En la jornada de hoy analizamos ‘Armageddon Time’ de James Gray, ‘The Eight Mountains’ de Felix van Groeningen y Charlotte Vandermeersch y ‘Father and son’ de Mathieu Vadepied.
When this festival started, a fellow critic told me that James Gray, in a certain way, in his films was always adapting Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, either through criminal cinema -The night is ours (2007)-, or through Herzog-style adventure films -Z, the lost city (2016)-, or through space opera -Ad Astra (2019 )-. The human being overcoming his own limits to try to reach a chimera risking his own life, his own mental stability, his own original ethics. An extreme way of trying to understand what this human existence is, what it means to live, what it means to love, what it means to win and, above all, what it means to lose. Because in life, basically, what we do is continually lose, day after day, until you reach a balance with your hopes and illusions in such a way that you live with defeat as if it were a tacit pact with happiness. And the first of the great defeats, of course, comes in adolescence. Or maybe a little earlier, at the age of twelve, the same age as Paul (Banks Repeta) in Armageddon Time, the most particular coming-of-age that James Gray premiered at Cannes where he dives into his own personal memory – New York, the 80s – to build a very delicate and, at times, heartbreaking story of friendship, illusions, family, class struggle and, again, of loss. The loss of innocence, the loss of a loved one, the loss of someone who only wants to win. because he still doesn’t know that in this life, if you manage to draw, it’s already a great victory.
Armageddon Time It thus tells the story of Paul, the young son of a family of Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants, who attends a public school in the New York neighborhood where they stay, where he befriends a black boy who has repeated a year. The familyin Gray, It is always the backbone of vices and complexes who, moreover, tends to solve his problems by means of violence. It happened in Matter of Blood (1994), it happened in The Other Face of Crime (2000), it happened in Two Lovers (2008): the family traps you in its spider web, leaving you little or no way out, and one ends up inheriting their conflicts and making them theirs without possible remission. In Armageddon Time Gray returns to the small scale of A Matter of Blood to portray a small family drama thatNevertheless, the young protagonist lives like armageddon that reads the title of the film (and that is taken from a phrase by Ronald Reagan when he prophesied the end of the world for young Americans if the Democrats remained in power). The dream of the kid, probably the same young Gray, is to be an artist. be a cartoonist Be like Kandinsky. His father (Jeremy Strong), a plumber, and his mother (Anne Hathaway), a housewife, tell him to study, that he comply with what is established, that he will always be able to paint, but the first thing is first. His grandfather (great Anthony Hopkins) is the only one who connects with the boy, who encourages him to fight, just like his parents fought when they fled the Nazi pogrom. So Paul does not give up, even if he takes not 400, but together with his friend, 800 hits. His parents change his school, to a private one, sponsored by the Trump lineage – diabolical Jessica Chastain in her reception speech.
Perhaps by paying a lot of money they will be able to extinguish the dreams of the kid who dreams of rockets, of painting them, of launching them, perhaps his friend manning them. Gray handles the codes of melodrama with the empirical sensibility of a teacher and handling a staging of shameless classicism. I quoted him without naming him: the first François Truffaut (more than the last Paul Thomas Anderson, because here there is no romantic idealism and only bitter romanticism), the Francis Ford Coppola of Rebels (1983), the Nicholas Ray of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) , would be some of the putative fathers of Armageddon Time, new masterpiece from a filmmaker whoday by day, doesn’t seem to have found its own limits yet. First big favorite for the Palme d’Or.
Pyramide Distribution
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Although they had already collaborated together on the script for that drama called Alabama Monroe (2012), it is the first time that the Belgian couple formed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch have signed a film as co-directors. Groeningen’s previous film should have been his international confirmation, a pity that Beautiful Boy, you will always be my son (2018), even with its powerful leading tandem: Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet, was top-notch ashen material, a cross between cinema anti-drugs and the parent-child melodramon typical of a Dutch after-dinner afternoon. So in his new movie, The Eight Mountains, presented the competition in Cannes, the change of third shown by the filmmakers has been quite categorical (for good). Adaptation of the novel the eight mountains (2016) by Paolo Cognetti, with actors -there is the great Luca Marinelli, protagonist of Martin Eden (2019), but Alessandro Borghi is not short either-, Italian locations and dialogues, the film tells the story of friendship/love between two men, from infancy to something approaching maturity. Movie square format (3:4), that ardently seeks to get the maximum beauty out of each frame (and sometimes he succeeds), taking care of the dramatic mechanism of the film without stridency: how as we get older we are trapped by the same human condition that trapped our parentsthe blurring that exists between the intimate friendship between men and the repressed love story, the duel between the one who lives an almost nomadic life in the mountains and the one who uses the countryside as an escape from the pressures of the city… The Eight Mountains It looks like a better movie than it actually is., probably because its exaggerated length weighs heavily on it (150 minutes) and also probably because the basic dramatic conflict never materializes. Even so, a film that seeks intimacy trapped between gigantic mountains, with really beautiful moments.
Alexander G. Calvo
Cannes Day 1. The festival celebrates a return to (apparent) normality by opening with the festive zombie movie ‘Corten!’ by Michel Hazanavicius
Father & Soldier, the new Omar Sy
Marie-Clémence David 2022 – Unity – Korokoro – Gaumont – France 3 Cinema – Mille Soleils – Sypossible Africa
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The phenomenon Untouchable (2011) propelled the career of Omar Sy, since then one of the most popular comedic actors in French and international cinema. More than a decade later, Sy wants to make it clear that his acting range encompasses much more than well-intentioned humor. In Cannes he has presented the war drama Father and soldier (Skirmishers in its original French title), where he plays a Senegalese father captured along with his son and other men from the village by French troops to fight on the front lines of the First World War. The film has opened Un Certain Regardthe alternative section of the festival that hosts works by less recognized or riskier filmmakers.
Cannes Day 2. Tom Cruise stands tall in Cannes as the standard bearer for theatrical cinema
Omar Sy changes genre, from comedy to drama, but not character type. In Father and soldier he stands as a kind and ultra-protective father, drawn from head to toe to endear himself to the audience. His goal on his front will be to get his son to escape alive from a war that has nothing to do with them. The film aims to carry out a vindication of the role of African soldiers in the first Great European War from a supposed post-colonial perspective.. Sy and the rest of the actors of African origin speak in Fula, one of the languages of Senegal, and it is more than clear that they have been kidnapped by the French to act as cannon fodder. But, as was the case with Untouchable, Father and soldier reveals herself to be much more conservative than she appears in the portrait of the bond between the Senegalese and the French metropolis. Far from generating the slightest discomfort regarding France’s treatment of the inhabitants of its former colonies, the plot leads to a patriotic speech of conciliation. And as a war drama, Faher and soldier is listless in the battle scenes and excessively sentimental. The links with Intocable do not end here. Because the director of Father and soldierMathieu Vadepied, was the director of photography for the film by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano.
Eulàlia Iglesias
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