We watch the films of the race. They are often worth the detour. And a sign of the times, many heroines star there. On one continent or another, the female psyche captivates. The American Todd Haynes, familiar with the skies of Cannes, has long been a great director of actresses. He finds in May-December Julianne Moore, already staged in Safe And far from paradise. And offers him to co-star Natalie Portman, which isn’t bad either. So here is the filmmaker back in competition with an intimate work shot in 23 days which explores the dramas of the past to manage to confront it in a kind of catharsis.
The story is that of a 36-year-old mother-teacher (Julianne Moore) who becomes the lover of a thirteen-year-old teenager, friend of her son. Their forbidden affair will have made the headlines, broken up her family and earned the lady a stay in prison. Decades later, still in a relationship with this boy who has become the father of her new children, rejected by society, she agrees to see this period of her life recreated on screen. The actress (Natalie Portman) first conducts her investigation, insinuates herself with everyone, secretly seduces the husband (real Apollo played by Charles Melton), tries to discern the lies from the truths.
In a game of mirrors, the two women gaze at each other, lie to each other, groping in the dark. The film, subtle and successful, marries a real vertigo, dealing with a subject nourished by contemporary controversies on moral excesses and their hidden springs.
In the end, it’s the very nature of acting – of actress in this case – in its zones of intuition which imposes itself as the true subject of the film when the masks fall. In the shadow of personas by Bergman, this duel between two great actresses is a game of tennis, a game of cat and mouse, a caregiver’s relationship with a fragile woman hidden under a facade that is slowly cracking. Brilliant exercise!
The weight of tradition
The presence this year of several female directors in competition also leads to an opening towards countries that are often very absent from this forum. Like the first feature film by the Senegalese Ramata-Toulaye Sy Banel&Adama. The film draws its source from the codes of sub-Saharan African cinema in the shadow of Burkinabe master Idrissa Ouedraogo. Its script revisits the themes of modernity in the face of tradition, with a feminine point of view this time.
Because the heroine, mad in love for her husband, wants to free herself from old customs and live with him freely. But when the drought decimates the herds, his Romeo will have to follow the ancestral path traced for him. These intimate and cultural frictions are served by images of great beauty. The theatricality of the performance of the performers embraces the traditions of the griots so enduring in the 7e art from Africa, but where emotion struggles to emerge. Alas! Until now, the cinema of women in the race has not aroused the great thrill that makes us tremble. We are waiting for the real crush. Tomorrow maybe…
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.