La Presse at the 79th Venice Film Festival | A film to believe in the future

Winner of an Honorary Golden Lion for his entire career, Paul Schrader also came to launch at the Mostra Master Gardenerthe last part of a trilogy begun with First Reformed and continued with The Card Counter. The film, magnificent, even suggests a slightly more optimistic approach from a filmmaker specializing in gray areas…

Marc-Andre Lussier
The Press

Paul Schrader certainly did not steal the Lion of Honor awarded to him on Saturday. As part of the generation that reinvented American cinema in the 1970s – with the Spielbergs, Scorsese, Coppola and company -, the creator of the famous Travis Bickle of Taxi Driverfor which he wrote the screenplay, first established himself as a screenwriter before also distinguishing himself on the production side.

The filmmaker, whose fame has taken a new turn since First Reformed, the first part of a trilogy that began five years ago, showed up in Venice with a remarkable new film under its arm. shot after The Card Counterwhich had been so well received, Master Gardenerscreened out of competition, is a feature film that is both beautiful and disturbing, not devoid of humour, in which Schrader questions the notion of redemption.

Have faith in the future

A Travis Bickle character turned gardener? Yes, it’s hard to believe. But one of the lines of Master Gardener is the key to the whole dramatic construction of the film: to garden is to have faith in the future. Mean by this that nature will always end up reclaiming its rights, regardless of the context, or the time it will take to achieve this.

When you meet Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) at the beginning of the story, you could hardly think that this being, for whom botany no longer holds any secrets, could drag such a heavy past. It is however the case. The same could be said of Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), very elegant lady, owner of an estate where Narvel is in charge of gardening, in addition to passing on her know-how to apprentices.

However, we quickly understand that the relationship between the boss and her employee is ambiguous, and that the arrival of the owner’s little niece, who was nevertheless invited, obviously does not make the lady happy.

“I wondered what would happen if, for example, we taught a Proud Boy [militant d’extrême droite] how to take care of a garden and that he was asked to take care of it, explained Paul Schrader. Could we redeem it? Quite frankly, I don’t know. I come from a generation where we wanted to show violence, but here, I move away from it. As we grow older, our questioning about redemption evolves. We don’t want to leave this world without knowing how to say I love you. »

Even more free!

Visually stunning, dramatically surprising, Master Gardener is Paul Schrader’s most recent contribution to a highly relevant body of work. Since the honor given to him at the Mostra covers his entire career, the filmmaker was asked to indicate his preferences among the films he has made, in addition to signing the scripts.

“It’s like for his children, we love them for different reasons. I would still say mishima because, to this day, I still can’t believe I did it! In terms of style, The Comfort of Strangers. I was lucky. Technology is evolving, we can make films at a lower cost, and I find even more freedom there. »

Joel Edgerton has also well translated the importance of Paul Schrader in American cinematography.

“When I was studying drama in school, I would watch the performances of all these great actors of the 1970s—Robert De Niro, of course—and I was completely mesmerized. Until I realized that if these actors could offer such extraordinary performances, it was because they first had a script like the ones Paul wrote. »

Master Gardener will be distributed in Canada by VVS Films. No release date has yet been set.