The concept of auteur cinema, so emphatic and prestigious, lends itself to multiple interpretations and is not always blessed by quality.
There are undoubted authors, with a recognizable style and universe, whose cinema is unbearable for me.
Their constant and transparent signs of identity, their alleged art, incite me to run away every time I run into them.
And there are admirable artisans who have never hung the label of artists.
They have limited themselves to making good films in multiple genres without imposing their signature on you all the time.
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Robert Guédiguian: “I am a desperate optimist”
Frenchman Robert Guédiguian has been directing films for 40 years.
Also being consistent with the world he wants to show, with what he thinks about the state of things, creating with deep-rooted, honest and unfailing social conscience stories and characters that almost always have it raw, who try to keep their cool and not betray the principles and the causes in which they have believed.
And the feeling of failure accompanies them, circumstances can corner them, everything is problematic and complex, maintaining dignity demands a high price.
And of course, Guédiguian
sometimes it has been very inspired and in others you perceive the fainting and repetition.
There is no doubt about his honesty, but that does not guarantee the creation of art.
Guédiguian has also been obsessively faithful to fixed landscapes in developing his plots and working with the same performers.
His wife, actress Arian Ascaride, has starred in almost all of his films.
And the actors Gérard Meylan and Jean-Pierre Darroussin have invariably accompanied her.
Her presence is familiar to us.
She is also abusive in some situations.
But he will know.
I feel respect for his cinema.
And at times he has moved me.
As in
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
and
Marius and Jeannette
.
Others I have forgotten.
But I always have an initial interest in the cinema of this leftist in possession of a brain, nuances, contradictions, lucidity, disenchantment and heart.
In
Mali Twist
, shot in the midst of the pandemic, Guédiguian abandons his usual settings and the faces that have ancestrally inhabited his cinema.
He moved to Mali in 1962. The country had just been freed from French colonization.
There are young people who have truly believed in the work of making the townspeople aware of the ideals and advantages of the new world, collectivization, education, socialism.
They do so with enthusiasm and good faith, even though the bureaucrats of politics and the new power distrust their vibrant apostolate.
In the new world they also begin to suffocate the small merchants.
Theory and reality collide.
And although everything pretends to be more civilized, traditional barbarities can still be perpetrated, such as a father being able to buy a wife for his son.
Guédiguian also talks about the arrival of rock and twist to a youth seduced by them, who is happy dancing, who perceives that his head and his body are released with that music.
And Guédiguian makes believable the vitality and joy of those excited people with the new dances.
Also an exciting and complicated love story in permanent threat by the old and unjust traditions.
It is a light film that is seen and heard with some pleasure.
It is not normal in the current billboard.
And it's not much, but I'll settle for it.
Mali Twist
Direction:
Robert Guediguian.
Cast:
Stéphane Bak, Alice Da Luz, Saabo Balde.
Genre:
drama.
France, 2021.
Duration:
129 minutes.
Premiere: July 8.
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