The 79e Venice Film Festival is still very young, but it is already marked by some very strong cinematographic proposals, in particular this Athena.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
Athena: a civil war in the suburbs
This third feature film by Romain Gavras (The world is yours) imposes itself thanks to the virtuosity of a staging constantly under tension, but also by its capacity to seize a state of mind which can lead to all the skids. In the form of a contemporary Greek tragedy, Athena relates the climate of civil war which settles in the city of a Parisian suburb after the death of a young man, allegedly shot down because of a police blunder. We obviously think of Miserablesespecially since Ladj Ly participated in writing the screenplay forAthena. With his expertise, Gavras opted for an immersive approach that leaves no respite to the viewer. A vertiginous sequence shot, lasting more than 10 minutes, opens this explosive drama. In the running for the Golden Lion, Athena premieres on Netflix on September 23.
A couple : literary beauty
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE VENICE MOSTRA
In addition to signing the screenplay, Nathalie Boutefeu is the only actress inA couplea film directed by Frederick Wiseman.
The second French film presented Friday in official competition could not be more different fromAthena. A great documentary filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman, at the age of 92, made his first feature-length fiction film. Taking a stripped-down approach, he draws the portrait of Sophie Tolstoy, wife of Leo Tolstoy, through the screenplay written by Nathalie Boutefeu, the only actress in this feature film. At the heart of beautifully filmed images of nature, the latter delivers to the camera the anxieties and the existential quest of a woman feeling abandoned by the man she loves. It’s very beautiful, very literary, and the actress is remarkable. A couplewhose duration is 64 minutes, is however more of a cinematographic essay and must be appreciated as such.