When Martin Scorsese, Robert de Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio loom on the Croisette as a trio of aces, it inevitably creates the event. Onlookers were shouting on Saturday and moviegoers rushed to the Palace on Killers of the Flower Moon, jostling in the queues under the crowd of umbrellas. For the first time, the filmmaker of Gangs of New York brought together his two favorite actors on screen, retracing the symbolic course of his fruitful career, with testamentary accents.
Remember that Scorsese had received the Palme d’or here for Taxi Driver in 1976 as well as the directing prize ten years later for After Hours. He chaired the jury in 1998, but no longer launched a film on La Croisette. The mythical American filmmaker was desired. This year, he wanted to give a boost to Cannes, bastion of the big screen more than elsewhere. Like Almodovar who presented his western at the start of the festival, this is the first time that “Marty” has touched on this iconic American genre.
Adapted from the historically researched novel by David Grant which DiCaprio had suggested the filmmaker read, this film was presented out of competition according to Scorsese’s wishes. This manifest work is part of the current recognition of the crimes suffered by the first inhabitants of the country. Scorsese has never finished exploring the American DNA woven of violence and greed. He dives into it again with his legendary dexterity, striking images, a love of the native population staged.
A hundred years ago, the tragic story evokes that of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma, whose members were executed in cold blood or slowly poisoned after oil was discovered on their land. They had hit the jackpot and were strutting around in villas spending their tickets. Crooked whites and various desperadoes flocked to profit from the hoard, play the colt or marry their wives for the purpose of inheritance. Investigations were carried out very late in order to lock up the culprits.
Here a false friend of the Osages, patron, king of the place and sinister scoundrel, Robert de Niro, at the top of his form, has everything of an old godfather of a time without faith or law. It took Scorsese to direct the interpreter of Taxi Driver. Leonardo DiCaprio is also great, but less charismatic than his counterpart as the King’s nephew who does his dirty work without knowing he is being manipulated. Lily Gladstone more apathetically portrays her loving and abused Native wife Molly.
Killers of the Flower Moon is haunted as much by the ferocity of the cowboys as by the poetry of native traditions brought to life. We feel the breath of the great film pass over him. With a duration of 3 h 26, alas! The filmmaker nevertheless stretches his sauce at the end of the game through less fruitful trial scenes. But with his immense qualities, he is predicted to have great audience successes
Western, therefore, but already modern. Model T Fords and other vehicles replaced the horses of yesteryear. On the newsreels, people watch black towns being devastated. The 20th century continues in its own way the genocidal work on the First Peoples started upstream. John Edgar Hoover at the head of the FBI, will get involved in the Affair of the Osage as head of the FBI destined to mark his century. Who really wanted to avenge the natives, aware themselves of being on the brink of the abyss? Locking up a few mobsters to calm people’s minds was enough in high places…
It is on a brilliant mechanics that Scorsese relies to camp his film in this desert of newly enriched, luxurious residences and indigenous ceremonies as mysterious as bewitching, as well as the omnipresent brutality. Certain images of owls announcing death to Osage women flirt with magical realism. Burned oil lands behind human silhouettes almost in Chinese shadows dazzle. The white and indigenous worlds marry here with ardor and incomprehension, under the lure of gain of some, the distress of others, also the love born of these marriages of interest. twilight song, Killers of The Flower Moon sheds light on contemporary inequities in the same breath, as the culture of assassination and racism persists in flourishing among the Southern Neighbors.
A great connoisseur of American popular music, Scorsese and Canadian composer Robbie Robertson, former guitarist of The Band, provide us with an anthology in which old blues, folk music, “work songs” and syncopated Aboriginal songs accompany a period work that is by turns bloody, sentimental and memorial. This western with aesthetically pleasing but striking sets and costumes also veers into a psychological thriller. Above all, this cry of denunciation resounds in an intimate way through the commitment of the filmmaker, who supports his message very strongly indeed at the very end of his work.
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.