A radiant sun may shine brightly on the Croisette, but the films are dark at the Palais. Contrast effect that makes us all a little bipolar. Death is there prowling and striking, the characters collide, their cries ring in our ears. Cannes blows hot and cold endlessly, feeding its myth. So for Brother and sister by Arnaud Desplechin.
A regular at Cannes, the French filmmaker ofA Christmas taleof The Sentinel and of kings and queenreturns to his first love.
For a long time, the family vein, with its crashes and its traumas, explored from its first film The life of the dead, has been one of his fertile sources of inspiration. But he preferred to adapt authors in recent years, the documentary of Mosco Boucault in Roubaix, a light, Philip Roth’s novel with Deception. Suddenly the desire to rediscover the atmosphere ofA Christmas talethrough a sharp angle, pushed him to co-write the script for Brother and sister, with the fierce hatred that binds and disunites Louis, the writer brother (Melvil Poupaud, wild and damaged) and Alice, the actress sister (Marion Cotillard, tough and vulnerable). She, a princess in her tower, he, having made his breakthrough in literature by writing dirty talk about Alice. Seen Friday in competition, this work of beauty and contrasts, very codified, flouts verisimilitude. Desplechin prefers dramatic effects to matte realism. He reinvents life.
An aversion worthy of a myth
“Families, I hate you! Gide’s words could have been placed as an epigraph to Brother and sister. Because they have noisy hatred and scathing repartee. They make toga effects, break the house and throw nasty things through their heads. What dazzling dialogues!
All this against the backdrop of a spectacular accident and bereavement. Because their parents, hit by a truck after trying to help an injured young driver, are in bad shape in the hospital and will not live very long. Suddenly, the one who had gone into exile in the depths of the mountains with his Iranian wife (warm and vibrant Golshifteh Farahani) returns home. Both run away, bump into each other, meet again. The specter of incest floats without quite landing.
As always with Desplechin, the references are numerous. Here, Truffaut, there Wes Anderson or Woody Allen, detour by western scenes. With his luggage, he flies away elsewhere. The film deals with forgiveness, between synagogue and Christian church, to send the moral question better waltz between dogmas.
A classic theatrical figure, that of Patrick Timsit as a friend of the family, warm ear and hand on heart, becomes the bridge between the two continents of the siblings. Well-drawn secondary characters serve as hyphens to the brotherly tragedy.
Magnificent scenes in the theater where Alice plays an adaptation of a short story by Joyce, those of her friendship with a young Romanian admirer who adulates her, parallel to the absurd hatred dedicated to her brother.
You still have to be Desplechin to allow yourself such distortions of reality. In Quebec, the behavior of the protagonists: insults to a pharmacist or to peace officers, ransacking of a restaurant and other misdeeds, would have led them straight to prison. Here, they can afford everything without any consequences. The filmmaker does not care, transforms his heroes into mythological gods. The sedative effects of opium become those of cannabis which makes you laugh. Go find out why…
At the parents’ bedside, Alice and Louis take turns stealing, privately devastated, bogged down in alcohol or other substances. Their aversion is theatrical, passionate and ventures on the side of myth. The skids are powerful, exalted, the staging and its images slip between the crashes. And this disconcerting film loses us, wins us on its rope of exacerbated feelings, until its conclusion of light which brings an almost too beautiful redemption to a fiery work.
Cairo, nest of spies
Also in competition, the Swedish production The Child of Paradise by Tarik Saleh (Metropia, tommy) unfolded in Cairo on a well-mastered classic Egyptian aesthetic. Let’s not look for female characters here, except in simple accessories.
This tough, well-acted film, with no-nonsense cinematography, is set in a male, Sunni community, where a gifted young fisherman is sent to study. But at the time of appointing a new imam, the scales fall from his eyes. A policeman in the pay of the government (Fares Fares, caricature) recruits him as a spy to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood (prohibited group) from interfering in this state affair. Will the young man be murdered like his predecessor?
This religious thriller, where hypocrisy and official faith keep catapulting each other, reveals a nest of intrigue, like in the Vatican. Nothing to make you want religion. The Child of Paradise is a powerful charge against all the powers, political or Islamist who crush the innocents sent to rub shoulders with it.
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.