(Cannes) In an aisle of the Debussy room, at the Palais des Festivals, a young woman, barely 20 years old, walked timidly towards the row where Xavier Dolan, president of the jury of the Un certain regard section, was sitting. “I wrote this note for you!” “, she told him, giving him a handwritten letter. Her friends, who remained by her side, congratulated her for her courage.
It was Sunday, just a few minutes before the presentation at Un certain regard de la comedy-drama The dog’s trial. This is the first film of the Franco-Swiss actress Lætitia Dosch, revealed by the excellent The Battle of Solferino (2013) by Justine Triet, Palme d’Or of 2023 for Anatomy of a fallwho was present in the room.
The entire cast (Jean-Pascal Zadi, Mathieu Demy, François Damiens, but also the dog Kodi) was also on hand for this premiere, with the exception of Anne Dorval, who, if I understood correctly, preferred to avoid any appearance (even infinitesimal) of conflict of interest with his friend Xavier Dolan, who will have to judge his work.
The Québécoise plays a formidable, twisted and very comical (in a deliberately caricatured register) lawyer named Roseline Bruckenheimer, in a unique trial pitting her against Avril Lucciani (Lætitia Dosch), who describes herself as the lawyer of lost causes. His new client, Dariuch, presents him with a desperate case: his dog Cosmos has bitten a woman for the third time and must be euthanized. Unless Avril wins her case.
PHOTO LOÏC VENANCE, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
The director and actress Lætitia Dosch on the sidelines of the presentation of the film The dog’s trialSunday
If you find this scenario unlikely, think again: The dog’s trial, which will be released in Quebec in the fall, is inspired by a famous case in Switzerland. Lætitia Dosch produces a friendly and funny film, but also touching – as are these little animals – which asks relevant moral questions about the treatment of the environment and animals. How can a dog who has a favorite song by Véronique Sanson be legally assimilated to an inanimate thing?
A failed adaptation
I probably expected too much from Kirill Serebrennikov’s adaptation of Emmanuel Carrère’s excellent novel Limonovabout this Russian political and literary character who is as fascinating as he is controversial. Limonov: the balladco-written by Pawel Pawlikowski (Cold War), stars Briton Ben Whishaw in the role of the Soviet troublemaker, a poet exiled in the United States, who became a literary star in France, then nationalist leader of a far-right movement in Russia.
The Russian filmmaker Petrov’s fever (2021) and Tchaikovsky’s wife (2022), also presented in competition at Cannes, fails to make the life of this punk anarchist anything other than a biopic flatly conventional.
PHOTO ANDREJS STROKINS, PROVIDED BY THE CANNES FESTIVAL
Ben Whishaw in Limonov: the ballad
Édouard Limonov was forcibly exiled in the 1970s in New York, which was reconstituted thanks to very close-up shots in a setting that we do not believe or integrated with bad special effects à la Forrest Gump in film sequences from ‘archives.
Whishaw does his best, but he cannot accomplish miracles with this poorly sketched and caricatured character, who, like his interlocutors, speaks in English mixed with a Russian accent that is difficult to explain in a proposition that is not Hollywood.
Serebrennikov, himself a Russian dissident who had to go into exile in Berlin two years ago, after being placed under house arrest in Moscow for his support of the LGBTQ+ movement, is also a theater director and this is obvious. easily. Its static staging sorely lacks movement and inventiveness.
Emmanuel Carrère has a small role in the film which is in some way his own: he knew Limonov in the 1980s, before meeting him again 20 years later in Moscow. The bland work that Kirill Serebrennikov drew from his novel runs dry and suffers enormously from comparison.
The hosting costs for this report were paid by the Cannes Film Festival, which had no say over it.