Cannes is a festival of memory, stuck to its discoveries of the past, to filmmakers and performers in light and consecration. Influences are felt, as if everyone gave to the next through the cinematographic legacies of the Croisette.
We saw in competition this week Tori and Lokita of the Dardenne brothers, who are competing here for their third Palme d’or. But it’s another Belgian film, Closeby the Flemish Lukas Dhont, in line with the best works of the siblings, in less raw, which offered a real heart to the exhausted fauna.
To believe that inspiration has jumped the bridge of generations to knock on the door of a filmmaker with a fresher look, still inhabited by grace. The comparison with the Dardenne is all the more necessary in front of Close that a character of a bereaved mother sees herself embodied by Émilie Dequenne, winner here in 1999 for female interpretation in Rosetta (Golden Palm), confirmed actress since.
Lukas Dhont is not a newcomer, however. Its overwhelming Girlabout a young transgender, had won the Camera d’or in 2018. Here he confirms his immense talent as an actor’s director and his extraordinary sensitivity with the subtle, the delicate Closeautobiographical film, still co-written with Angelo Tijssens.
It reveals the close friendship between two 13-year-old boys, which leads to a breakup and bereavement. It all starts in the light, because in the countryside, the two friends Rémi (Gustave De Waele) and Léo (Eden Dambrine) – just terrific – run in the fields. So close that they often sleep in the same bed, without the homosexual attraction being named. But at school, Leo, who is trying to assert himself, cuts this fusional bond and tragedy occurs.
This film is literally nourished by his silences as the survivors of Rémi’s death, parents and friends, keep the pain closed in them. Léo, between his hockey training, his school life and his bike in the middle of nature, eats his guilt. Close is of such finesse that one remains dazzled. Even the music does nothing. Everything is suggested, right up to the outcome. We are talking about impeccable distribution, Émilie Dequenne, prodigious of grief returned, the children, all excellent. Not a false note in this work on the quest for the absolute of youth, on buried pain and on redemption, which is expected to be high on the charts.
Baby looking for taker
We were eager to see The lucky stars of the Nippon Hirokazu Kore-eda, which had given us the unforgettable Nobody Knows and A family matter, palmé d’or in 2018. The family remains for him an inexhaustible source of inspiration, a beacon of social contradictions. This time, his sarcastic vein mixes with a few violins (not too much) in a story of a baby abandoned by his mother (Ji-eun Lee) and taken in by child dealers, with whom the young prostitute mother makes an alliance, officially in order to to share the loot of a possible adoption. The action takes place in South Korea, mid-road movie to find the ideal parents, half-chronic of friends gathered at home and not so heartless, after all. In this dirty core, the patriarch is encamped by the always impressive Song Kang-ho. Policewomen, accomplices of the mother, track the movements of the traffickers of babies. The scenario is tightly tied, the gags and the well-married emotional ranges, the tight editing. We are not talking about Kore-eda’s best film, however, but about a work full of drive, revealing social paradoxes, without the superior emotion that could really propel it.
Tahitian darkness
If a film should divide critics and festival-goers, that’s fine. Peace. Torment on the Islands (2 h 45) from the Catalan Albert Serra. This imposing filmmaker (The death of Louis XIV) does not make a gift to the spectator. Very long scenes, often in static shots, with justified scenarios will seem off-putting to many. This powerful film shot in Tahiti has to be earned, a sort of epic in the wake ofApocalypse Now by Coppola. For its breadth and depth of field, its sensuality, its political stakes, its latent catastrophe. The French diplomat who returns to the island (Benoît Magimel, who won the safe) first appears as an undrinkable colonialist. But the more the film advances between dream and reality, the more his ambivalence, his passions, his understanding of the drama in progress transform him into a man endowed with antennas, who will not save anything without losing his lucidity for all that. And Magimel, already awarded at Cannes for The pianist, could reap a new award thanks to this chilling, cynical performance with a crack.
A transgender woman character takes sensuality to unnamed shores. And beyond the idyllic landscape and the tribal dances intended for tourists arise, behind each image with deceptive sensationalism, the colonization, the sexual and political exploitation of a people who fear new atomic experiments in their atolls. We really penetrate In the heart of darkness by Joseph Conrad, a slow plunge into the abyss, while a two-faced colonel conspires for the worst and will end up provoking it. Let’s hope that the jury will be able to reward this burning and twilight work for its just merit.
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.