The favorites and the others ... Here are the strong points and the weak points, detected by the Culture service of the
Figaro,
among the 24 films in competition for the palme d'or at the 74th Cannes Film Festival, which will be awarded on Saturday by the jury by Spike Lee.
The
Figaro
palm
The Story of My Wife,
by Ildiko Enyedi
No time to waste.
This ship captain will marry the first woman who will enter the restaurant where he has lunch with a friend.
Jacques is lucky: it's Léa Seydoux.
That's good: she agrees.
The sailor cannot believe it.
This Lizzy is quite a character.
Heads turn in its path.
She is a socialite, a sorter.
His smile is devastating.
On land, things are more complicated.
Lizzy doesn't always seem to have the same emotions as her husband.
Where does this indifference come from?
What do these yawns mean?
We should surely watch this rascal circling around her.
Ildiko Enyedi is making a film about loyalty and doubt.
A masterpiece.
To read also:
The story of my wife
: long-term love
Le Figaro
loves passionately
Red Rocket
, by Sean Baker
Ex-pornstar returns to her hometown for a fresh start. We discover Mikey as he gets off the bus, back in Texas City, his hometown, 40 years old, $ 22 in his pocket and his face bruised. Surprise. His wife and stepmother did not expect to see him again. He eventually convinces them to let him squat on the sofa for rent. He undertakes to find a job. On his CV, his last job dates back seventeen years. A hell of a hole in his career. He prefers to play honesty with potential employers: he was a porn star in California. Being sincere is not necessarily an asset. He is told that he is overqualified for the job.
Red Rocket's
real eye-
opener
is its lead actor, Simon Rex.Fourth knife in Hollywood (he plays in the series of
Scary Movie
), he is astonishing in the shoes of this fast-paced loser.
To read also:
Red Rocket:
the magnificent loser
Drive my car,
by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
The Saab 900 is red. A Japanese who chooses a Scandinavian brand proves his curiosity, his openness. The stranger does not scare Yusuke who is a director. The couple he forms with a screenwriter seems solid. She has a peculiarity: she invents her intrigues out loud during love. Orgasms inspire her. Sometimes she can't remember what she said between sighs. In the morning, he tells her. She takes notes. After missing a plane, he returns home unexpectedly and discovers her on the sofa having sex with a young actor. She didn't see him. He closes the door silently. In the evening, an accident occurs. Two years later, the widower was invited to a theater festival held in Hiroshima. He came by car. He enjoys being behind the wheel of his vehicle.The regulations oblige him to use a driver. Misaki isn't talkative, with her cap and crumpled tweed jacket. Against the backdrop of Chekhov, Ryusuke Hamaguchi films the meeting of a director and the woman responsible for carrying it. All in delicacy.
Read also:
Drive my car
: accompanied driving
Flag Day,
by Sean Penn
It all starts with dazzling. That of a kid who describes to her father a cowboy all smiles with his hat, his pair of jeans and his boots. The scene takes place on the side of a highway in Minnesota, in the heart of 1970s America. The family sedan is in the ditch. The mother is chomping at the bit. The siblings are bored. However, the father and the daughter share this moment of complicity, as if to better seal this strong filial bond. Jennifer Vogel's father is not like the others. It is this tumultuous relationship, made of love, anger, disappointment and possibly bathed in the memory of a belated forgiveness, that is the beating heart of Sean Penn's sixth film.
Flag Day
revives the vein of his harsh and atmospheric films of which he has the secret, from
The Indian Runner
to
The Pledge
via
Mystic River
or
Into The Wild
.
It is arguably one of his best films.
Read also:
Flag Day
, the comeback of Sean Penn
Stillwater,
by
Tom McCarthy
In
Stillwater
, by Tom McCarthy (Oscar winner for
Spotlight
, film investigating pedophilia scandals in the Church in Boston), Matt Damon does not play an ultra, but a good guy from Oklahoma (cap-goat-shirt in tiles), Bill Baker, income from everything (unemployment, widowhood, alcohol) and left for Marseille where his daughter Allison, a student who chose to flee her family and her country, is incarcerated in the Baumettes prison, accused of having stabbed her girlfriend. From her cell, Bill's daughter proclaims her innocence. His father leads the investigation, visits the northern districts, takes hits and gives some, but the scenario subtly thwarts the spectator's horizon of expectation.
Stillwater
is not a thriller, let alone a revenge movie.
The truth is never simple.
Neither men nor cities boil down to their appearance.
Read also:
Stillwater
: an American in Marseille
Everything went well
, by François Ozon
A businessman diminished by illness asks his daughters to help him die.
François Ozon brings to the screen the story of Emmanuel Bernheim with Sophie Marceau, Géraldine Pailhas and André Dussollier, imperial.
André Dussolier finds there a role to his measure, in this diminished and lucid being, who continues to love Brahms and wishes to have lunch one last time at the very chic Voltaire, to order precision wines.
Around him, they drooled over it.
His sculptor wife walks with a cane, does not loosen her lips.
It's Charlotte Rampling, depressed and suffering from Parkinson's.
Ozon, more careful than ever, adapts without trembling the story of Emmanuel Bernheim.
Read also:
Everything went well
, deadly fight
Le Figaro
likes a lot
The French Dispatch, by
Wes Anderson
The French Dispatch
was filmed entirely in Angoulême but for the most part in the studio, which makes a big splash for lovers of the Angoulême city who will find it difficult to recognize Ennui-sur-Blasé.
It was in this city that
The French Dispatch,
a large circulation American magazine
,
was established around 1950
.
Arthur Howitzer Jr., its editor, has just died and the title will cease to appear with its last breath.
The members of his team get together to write his obituary based on their memories.
This is the starting point for four stories.
Wes Anderson uses all his panoply (voiceover, embedded stories, animation and score by Alexandre Desplat) for a parody tribute to the
New Yorker.
To read also:
The French Dispatch
, the magic lantern of Wes Anderson
Titanium,
by Julia Ducournau
The director of
Grave
moves up a gear and confirms with this second feature film its extraordinary tastes. In the back seat, there is a little girl who annoys her father by imitating the sound of an engine. Given that while driving we discover Bertrand Bonello, we are hardly surprised that the scene ends with an accident on the Marseille ring road. Appraisal: the doctors graft a titanium plate into the kid's skull. The consequences are not long in coming. She kisses the window of a car parked in front of the hospital. Twenty years later, things haven't gotten better. Julia Ducournau directs this madness as one drives a bumper, in neon lights à la Gaspard Noé. Barely, she avoids falling into the grotesque. It is often two fingers away. It's called having personality.
To read also:
Titanium
by Julia Ducournau, sex, death and bodywork ...
A hero,
by Asghar Farhadi
With this film, the Iranian director of "A Separation" regains the vigor of his first films. Here, his main character is called Rahim. In prison for an unpaid debt, he has a two-day leave. He is determined to convince his creditor to withdraw his complaint. For that, he must repay it. A bag containing some gold coins is at the origin of the obstacle course of Rahim. It will go through all the states, will use different stratagems and arrangements, will sink inexorably. How do you say Kafkaesque in Farsi? With
A Hero
, Farhadi is back in his country, and he's never as good as his language. He signs his best film since
A Separation
.
To read also:
A hero
: Asghar Farhadi, prophet in his country
The Olympics,
by Jacques Audiard
Palme d'Or in 2015 with
Dheepan
, the director changes genre with this drama inspired by three new graphics by American author Adrian Tomine. It begins with the meeting between Émilie (Lucie Zhang) and Camille (Makita Samba). They are roommates, then lovers, then nothing, neither roommates nor lovers. Nora (Noémie Merlant), young in her thirties, arrives from Bordeaux to study law at Tolbiac. A blonde wig that she styles to go to a party creates a misunderstanding and terrible humiliation. It is confused with a "cam girl" with the nickname of Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth). Nora will want to meet her after leaving college and starting to work in a real estate agency, recruited by… Camille, very quickly in love with her, under the gaze of Emilie who still has a crush on him. Beneath his tough looks, Audiard is sentimental.Nothing interests him more than a romantic encounter. He has never ceased to break virilism and masculinism from within. This time he does it from outside, without jail or thugs.
To read also:
The Olympics
of Jacques Audiard: extension of the field of desire
High and strong,
by Nabil Ayouch
Director Nabil Ayouch once again stigmatizes the weight of traditions in Morocco. This time, his speech goes through music and dance. He imagines Anas, a former rapper, hired in a cultural center in Sidi Moumen to give hip-hop lessons to a bunch of kids. Ismail, Amina, Meriem, Soufiane or Abderrahim all want to express their suffering in words. Anas will help them to channel their anger, intimate, social and political, and to put it into verse, despite the refusal of certain parents who take a dim view of this protest music. To find
Haut et Fort
, a mixture of
Fame
and
Entre les Murs
, would not be a huge surprise.
Read also:
Loud and strong
: rap, a panacea for subversion
Le Figaro
likes a little
Annette
by Leos Carax
Screened at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, Leos Carax's long-awaited musical is a hit.
It starts, however, with a fairly playful sequence, with a catchy air,
So May We Start
which makes you want to snap your fingers.
The magic is extinguished very quickly.
Love with a capital A appears on the screen.
Henry is a stand-up comic.
Ann is a soprano.
They are therefore famous.
They live in Los Angeles in a raw concrete architect house with a long pool.
We can hear them singing a romantic bluette,
We Love Each Other So Much
.
They buy a yacht.
The fans are on their heels.
The film swells like La Fontaine's frog.
In the sky of Carax, the stars are cold.
They shine like an oilcloth.
All this interminable, ornate, bombastic.
Carax has a certain sense of the pompous.
He films in capital letters.
He thinks he is approaching the sublime;
it often borders on the ridiculous.
To read also:
Annette
of Leos Carax: slice of emptiness
Bergman Island,
by Mia Hansen-Love
Mia Hansen-Love enjoys extreme sports. To send his characters in the footsteps of Ingmar Bergman, it must be done. Obviously, since this is a French film, they don't work: they are therefore both filmmakers. Here they are in the famous island of Farö.
“Wah!”
Exclaims the man. They settle in the master's house with the idea of each writing a screenplay. It doesn't exactly smell of thriller. They can't get over sleeping in the bedroom of
Scenes from married life
,
"the film that divorced millions of people"
.
The tourist aspect is undoubtedly the main interest of the thing.
Mia Hansen-Love sends two screenwriters to Farö at the master's house, which is not enough to give her inspiration.
She sinks into the clichés.
Read also:
Bergman Island
, adrift
Tre piani
, by Nanni Moretti
Tre piani
doesn't look like a Nanni Moretti movie. It is inspired by a novel by the Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo (
Three floors
, at Gallimard). It is an old genre like Haussmann, the building book (
Zola's
Pot-Bouille
or
Perec's
La Vie manual
). Here, the sectional view does not offer a great variety of social classes. The three families of the residence all belong to the bourgeoisie. They are distinguished by their neuroses. Nanni Moretti took on the role of Vittorio, father and inflexible judge. While you don't need to practice autofiction to sign a personal film, it's not clear where it fits in this story. Its irony, its verve, its originality,have in any case here disappeared.
To read also:
Tre piani
, Nanni Moretti unknown at this address
Memoria
, by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
With
Memoria
, the Thai director and plastic artist seems to be ceding nothing to his mystical radicalism. Its synopsis is already a poem:
“At daybreak, I was surprised by a big BANG and did not sleep again. In Bogota, through the mountains, in the tunnel, near the river. A bang. "
The first sequences allow you to see a little more clearly. Jessica (Tilda Swinton, no makeup) is a Scottish woman traveling to Colombia. She is obsessed with a bang that she seems the only one to hear and that she describes to a sound engineer as follows:
"A concrete ball falling into a metal well surrounded by sea water."
HM hm.
Bang or poum, Jessica visits a friend (her sister?) In the hospital.
She is a member of Mapa Teatro, an ethno-theatrical company from Bogota that works with the tribes of the Amazon.
Memoria
is the ideal object to let beauty blossom and the mind wander.
Read also:
Weerasethakul,
you'll see it's cool
Petrov's Fever,
by Kirill Serebrennikov
It's Christmas.
It must be said quickly.
We are not at the party in this baroque and tormented fresco where a cat would not find her young.
40 °: is it the hero's temperature or the alcohol content of the bottles he empties with gusto?
Kirill Serebrennikov, whose
Disciple
and
Leto
we loved
,
plunges into the soaked brain of this designer who is also a garage owner.
Drunk, in every sense of the word.
Read also:
Petrov's fever
by Kirill Serebrennikov: hangover
Le Figaro
does not like at all
Benedetta,
by Paul Verhoeven
Paul Verhoeven veils Virginie Efira and stages her fantasies in a 17th century convent. As a teenager, the convent of Pescia opened its doors to him. Big mistake. The blonde damsel is disturbing. Excess is its measure. It is shocking, in this den of silence and hypocrisy. The good sisters whisper in the dark, giggle for nothing. A disruptive element, and the whole group dissolves. In addition, here is another arrival. This one is brown. Nice balance. Sideways glances, brushing in the corridors. The temperature is rising in Tuscany. Behind his camera, Paul Verhoeven turns red and congested. It is rare, it is touching, to attend these banal frolics filmed by a libidinous filmmaker like an old pantyhose that yawns.
To read also:
Benedetta
de Verhoeven: the stigmas of a libidinous turnip
France
, by Bruno Dumont
France has a husband who publishes an essay novel, an odious son who does not let go of his Game Boy. She lives in a huge apartment that looks like a cathedral decorated by Jacques Garcia. She's always late. And there you have it: suddenly, she overturns a scooter. For her, this is a revelation, the equivalent of the pillar of Notre-Dame for Claudel. The announcer realizes that her life is hollow, her celebrity vain. She takes care of the injured, signs a big check for the family. 3000 euros:
"It's nothing"
, she replies to the vivacious husband. She feels guilty, cries on the screen. Depression is lying in wait for her. She leaves the antenna.
"Awesome! Waoh! ”
, comments Blanche Gardin who has vocabulary.
The director gets entangled in a laborious denunciation of the media.
Here, he repeats things a hundred times, shows a car accident that is useless, misses the moments of emotion, multiplies the clichés.
Benjamin Biolay is the least bad of the distribution: that is to say.
To read also: Bruno Dumont, poor
France
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