I would like to talk to you about Jerzy Skolimowski, one of the pioneers of the Polish seventh art. The son of a resistant mother, marked by the war, he had launched himself into the cinema on the advice of Andrzej Wajda, before co-writing the screenplay of knife in water, Roman Polanski’s first feature film (1962). The chiselled face of this explorer of the image, also an actor, now in his eighties, has been part of the cinematographic legend over the decades. movies like The barrier and departure in the 1960s had revealed him to be lyrical, innovative, inventive. Awarded in Cannes, in Venice, in Berlin, over the course of a great career, for Polish or international works, he also gave us deep-end, Four nights with Anna, Essential Killing.
Skolimowski, with his unbridled creativity, his marginal heroes jostled by the cruelty of the world, is also a talented painter, reclusive in his forest, who had not made a film for ten years.
So, we were witnessing his big comeback in Cannes competition on Thursday with the film Hi Han (EO), written with Ewa Piaskowska. In this magical, powerful, superb and melancholic work, the hero is none other than a donkey. Very impressed with Random Balthazar of Robert Bresson, his favorite film, he pays him a burning tribute. The Comtesse de Ségur had written Memoirs of a donkey. La Fontaine doomed him to death in one of his fables. The gentle and stubborn animal, with large sad eyes, proves to be a fruitful source of inspiration.
The charismatic Tako
Six donkeys performed Hi-Han, whose star is Tako, found in Warsaw. His charisma lights up the screen. It is sometimes easier to empathize with a harmless animal than with a more or less perverse human. We step into the shoes of this Hi-Han, crying over his setbacks, hoping for his survival. What animation does easily through mirror animals, a film with quadruped actors must thwart a thousand constraints linked to the good or bad will of the performers.
Hi Han constitutes an allegory of flouted innocence. This donkey on the run makes an initiatory journey, after losing his beloved mistress, a circus star. Escaped from a therapeutic center for disabled children, he wanders between cities and Polish forests among ferocious or friendly wolves and humans, observing the beauty and the horrors of the world. He raises his astonished ears, brays a good blow, advances between two captures and three halters attached to his collar by new masters. Including a son of Italian family to the eccentric mother embodied on the razor’s edge by Isabelle Huppert.
Scenes with players from a soccer team make people laugh and cry, dazzling images of the donkey in the red dawn or in front of a hydraulic dam with raging waves are dazzling. The staging diversifies and plays with audacity with a force of admirable framing. The camera follows the emotions, captures the eye in close-up, without the script losing its rhythm. Skolimowski offers daring effects, then resumes the pace of walking in clogs, revealing the madness, the violence or the tenderness of the humans perceived by this donkey, which once rebels in a radical way. This filmmaker, who likes so much to show figures of difference, could not be better served than by a beast of burden, whose destiny is sealed in advance, but who follows his path to the end, judging or not those who flout. We wish this donkey a great career in theaters and a prize list at the end of this marathon.
The rebellious childhood of James Gray
I expected a lotArmageddon Timean autobiographical work by the American James Gray who recounts his childhood there, like Alfonso Cuarón with Rome and Kenneth Branagh through Belfast. I left the screening quite disappointed. Several of his films (including Little Odessa, The Yards, Two Lovers) had been presented at the biggest festivals, including many times at Cannes. And this evocation of a childhood in the Reagan era in Queens of New York pleases, without upsetting. Young Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta, very fair) stands up to his parents (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) in their Jewish family, but respects his grandfather (Anthony Hopkins, always up to it). He plays the four hundred blows with a black friend persecuted for his color, dreams of a career as an artist. This dissipated boy ends up landing in a private school, the Kew-Forest School, whose father Donald Trump chairs the board of directors. Hence a splendid flash appearance by Jessica Chastain as Maryanne Trump, calling on students in uniform to success at all costs.
The film is based on a good screenplay, served by a solid cast, but through an overly academic work, which misleads several emotions. The great cinematographer Darius Khondji hardly makes any sparks there. Armageddon Time is coupled with a social critique in this college where racism is king, as in all of society, where the barrier of social class remains almost insurmountable. It is the other side of the American dream that is exposed here, to the merit of the film. The scenario writer does not play the nostalgic note, if it is not by the humanist legacy of the deceased grandfather.
It is a more personal work than The Immigrantwhich did not convince at Cannes in 2013. However, we miss the lively and original style that James Gray had been able to breathe into The Yards, Little Odessa and We Own the Night. As if, by trying to rake too much of the large audience, he misplaced the finesse of his signature.