Posted at 7:00 a.m.
The 400 blows
Now a regular at the Cannes competition – he was already there in 2000 with The Yards –, the American James Gray presented on Thursday Armageddon Time, his most personal, autobiographical film. The story of dreamy pre-teen Paul, gifted in the arts and troubled, and his special relationship with his grandfather (tremendous Anthony Hopkins) in the late 1970s in the Queens neighborhood of New York. In this nostalgic initiatory story, James Gray examines the limits of the American dream, which are racism, anti-Semitism, meritocracy and even poverty, when Ronald Reagan is about to be elected President of the United States. Paul, brooded over by his mother (Anne Hathaway), fearing the violent anger of his father (Jeremy Strong, revealed by the series Succession), candidly discovers racial profiling and white privilege through the fate of his black classmate. The social and family chronicle that James Gray articulates around this emulator of Antoine Doinel is captivating and touching. The filmmaker avoids political correctness, showing and naming the realities of the time. But there are waverings, even holes in the scenario that are difficult to explain.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE PRODUCTION
EO
Donkey Skin
In competition for the seventh time in Cannes, the veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski, 84, offers in EO a tribute, 56 years later, to the classic Random balthazar by Robert Bresson, in a hallucinated version. That is to say that we follow the tribulations of a donkey (which is called EO; to be pronounced “hi-han”), from a circus in Poland to a cattle farm, passing through a match amateur soccer and a stay in a bourgeois villa in Italy, where a woman (Isabelle Huppert, on screen five minutes) smashes porcelain plates on a ceramic floor. During his strange epic, EO does not hold still, escapes several times hoping to find the circus artist who took care of him so well, and briefly crosses the path of several benevolent or cruel characters, with more or less fates. less dramatic. In this escape from the donkey, there are strong, dreamlike, stroboscopic images reminiscent of Fellini (the circus, of course…) and sometimes combined with silences, sometimes with deafening music. This poetic and melancholic “as high as a donkey” fable is not without charm… but never like the original.