(by Alessandra Magliaro)
On the ninth day of the Cannes Film Festival, one of this year's main themes became evident: the story of the feminine, of the dark side, disturbing, unpublished, finally out of stereotypes. The complexity of women seems to have found in this edition a key to the story. It certainly has to do with the record number of female directors in competition, but certainly not only: finding non-trivial, unconventional keys to tell stories that tell us something is certainly not the prerogative of women but rather of sensitive talents. It happens with one of the two films of the day, L'Eté Dernier by Catherine Breillat, which tells the story of a toxic relationship between a handsome boy who has just come of age (Samuel Kircher) and a lawyer of abused girls who is the second wife (Lea Drucker) of his father (Olivier Rabourdine) and is twice his age. Breillat, 74, who has long been fighting the outcomes of paralysis, is not new to these morbid stories in her filmography, but L'Etè Dernier comes after May December by Todd Haynes, also a morbid and ambiguous story about a scandalous couple with her (Julianne Moore) 20 years older than him, seduced at 13. Said that film's co-star, Natalie Portman: "It always drives me crazy when people say, oh, if only women ruled the world, it would be a kinder place. No, women are human and present themselves in all the different complexities."
Women in the spotlight as in Firebrand with Jude Law King Henry VIII and Alicia Vikander sixth and last wife Catherina Parr to steal the scene challenging him and plotting bravely behind his back. To give some examples. The second film in a competition that is now drawing to a close was eagerly awaited: the return to the race of Wim Wenders back in Tokyo for Perfect Days. With a soundtrack worthy of the title of Lou Reed's song and images of the Japanese city shot by a master of cinema on the road, Wenders' beautiful film tells the happiness of simple things, a life in which small details poetically count. The protagonist, a Chaplinian antihero, is an employee of the public toilets of Tokyo (so beautiful, technological and clean that they are worth the trip), he does his job with passion, he loves listening to vintage music cassettes, reading used books, living modestly but his is a big and sensitive heart, a simple and solitary soul. Here too, as for L'Etè Dernier and May December, Perfect Days has its own similar in competition: Les Feuilles Mortes by Aki Kaurismaki. The Sol dell'Avvenire by Nanni Moretti had a warm welcome in Cannes: 13 minutes of applause last night in the hall and a standing ovation from journalists at the official meeting with the press. Juliette Binoche talked about the character of the cook Eugenie in the Passion of Dodin Bouffant by Hùng Tran Anh, a delicious film (it will be released with Lucky Red) that is a portrait of nineteenth-century gastronomy French but also a love story through food.
And also here with a double in competition, Club Zero by Jessica Hausner with anorexic teenagers. "I loved playing this woman, hers is a portrait of a feminist. She maintains independence throughout her life and then as now that is the secret to a true relationship," said a radiant Binoche recounting how the sous chef of the Napoleon of boiled meat, pot-au-feu, Dodin Bouffant (Benoit Magimel) resists the man who has always loved her. In the afternoon, sold out for Quentin Tarantino's lesson: the director talked about his love for cinema, his beginnings and reiterated that The Movie Critic will be his tenth and last film. The film will go into pre-production next month and will star "someone he's never worked with before, maybe someone from baseball." The Movie Critic is set in California in 1977 "and is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and wrote reviews of porn movies." One of Tarantino's duties as a teenager was to load porn magazines into a vending machine and empty coins from the ATM.