A strange phenomenon sometimes occurs in Cannes. Let’s call it the breath of the Palm, which ripples between the seats and suspends our minds. Very beautiful pieces have imposed themselves since the start of this competition, but on Thursday, in front of Perfect Days, by the German Wim Wenders, that grace touched us like the wing of an angel.
There are two films left to see in this race. Who knows what wood they will be warming themselves with? Still, the perfection, the subtlety, the poetry of this work impose their obviousness. Alas, for a few years, we have heard that successive juries would be suggested to grant the supreme award to an excellent film likely to perform in theaters! As a result, the fragile, intimate, confidential opuses would have less chance than before of climbing to the top, contenting themselves with the Grand Jury Prize or other less scintillating laurels. And who knows what jury consensus may hold for the truly deserving? Mystery of these confabulations! Nevertheless, we demand justice for this masterpiece…
Wenders (winner of gold in 1984 for his magnificent road-movie Paris, Texas) is split this year on the Croisette. He launches together in a special session Anselm, 3D documentary on the German Anselm Kiefer, giant of contemporary art. A fruitful vintage for a filmmaker who has known his low periods.
With Perfect Days, shot in Japan, it tackles a priori an unattractive subject. The portrait of a solitary, silent and refined man (Yakusho Kōji) who cleans public toilets in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. The beauty and the subtlety of this film with the camera of flexibility and ingenuity hardly marry the frenzy of the times, that is to say. Modern, however…
This German has managed to make a Japanese work clinging to the codes of the land of the Rising Sun, steeped in unspoken words and hidden glances, under the splendor of a tree in the wind, a smile or a movement of taï- chi, here extirpated from an apparently trivial daily life that has become sublime. Wenders places himself in the shadow of the great Japanese filmmaker Ozu Yasujirō, long chronicler of the changes in his archipelago, mentor to whom this film is dedicated.
Yakusho Koji (Eel, Shall We Dance?), genius actor — will he win the Best Actor award this year? — illuminates with an interior light Hirayama, a man of wisdom and extreme courtesy, who shines the magnificent public toilets of the city. He scrubs the bowls with meticulousness and bliss, reflections of his spiritual evolution, of respect for the common good and for things well done. Where does this unclassifiable individual come from? From a wealthy background. He reads great authors, listens to American rock songs from the 1960s and 1970s on audio cassettes, captures the wonders of nature with his old film camera, far from the sirens of the digital revolution.
Beings cross his life: a funny young employee, a charming niece emerging from the past, the hostess of a singing bar The House of the Rising Sun in Japanese to the clients she nurses. The photos captured by Hirayama give the film an extra lyricism, while songs by Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground and company mingle with Japanese tunes, chanting a lively rhythm: a striking effect of contrast. This film reveals itself to be magnificent in its fleeting, melodic and poignant truth. So !
Catherine Breillat on the razor’s edge
In front of such a jewel, Last summer by Catherine Breillat — freely adapted from the Danish film Queen of Hearts – yet filled with excitement and brilliantly realized, sees its star fade. French filmmakerA real girl and D’Anatomy of Hell has always handled eroticism frontally, hence its sticky label of sulphurous, but this work on the shock of love and lies fuels emotion above all.
By staging a married lawyer and mother (Léa Drucker) who has become the lover of her 17-year-old stepson (Samuel Kircher), the filmmaker only handles transgression to better examine the mysteries of the human soul. Neither forty-something predator nor lamb of the sacrifice clash. Two fragile beings seize each other then betray each other without extinguishing their fires. The part of childhood in refusal to die in this woman responds to that of the adolescent with a chubby face in her bed. The family and professional executives are cut into key scenes predicting the impasse, like in a film by Chabrol.
Catherine Breillat had not filmed for 10 years, victim in 2005 of a cerebrovascular accident which will have made her hemiplegic, then cheated by a crook who disappeared with her savings. Long depressed, she had revealed this scam in 2011 in Abuse of weakness. For her as for Wenders, 2023 becomes the year of the big comeback.
Last summer explores the love that comes up against the imperatives of life, with luminous images and a Léa Drucker on the razor’s edge between guilt, terror of the consequences and almost mystical carnal ecstasies. From a fierce and asocial boy, the young man becomes a hostage of confused feelings and Samuel Kircher plays the disorder of the flesh and the heart with a palpable abandon.
Beautiful film carried by an implacable mechanics, Last summer remains a relatively classic work of cinema. For his part, Wenders, by venturing out of the frames, will have succeeded in the magic flight.
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.