Big event Friday that this press conference of the team ofIndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. This part of farewell earned a monster ovation to Harrison Ford, who puts on his adventurer’s clothes and his big hat for one last time in this mythical series. The film was made without Spielberg, as everyone has already understood, replaced by James Mangold to direct.
Pure entertainment with a few archeology lessons as a bonus, it is taken well. The fast-paced film was given such a standing ovation that its actor said he was very moved, while also holding his honorary Palme d’Or.
Between the IIIe Reich and the 1970s (Mads Mikkelsen plays a Nazi villain), the quest for a dial designed by Archimedes to go back in time offers the opportunity for a thousand cascades between continents to save the cultural treasures of the Earth. The 80-year-old actor has confessed to reporters that he loves getting older, but in this film, Indy, now a retired professor, returns to work as a daredevil investigator. It will also lose 30 years thanks to digital effects, for a long throwback to Germany.
“I wanted this film to encapsulate the first four parts,” Ford said, wanting Indiana to “remember the vigor of his youth and help others without getting into a flirtatious relationship.” Indy, his character with tumultuous adventures, will have accompanied him throughout his adult life as a double full of courage, phobias and faults. “And everyone loves him,” rejoices Harrison Ford. The maturity of the character contributes this time to the success of the closing piece.
The festival-goers had fun like children in front of this show production, intoxicated by the inventiveness and humor of the script – with sometimes not very subtle special effects, but let’s not quibble. Indy throws himself into the void, while admitting to finding it less easy to climb the mountains after so many injuries and back pain due to middle age.
Nothing will beat Raiders of the Lost Arkthe first-born of the saga, in several cinephile hearts, but this film-sum, which straddles all the destiny of the hero since its beginnings, has an unprecedented tenderness.
The Third Reich in a different tone…
All this is well and good, because you have to relax. Still, in competition, the IIIe Reich held the star in a more serious and powerful work. How to show Auschwitz again?
Briton Jonathan Glazer has managed to renew the sinister genre through The Zone of Interest. A remarkable work, based on the concept of “banality of evil” defended by the philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt. It is a moral mirror that the filmmaker holds up to the viewer, because the Holocaust also testifies to our cowardice today.
In their beautiful home in front of the extermination camp, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (the formidable Sandra Hüller) tend to the garden, organize parties, caress their fair-haired children and live out their worries as the wealthy, disillusioned with their couple. Outside, the chimneys crackle, shots are fired, the wife recovers gold teeth from the Jews who have gone up in smoke. No remorse touches these characters.
On a camera with suffocating frames, black animation effects reveal disturbing scenes. And the latest horrifying images showing piles of the victims’ clothes behind cold glass windows send shivers down the spine.
The Return of the Turkish Master
The immense Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, palmé d’or for Winter Sleepa regular at the festival, is back in the running with dry herbs. In our troubled times, he explores like many others the border between good and evil when the benchmarks fall.
A teacher (Deniz Celiloğlu), back in his Anatolian village, ogles a pre-teen girl after class, who complains to the administration. Suspicion weighs on him and his companion, while the weight of taboos makes them lose their footing. Like several opuses by the Turkish filmmaker, this work is nourished by magnificent sequence shots, veiled glances and endless theoretical reflections on life, where bad faith is never far away. The mystery floats on the motives of each other.
And if dry herbs does not release the sublime grace of the best films of this director, the 3 hours and 17 minutes of this work pass in a hypnosis, so much the slowness and the depth of the gaze of Ceylan create a brilliant and perverse climate that only he can distill.
The lost girls
I would have liked to love Olfa’s daughters, by the Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania. The presence of new directors in competition can only rejoice the heart. But this filmic object of docureality gets tangled in its laces.
A violent mother who lost her two eldest daughters in their fight for jihad agrees to participate in a film with the youngest survivors, in the company of actresses, to untangle the web of tragic outcomes. All of them waltz together without touching us, and an aestheticization of the young girls leads the tone of the film astray into zones of frivolity, without emotion as a result. Alas!
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.