy and ideas, cinema continues to feed the content macro-farms behind the audiovisual magma.

And Cannes, one of the most reliable thermometers of the quality of this primary substance, vindicates like no other the importance of also building on its tradition and past.

The president of Ukraine, Volodímir Zelenski, spoke of both things in a telematic intervention, citing

The Great Dictator,

by Charles Chaplin.

“The film did not destroy the real dictator, but thanks to it the cinema did not remain silent,” he said, adding: “We need a new Chaplin who shows that in our time the medium is not silent either.

The dictator will be overthrown.”

While the film of the opening gala recovered the joyful shouting of the street, a few meters away, in the Debussy room, another of the festival's sections, Cannes Classics, started with the restored version of

The Mother and the Whore,

the legendary 1973 film by Jean Eustache.

It was exciting to see the huge queue of students who came to the appointment.

Young people from all over France who study cinema in high school and who explain how important it is for them to see a three-hour long film in black and white.

In the room, before starting, some took selfies while John Coltrane and Miles Davis played and, at the end, they ended up cheering two of its protagonists, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Françoise Lebrun, who hugged.

Almost half a century later, the suicidal Eustache and his hangover-film of May 68 raised a stalls delivered to that mixture of humor and love for an already outdated world.

And the future of cinema, with all its doubts and desires, was sitting there.


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Source: elparis

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