Cannes Film Festival | Elvis seeks himself and does not find himself

(Cannes) One wonders what is Elvis, the new film by Baz Luhrmann. Is it a musical, biographical drama, comic book adaptation, superhero movie, pastiche? The Australian filmmaker himself doesn’t seem to know it too much, so often he changes register in this 2 h 39 min film which fails to move people by drowning in artifices of staging.

Marc Cassivi
The Press

The world premiere ofElvispresented out of competition at the Grand Théâtre Lumière on Wednesday evening, was undoubtedly the most anticipated event of this 75^and Cannes film festival. The film of course received thunderous applause at the end of the screening. The opposite would have been almost unthinkable in the presence of Luhrmann as well as actors Austin Butler, Tom Hanks and Priscilla Presley, the King’s widow, who has been raving about the film on social networks for a week.

Baz Luhrmann is a regular at the Cannes Film Festival. His first feature film, Strictly Ballroomwhich was screened this week as part of the Cinéma à la plage series, was presented in the Un certain regard section in 1992. Red Mill ! opened the Festival and the competition in 2001, and The Great Gatsby was also the opening film in 2013.

Luhrmann says he chose Austin Butler, 30, to play Elvis “because he’s an actor who can not only naturally replicate this unique performer’s distinct body language and vocal qualities, but also his vulnerability.”

Butler’s transformation, which we see in particular in Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino, is amazing. He lends his own voice to Presley’s songs, which have been reinterpreted and sometimes rearranged to suit the taste of the day… but not always in the best taste.

The problem of the filmmaker’s film Red Mill !, it’s because we don’t believe any of his characters. They’re so cartoonish they have the depth – and magnetism – of a cardboard movie poster. “I’m a superhero,” says Elvis, and it looks like Lurhmann has made him, in his usual way, a character from cartoon.

Tom Hanks, who plays Elvis’ impresario, the enigmatic and Machiavellian Colonel Tom Parker, is so grotesquely made up that he reminds me of the Fat Bastard character played by Mike Myers in Austin Powers. Especially since he has a grain of pseudo-Dutch accent in his voice, to recall the obscure origins of the impresario.

This biopic chronological and hyperactive on the life and work of Elvis Presley is particularly interested in the relationship of dependence between the legendary singer and this famous Colonel Parker, who was his impresario for 21 years. “He treated him like a monkey in a cage,” says Jerry Lee Lewis in Ethan Coen’s documentary about him, which premiered at Cannes earlier this week. “He locked me in this golden cage,” says Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s film.

Colonel Parker was running a circus show when he heard “that young white man singing like a black man” on the radio. He immediately understood that he was holding a rough diamond in his hands. The story of Elvis is also told from the point of view of the colonel, who granted himself, it seems, 50% of the receipts of his protege.

The two men, suggests Luhrmann, were sometimes at loggerheads and that Elvis was perhaps less under his thumb than one might think, but never independent enough to get rid of him. Parker always found a new scheme (the residence in Las Vegas, for example) to convince Presley to remain faithful to him. The screenplay, unfortunately, does not fully understand the foundations and intricacies of their dynamics.

This hagiography of the King of rock and roll also touches very little on the dark side of the artist, except to make us understand that by dint of being under house arrest in Las Vegas by the colonel, Elvis, overworked, ended up by becoming addicted to barbiturates. It’s not a detail in his story, but it happens like a hair in the soup, and suddenly Elvis Presley, bloated, dies in 1977, at the age of 42.

He did not die of a heart attack or an overdose of pills, Colonel Parker maintains at the end of the film. He died of loving his audience more than his own life.

Baz Luhrmann tries to draw a parallel between the existence of this larger than life character and the boiling of the time in the United States, with the struggle for civil rights and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers. It’s flat – the film was mostly shot in studio in Australia; it feels – and we do not understand where the filmmaker is coming from. Recall the links of Elvis with the black community? Giving social or political meaning to one’s life?

His film’s biggest flaws, however, lie elsewhere. In the mannerism of its realization which swirls ceaselessly, in its frantic assembly, to cause an epileptic attack, in the abuse of split-screen and the emphasis on mushy violins. Everything is in place to arouse emotion. She never appears.

Elvis is set to hit theaters June 24 in North America.