No, Cannes is not content to welcome stars and screen films. He sometimes lays the filmmakers down on the psychoanalyst’s couch. More jostled than ever by the loss of bearings and the eyes of the spectator become flashing by dint of zapping, is the seventh art lying on its deathbed? Huge question.
At the Agnès Varda hall was screened on Tuesday Rods 999, a brainstorming film directed by Lubna Playoust about the patient’s future. Filmed last year in a hotel room in Cannes, it took over from Rods 666piloted by Wim Wenders, who, in 1982, collected the predictions of Godard, Fassbinder, Antonioni, Spielberg and company.
This time around twenty filmmakers question their crystal ball, including Audrey Diwan, Olivier Assayas, David Cronenberg, Ruben Ostlünd, Arnaud Desplechin, Paolo Sorrentino, Asghar Farhadi, Claire Denis and Monia Chokri.
Forty years apart, only Wim Wenders will have taken part in both adventures. The director of wings of desire joins the ranks of pessimists about the future of cinema. Crisis of theaters and distribution, collective memory breakdown, exile of the audience at home, tyranny of platforms and algorithms over minds: don’t throw away any more! Others, like David Cronenberg, refuse to admit defeat.
In this great festival nourished by splendor and works, although prisoner of its niche, we will have heard calls for resistance to save the poetry and imagination of creators in the face of the vertigo of emptiness. Also, songs of hope, which give the taste to believe in it.
In the shoes of Moretti
Nanni Moretti has been making his films for so long in Cannes that the death of the seventh art seems less inevitable in his company. Multi-award winning over the decades, palmé d’or in 2001 with The son’s roomthe Italian filmmaker revived on Wednesday his vein of ironic autofiction in Towards a bright future. Screened in competition, this delicious comedy questions, what else? The seventh art.
The character of Nanni Moretti makes a film there without a big budget alongside his producer wife, tired of his tyranny (Margherita Buy) and an extravagant French producer (Mathieu Amalric) who sends him in vain to roll to Netflix. We are not far from the concerns of filmmakers in Canes 999. Towards a bright futurein line with 8 ½ by Fellini, combines the filmmaker’s existential quest, his marital difficulties and the pangs of a film that escapes him. The latter approaches in 1956 the moods of an Italian communist (wonderful Sylvio Orlando) who is struggling to cut the cord with the Soviet Union.
As a filmmaker, Moretti turns out to be more comical and egocentric than ever, overwhelmed by his era which ignores political commitment, by his daughter in love with an elderly man, by actors who modify his lines, by his own bad faith, by his badly extinguished nostalgia.
We will not give wrong here to those who called him the Italian Woody Allen, so much their contradictions seem to answer each other. But he has aged better than his American colleague. Towards a bright future, a great success in Italy where the film was released on April 20, enchants with its circus acts, its unmanageable sets, its stunned and hopeful director, a sort of Charlot at Cinecitta. And in this film with well-directed actors (including him), his generous melancholy and his lack of pretension are a real balm to the heart. We do not predict the Palme d’Or for a second, but we savor his latest work like a gelato on a terrace in Rome in the afternoon.
The pleasures of great food
We saw in Cannes this week Club Zero, by Jessica Hausner, who made fasting a supreme way of life. Here we are at the antipodes of this asceticism. The passion of Dodin Bouffantalso in the running for the Palme d’Or, evokes more Babette’s Feast and others great food, as it serves us to eat and drink. Trần Anh Hùng, filmmaker of Franco-Vietnamese origin, author of the admirable Smell of green papaya. He offers a tip of the hat to the culinary art of his adopted country. The film adapts Marcel Rouff’s novel published in 1924 and set at the end of the 19th century.e century, when overconsumption hardly weighed on the conscience of wealthy gourmets.
An ode to truffled entremets, ortolans, parsley sauces with port and other chickens simmered in their juice with various primers, the film, very old France, features Benoît Magimel as an exceptional chef and Juliette Binoche (formidable) as an incomparable cook and companion of the chef. This former couple in the city finds on the screen a tasty complicity, since there are flavors. It also does wonders on the red carpet…
In a castle where good food is concocted in the kitchen and savored in the dining room, the gestures of art: cutting the onions, frying the sole and other alchemical manipulations are sacred. The film, with the help of chef Pierre Gagnaire, does not deprive us of any step in the divine process. The life of the couple and the trials of their journey seem destined to open our senses to new tastings. A very classic film, with magnificent images, impeccable distribution, The passion of Dodin Bouffant delights with its tribute to an art that makes our taste buds salivate. And which, like the cinema, still has a few rich hours ahead of it in sweet France.
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.