It took patience and unwavering faith to get tickets to the official session of the Elvis by Baz Luhrmann, presented out of competition at the Lumière amphitheater. The event was well attended. And the fauna of the Sunday best climbed the red carpet to the sound of rock’n’roll tunes before the show, with the flashes of cameras which are essential, especially when Sharon Stone comes to lend herself to the game.
From the inside, the Cannes circus always has something too fake. The screams of the photographers, the selfies with the fans (prohibited here) nevertheless proliferate when these beautiful people get out of the official cars, and the stars accept the game and smile for their fans. Wednesday evening, the atmosphere was particularly electric in the room, especially when the film crew entered the premises. People really wanted to see Elvis and love it. It was palpable.
Australian filmmaker Red Mill ! and great gatsby fear no challenge. Accustomed to Cannes, his flamboyant and baroque universe ignites the Croisette each time, good vintage, bad vintage. Take the legend of the King head on by asking an actor (Austin Butler, seen in The Dead Don’t Die of Jim Jarmusch) to embody the icon called for a hell of a nerve. He scripted the thing with Craig Pearce and Sam Bromell. Three heads are better than one. John Carpenter had indeed made a TV movie in 1979 attacking the same star, but it had been a long time, and the cinema can offer something better. This time, the fate of the King, a huge star, then a puffy stage man, addicted to drugs, alcohol, excesses, clinging to the Las Vegas scene, which has become his second home, is a mythology.
Commercial success in sight
Very applauded at the end, we can predict at Elvis a great commercial success, even if Luhrmann did not sign with him his best unified work, with 9000 extras, a host of special effects, and a dazzling introduction between exceptional aerial shots, cranes and formidable mechanical games. The assembly of hell announced all the delights. It continued with vibrant scenes, when the young Elvis sang his most famous rocks in front of electrified spectators.
The narration is provided by the voice of the famous manager of the King, the ruthless Colonel Parker (Tom Hanks, formidable). This man will have pushed him, domesticated him, cut him off from his dreams and robbed him by serving himself on the plate with butter. Their clashes are at the center of this biopic. The colonel with a mysterious past even accepted the censorship of a certain era which howled at the obscenity of the footwork and the pelvis of the singer of Blue Suede Shoes, in front of which the girls swooned. He invited her to denature herself.
He knows how to wiggle his hips and offer remarkable stage performances, Austin Butler. Still, getting into the shoes of an artist as charismatic as Elvis is still difficult and, in the scenes of intimacy, his acting seems very poor, especially against Tom Hanks.
Tribute to music, with hats off to BB King, blues, gospel which will have aroused the vocation of a child with unique talent. This production seduced by the performances of the singers, not only those of Elvis. Without ignoring the American wounds of the time, including the assassinations of Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, but also the terrible racial segregation particularly acute during the 1950s and 1960s, when everything started to explode. The cinematographic episodes during which Elvis chained the nanars are retracted. Even more his military service in Germany.
Do not break icon
Much to his admiration, the filmmaker will not have plunged thoroughly into the demons of this adored, famous singer, who at the end of the course sank into a sort of intoxicated dementia that was too often overlooked.
Thus, the film runs out of steam (alas!) along the way, adds violins, multiplies the discussions between the manager and his reluctant foal until more thirsty. The wife, Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge, very weak), does not have much hard-hitting reply to put in her mouth. Their love is reduced to that of an almost conventional couple, doomed to break up. In fact, the emotional life of the famous rocker, who would later collect conquests to the point of vertigo, is barely overlooked. No question of breaking the icon. Scratch it a little, pass again. We feel the reluctance of Luhrmann. We deplore them.
As for the multiple-screen images, adorned with spectacular effects, they soon give way to a wiser production, despite a sequence of orchestral conducting by Elvis which majestically illuminates his musical talent. During the last hour, the rhythm becomes heavy with too many lengths, the dialogues wither, the domestic scenes break the crazy pace. They should also have fattened up the performer more to offer him the heavy silhouette of the singer in decline passed to the legend of Las Vegas. So much so that the return of Elvis to the screen, initially successful, then disappointing, left me unsatisfied, without the desire to applaud wildly with the chic floor which always acclaims the premieres.
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.