With lost illusionsthe adaptation of Balzac by Xavier Giannoli (15 nominations), Annettethe musical drama by Léos Carax (11), and Alinethe true-false biopic of Celine Dion by Valérie Lemercier (10), the choices of the Académie des César for the 2022 edition reflect the quality and diversity of French cinema in 2021. These are also films that have brought together, as rarely, critics and the public, despite the disaffection of the rooms due to the health crisis, for two years.
lost illusions almost unanimously among moviegoers, critics and the public. Contrary to Flaubert, Stendhal or Zola, Balzac was not adapted to the cinema as often as that, except Eugenie Grandet, of which an umpteenth version was released shortly before Giannoli’s film. A rural drama, it gives way here to what is undoubtedly the quintessence of human comedythe description of an era and its commentary by a writer who reflected in it his own experience.
Giannoli captures it and visualizes it as a person. Balzac never found himself on screen as he did in his film. With a cast that has the genius to distribute roles perfectly suited to the characters – Benjamin Voisin, Cécile de France, Vincent Lacoste, Xavier Dolan, Jeanne Balibar and Gérard Depardieu – his historical reconstruction of the Restoration of the 1820s-30s is a marvel. Let’s hope the filmmaker directs the sequel tolost illusionseven more romantic, Splendor and misery of courtesans.
Musical film, opera-rock will say some, on a screenplay by Ron and Russell Mael, who form the rock duo Sparks, Annette is a separate work, just like its director. We had to wait nine years, after Holy Motors, to find behind the camera this regular at the Cannes Film Festival, where he received the Screenplay Prize. Interpreted by Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver (nominated best actor at the César), associated with the cult group Sparks in the music, the distribution is too beautiful and innovative.
Faithful to his labyrinthine narrations and his sophisticated images, Leos Carax films a tragic melodrama 2.0, the neo-romantic chronicle of a couple of artists who are torn apart, dynamited by jealousy, and whose culmination will be the manipulation of their child. Annette will undoubtedly mark a date in the filmography of Leos Carax, as a success in the delicate art of musical film, but also as a work in its own right.
Valérie Lemercier, actress and director, recounts, with humor and tenderness, the exceptional and atypical career of the Quebec singer, in a film with an international dimension, like the star. Retracing Celine Dion’s career seems like a ready-made subject for Valérie Lemercier, in front of and behind the camera. In the form of a fake-biopic, since all names and locations have been changed.
Valérie Lemercier carries her subject high in her fourth feature film.
She goes from intimate comedies to an international subject, Celine Dion, in a flamboyant staging, like her heroine. The actress plays Aline, from her 8th birthday to today. Her singing voice is that of Victoria Sio, but she gives full throttle on stage and in her multiple transformations. The magnitude of the staging provides a story full of twists and turns, with constant humor except when the emotion overflows to tears, like Céline.
One can be surprised that Titanium by Julia Ducournau, Palme d’or at Cannes, only appears in four categories. It must be said that the film is divisive in its narrative that has been taxed as too “cowardly”, while its structure recalls William Burroughs or JG Ballard, major references of the director, like David Cronenberg who took them to the ‘screen.
Director also quoted by Brian De Palma or Dario Argento, she goes beyond the homage in her inventive, sophisticated and impressive staging. Its young actress Agathe Rousselle, for the first time in a leading role, remarkable in a very physical and transformative performance, finds herself in the category Best female hope: deserved. Vincent Lindon, in a supporting role with formidable misuse, is on the other hand ignored.
The splendid thriller North ferry by Cédric Jimenez, present in seven categories, deals with what was presented in 2012 as the affair of the “ripoux cops” of Marseille. Screened out of competition at Cannes, nervous and tense like few French thrillers since its rarefaction in the cinema, Cédric Jimenez’s film was released in a climate of perennial unease from the police: high tension.
North ferry does not paint a complacent portrait of the police, as has been said. The all too rare moments of private life of these disillusioned cops humanize them and the double-edged relationship that the youngest of them maintains with his informant is disturbing. Everyone will come out traumatized. Gilles Lellouche (named best actor) as a die-hard cop won the prize for interpretation, his best role to date.
With his seven nominations for The divide, the Academy finally recognizes one of the major directors of French cinema in an extraordinary comedy, a genre in which we did not expect it. She taunts the French social crisis in a choral film around the Yellow Vests and the nursing staff, while talking about love.
If the subject is serious, the film is irresistibly funny, embarking Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Marina Foïs, Pio Marmai and a non-professional actress, the remarkable carer Assiatou Diallo Sagna, in a comedy off the beaten track. Its staging, twirling in the heart of this chaos behind closed doors of the hospital, the rhythm in which it takes us, gives an absurd vision of the contemporary world that hits home.