Franco-Italian actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi has made several autobiographical films. Her family of the Italian upper class (she is the sister of Carla Bruni) inspired her several, including It’s easier for a camel… Familiar with Cannes, the filmmaker is competing this time with The Almond Trees.
I admit that his cinema, between comedy and sentimentality, often seemed to me mannered. This latest film is a happy surprise, the freshest and liveliest she has given us. The fact that she did not stage herself there gives her a distance that serves her purpose. The plot is taken from his youth, during the 80s in a group of apprentice actors at the Nanterre Theater School, under the direction of director Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Romans. This ephemeral formation will have spawned stars, including Agnès Jaoui and Vincent Perez, and retained a mythical aura.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi was one of them. On those days of intoxication and artistic enthusiasm, The Almond Trees bends over feverishly. Here, the young people who are selected after the audition spend long months loving each other, diving into hand-to-hand combat with the greatest theatrical texts, improvising, looking for meaning in their lives. And this frenzy, these moments of experimentation, these doubts, these heartbreaking loves make Les Amandiers a choral work full of twists, heavy scenes, heightened emotions, without losing the secondary figures along the way. The energy of youth blends with that of an exalted era, over which also hangs the shadow of AIDS and self-destruction.
The script was written by several hands, among others with the help of Noémie Lvovski.
(Louis Garrel, magnetic) plays Chéreau, Micha Lescot embodies Pierre Romans with passion. The two young main actors, as comedians of the troupe who have fallen in love, burst onto the screen: Nadia Tereszkiewicz (alter ego of the filmmaker) and Sofiane Bennacer, in the skin of the drugged, fragile companion, sucked into the void. As for Quebecer Vassili Schneider — who also puts his talents as a musician and singer to work — he happily participates in the group’s ball. It is the breath of the film, its vigor, its youth in a word which offer their lively pulsation to the almond trees. And we would not be surprised to find it somewhere on the charts.
Auscultate Iran
It took an Iranian exile in Scandinavia, Ali Abbasi, to film (in Jordan) a work as critical of the Mullahs’ regime as Mashhad Nights (HolySpider). The filmmaker was awarded in 2018 at Un certain regard for his fantastic film Border. Change of course, since this time the action, taken from a news item (co-scripted with Afshin Kamran Bahrami), is set in Iran in 2001, before September 11.
A serial killer nicknamed the spider was strangling prostitutes in a holy city, without the police making much of it. But a journalist (Zhara Amir Ebrahimi) had struggled to serve as bait to stop the visionary, who felt he was doing a work of salubrity by sacrificing these sinners. Finally hanged, the assassin received even after his death an immense popular support. This adventure with complex ramifications, carried out like a thriller, brings down many of the regime’s masks, including religious hypocrisies and still fierce misogyny. The film is reminiscent of certain works by Asghar Farhadi, a register below for the direction, the dialogues and the interpretation, but with a sustained rhythm, a solid camera and an obvious social significance. Islamism had already been flayed at the start of the competition through The child of paradise of the Egyptian Tarik Saleh established in Sweden. It is the same double discourse of political and religious authorities that is denounced here. Cannes remains a political platform.
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.