La Presse at the 77th Cannes Film Festival | A first crush

(Cannes) I don’t like musicals. My friend Marc-André Lussier, who was a great admirer of musical and Broadway, had fun seeing me grimace in front of the West Side Story by Steven Spielberg. We were always seat neighbors at the cinema. I think of him often these days. Our stays in Cannes, where we were roommates, cemented our friendship.

Just a year ago, he was sitting at the same desk, in the same hotel room, where I am writing this column. He disappeared a month later. I received an invitation to the Annual Press Dinner this week. It was addressed to Marc-André Cassivi. I was very moved by this slip of the tongue.

I’m sorry, I digress. I don’t like musicals, so why did I like it so much Emilia Pérez by Jacques Audiard, presented on Saturday? This is my first real favorite of the competition, which for the moment, almost halfway through, does not look like a great vintage.

A musical thriller set in the world of Mexico’s drug cartels, Emilia Pérez tells the story of Rita (Zoe Saldaña), an overqualified lawyer, exploited by a Mexico City firm, who helps her boss defend criminals, which means she gets all the work and it’s He is the one who takes the credit.

A powerful drug trafficker, Manitas, recognizes Rita’s talent and offers her a Faustian pact. An offer that she can hardly refuse… Alert here to the spoiler: I invite those who prefer not to know anything about the intrigues to refrain from reading the next paragraph.

The mandate offered to Rita for several million dollars? Serving as an emissary to Manitas, married to Jessica (Selena Gomez) and father of two young boys, so that he can secretly fulfill his lifelong dream: becoming the woman he always knew he was in his innermost being. As Manitas – and Emilia Pérez – transgender Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón is stunning (excuse her).

I’m taking the liberty of divulging since it’s a twist that happens early in the story – we’re not talking about The Crying Game by Neil Jordan – and that the Cannes Film Festival itself mentions it in its communications.

Tenth feature film by Frenchman Jacques Audiard and his first shot in Spanish, Emilia Pérez reminiscent in some ways a prophetGrand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2009, which also dealt with drug trafficking.

Audiard, who also presented in Cannes competition A very discreet hero (screenplay prize in 1996), Of rust and bone (2012) and The Olympics (2021), won the Palme d’Or for Deephan in 2015. He is the first candidate to seriously aspire to the great honors of this 77^e Cannes film festival.

Emilia Pérez is a moving, poignant film, which establishes a disturbing tension and an anxiety-provoking atmosphere, by tackling moral issues: can we do good with the money of evil? Is there redemption possible for the worst criminals? Can we change our deep nature?

It is also a very ambitious work, full of eccentricities, fantasies and assumed brilliance. Audiard could have ruined his life by taking so many risks. There are more unusual scenes which narrowly avoid getting out of hand: a surgeon sings in English the phrase “ From penis to vagina »…

But unlike Francis Coppola and his Megalopolis confused, Audiard takes up the challenge with his usual brilliance. He achieves a hybrid work which evokes both The skin I live in (2011) by Pedro Almodóvar and Sicario by Denis Villeneuve (2015), two films also presented in competition at Cannes.

At the heart ofEmilia Pérezthere is of course music, which has always been present in the work of Jacques Audiard (he directed the magnificent music video for At night I lie by the late Alain Bashung). Composed by singer Camille and arranger Clément Ducol, the songs are performed by several actors, but in particular Zoe Saldaña (especially associated with blockbusters as Avatar And Avengers) and Selena Gomez, popular singer also convincing in spring breakers (2012) by Harmony Korine as in the recent comedy series Only Murders in the Building.

We know the vocal talent of Selena Gomez. Zoe Saldaña is also surprisingly good. She sings and leads the dance with aplomb in several choreographies, notably in an irresistible number on political corruption at a charity banquet.

Nothing is too smooth in Emilia Pérez, unlike the majority of musicals. The singing of the actors is filmed by Audiard in such a way as to give the illusion that their voices have not been superimposed. The songs and choreographies do not take up too much space, never to the detriment of the plot, so much so that we tend to forget, especially in the second part of the film, that it is a musical film.

I do not know if Emilia Pérez will be on the charts on May 25, but I am convinced of one thing: Marc-André, who was also a die-hard fan of Jacques Audiard, would have loved it.

A film review filmed over 21 years

It is a review film that Jia Zhang-ke is offering in competition. The first scene of Caught by the Tides made me think of that of A Touch of SinScreenplay Prize at Cannes in 2013, with a character and his motorcycle on a desert country road.

There the comparison ends. The Chinese filmmaker’s most recent film is much more contemplative and less conventional in its narrative form. It is a fiction with the air of a documentary, with its numerous portraits which seem to be taken from life in Chinese daily life. It is also a film which, like Emilia Pérezhas an aural backdrop of omnipresent music, which varies from candy pop to classical.

A young woman, model, dancer and singer, experiences a passionate but stormy romantic relationship with a man who decides to find work in another region of China, at the dawn of the Beijing Olympic Games. He promises her that he will let her know when he is well settled, but soon, he no longer gives any news and she goes looking for him.

Caught by the Tides has the particularity of having been filmed over two decades, from 2001 to 2022, with the same actors, Zhubin Li and Jia Zhang-ke’s muse, Zhao Tao. His character is found, as in the excellent Still Life (Golden Lion of the Venice Film Festival in 2006), in a port city near the Three Gorges Dam, looking for her lover who no longer responds to her text messages.

Through this thwarted love story, the filmmaker of the very inspired Platform (2000), on the cultural revolution, traces the thread of his cinema, but also of the recent history of China. Without being his most accomplished work, it is a unique polaroid of the evolution of a fascinating society.

The hosting costs for this report were paid by the Cannes Film Festival, which had no say over it.