For the first film directed by Béatrice Dalle, Charlotte Gainsbourg agrees to play a witch delivered to the flames at the stake.
But nothing goes as planned.
The production capsizes, technical problems accumulate, spirits heat up, psychosis sets in and drama occurs.
To read also:
Appearances, Ondine, Sing Me a Song ...
Films to see or avoid this week
Gaspar Noé's medium-length film presented at Cannes did not please everyone.
Far from it.
As usual, the director experiments.
No dialogue, just improvisation.
No accuracy, just chaos.
This “
big mess
” does not appeal to Éric Neuhoff, our colleague from
Figaro
.
“
Red lights are flashing.
Neither tail nor head.
The film is about fifty minutes long.
It feels like it lasts three times as long.
"
The fight continues on the side of the
Echoes
towards this
Lux Æterna
"
quickly written and quickly turned
".
Olivier De Bruyn criticizes the film for "
seducing only unconditional fans of Gaspar Noé and indulgent aficionados of the main actresses
".
On the
Liberation
side
, Sandra Onana takes a dim view of Gaspar Noé's pleasure in "
sticking his claws into the professional biotope he knows best
", the cinema, by attacking producers, journalists, teams. techniques.
To read also: Gaspar Noé goes back
Irreversible
to the place for a new cinema outing
"
Our peepers cry for mercy, the cauldron overflows, and Noah refuses to lower the heat
," writes the journalist.
Enamored that he is the image that sweats and goes to the clash, the filmmaker wants us foam on the lips, on the verge of rupturing aneurysm, option epilepsy: a form of self-satisfied grin hovers over the company.
"
The fifty-minute film is above all akin to an obstacle course: “
We escape both washed out and hardly more convinced that this thrilling cinema must necessarily consider its spectator as a guinea pig.
"
However, some people put up with this atmosphere "
often bordering on hysteria, sometimes stroboscopic images
" like Renaud Baronian du
Parisien
.
If he advises against the film "
to the general public
", he can not help believing that
Lux Aeterna
will be appreciated by "
cinephiles and fans of the director of
Irréversible".
The film is a “
stirring and vibrant essay on cinema and the difficulties of making a film
”.
To read also: For Gaspar Noé, in 2019, "nobody would dare to finance a film like
Irréversible
"
Le
Journal du Dimanche
focuses primarily on the two “
phenomenal
actresses
, whose talent for improvisation is exploding
”.
As for the rest of the film, “
Gaspar Noé practices mise en abyme with jubilation, works on form with his usual virtuosity, in an infernal setting that inspires stroboscopic images in which red, his favorite color, predominates.
"
As for the
World
, Jean-François Rauger arrives with a beautiful imagination to find meaning in this cinematographic chaos, which “therefore
bears witness to a lively and implacable satirical gaze, the vision of a trivial world, that of cinema, devoid of all transcendence
”.
Despite this "
dismal and disturbing group portrait
", the viewer unfortunately passes "
the mill of a stroboscopic trance
".
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