At what point in our lives and, above all, at what price do we humans lose our innocence?
Do they lose it, let's say, the donkeys?
Yesterday, Thursday, these questions had a moving answer in the official competition section of the Cannes festival.
The latest film by American director James Gray, one of the brightest of his generation and a darling of this competition, landed on La Croisette with
Armageddon Time
,
a film with an autobiographical background that evokes the moment in which a boy from Queens leaves his neighborhood school for a private one made for the elites of New York.
His family environment, played by a prodigious choir of actors in which Anne Hathaway, Anthony Hopkins and Jeremy Strong stand out, and above all his friendship with an African-American classmate are the focus of a film set in the eighties, at the dawn of savage neoliberalism. that marked the Reagan era.
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Armageddon Time
is a distillation of many of the obsessions of the director of
Ad Astra
and
Z, the lost city
,
but passed through the gaze of a child who on many occasions reminds of Salinger's Holden Caufield in his furtive walks through New York.
An out-of-class and talkative boy who, with his critical gaze at the imperfect world around him, dreams of being an artist and doing whatever he wants.
Armageddon Time
is sentimental in the best sense of the word and, without cynicism, rough and tough too.
The classism and racism that it portrays, with a nod included to the Trump family, ends with one of those perfect and simple endings in which we say goodbye to a child to welcome a whole man.
A transition to maturity that the innocent look of
EO
's burrito will never know.
What the veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski does in
EO
could at times remind us of that immersion in animal life proposed by recent films like
Cow
,
by Andrea Arnold, but it goes much further.
A tribute to
Au Hasard Balthazar,
Robert Bresson's classic, in times of macro-farms that drew the first applause in the screening of specialized critics.
Skolimowski's film is not for less.
Separated from a circus and his sweet owner, the little donkey in this wonderful film will embark on a journey of no return in which the purity of his gaze will face the lack of empathy and respect of a world unable to reverse its hostility with the world. animal.
The background of horror that hides the beautiful images and sounds of Skolimowski speak of an apocalyptic world, where fire or scrap surround an animal life banished again and again from its paradise.
The fox farm for fur, the stable of thoroughbred horses or the circus from which they take the donkey after an animal protest shows that world incapable of asking the right questions about animals.
Anne Hathaway, James Gray, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb pose before the screening of 'Armageddon Time' in Cannes. SARAH MEYSSONNIER (REUTERS)
Skolimowski only makes a mistake of point of view by including an absurd episode starring the French actress Isabelle Huppert.
For the rest, his film confronts us with fundamental philosophical questions about the consciousness and communication of animals, their instinct about life and death, and even how animals, and especially horses, have transformed art into movement , that is to say, the cinema, until ending up also captives of the image.
As Béla Tarr in
The Turin Horse
—a film that inverted the point of view of one of the founding moments of animalism when, in the twilight of the 19th century, Nietzsche embraced in tears a horse that had been beaten in the middle of the street—, Skolimowski (whose visual rhythm, furthermore, does not allow not a second of tedium) reminds us without dialogue or proclamations, only through the eyes of a poor donkey, that without animal innocence what we lose is nothing other than our own humanity.
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