Awards without appeal at the American Film Festival of Deauville.
The lucky winner will have to clear a lot of space on his shelf ... At the end of a sustained competition, the jury of Vanessa Paradis awarded its grand prize to the psychological thriller of Sean Durkin,
The Nest
which depicts the tensions within of a couple affected by a transatlantic move.
The film, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, also walks away with the Critics' Award and the Louis Roederer Foundation Prize for Revelation 2020. Hopefully this will encourage distributor SND to book a theatrical release at this jubilant closed door.
Read also: Deauville celebrates its legends and the return to cinema life
In
The Nest
, which marks the return behind the camera of acclaimed author Martha Marcy May Marlene
,
Jude Law plays Rory, an ex-broker, who uproots his New York family in the British countryside.
We are in the 80s. On both sides of the Atlantic, Reagan and Thatcher are in power and money is king.
Rory dreams and breathes speculation, even if it means losing his mind and ignoring the suffering of his wife, his daughter and their little boy lost in the austere mansion where he has settled them.
Not sure that we would have liked to be confined in this building.
It allows the director to instill a Gothic atmosphere conducive to bursts.
Beauty and harshness of a pioneer life
Sean Durkin paints a vitriolic portrait of a dysfunctional marriage that survives on its lies and insults.
And explode the taboos of living together.
Starting with finances.
Perfect mythomaniac bastard, obsessed with the idea of erasing his popular origins and imposing them on the rich, Jude Law embodies the perfect allegory of toxic masculinity.
Opposite, the prodigious Carrie Coon (
The Leftovers
) is more than the weight.
She is not a tidy wife and humiliates for humiliation.
English decorum takes a hit and
The Nest
has a poisonous scent that smells of good
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
?
Vanessa Paradis and her team also awarded two jury prizes.
The first to the minimalist and sylvan western
First Cow
by Kelly Reichardt (
Wendy & Lucy
) which tells, in Oregon of the beginning of the 19th century, the lusts but also the happiness and the unexpected friendships that a dairy cow can arouse.
Lancinating and poetic, the camera lingers in cramped cabins and dark forests to better suggest the hope, the harshness and the solidarity of this life of pioneers.
The second winner of the jury prize goes to poignant
Lorelei
by Sabrina Doyle.
The redemption of a former convict and his love of youth,
"imperfect heroine who has her own dreams and is not there to help the man"
, according to the director.
My uncle Frank
praised by the public
Besides
The Nest
, the Revelation jury, chaired by Rebecca Zlotowski, awarded the director's trophy
to Kitty Green's
fabulous
The Assistant
.
Or a day in the life of an assistant to a Hollywood mogul who realizes that her boss is committing a thousand and one abuses.
A subtle and cynical portrait of the balance of power in the world of work.
The tyrant never appears on the screen, where a flamboyant Julia Garner evolves, sleepwalker and under pressure.
The absence of
The Assistant
from the charts would have been heartbreaking.
As is the case
with Emma Seligman's
remarkable
Shiva Baby
.
Unsurprisingly, the Audience Award went to the very successful and funny
Mon uncle Frank
, who managed to beat the competition's other “feel-good” favorite,
Minari
.
Alan Ball, creator of
Six Feet Under
, is inspired by his family history and his own coming out to recount the road trip in 1973 of a professor of literature who ends up confessing his homosexuality to those close to him.
Paul Bettany impresses in this role on edge.
