Cannes 2025 – Day 4: The nightmare Eddington, the latest of Hafsia Herzi, the interview with Kristen Stewart

Every day, the hot point live from the 78th Cannes Film Festival.

The film of the day: Eddington Ari Aster (in comedy)

Before, Ari Aster made horror films – Heredity Or Midsommar. Now he signs black comedies – Beau is afraid and today Eddington. But his comedies are even more creepy and nightmare than his horror films…

The nightmare that depicts Eddingtonit is that of today’s America-or May 2020, very precisely, when the sheriff of a new-mexic bled (Joaquin Phoenix) goes into politico-psychotic vrilles, against a background of covid epidemic and Black Lives Matter. The film, a kind of western with smartphones instead of the guns (but still also with guns), plunges us into contemporary ordinary US madness – conspi, fake news, sectarian delusions, political polarization in overheating, the total – with a fairly denying rage.

Ereasing, hilarious, terrifying, constantly surprising, Eddington confirms the dazzling formal engineering of Ari Aster. As we write these lines, in the middle of the night, the debrief of the film in the apartment First has been going on for almost six hours. And does not seem ready to stop.

The interview of the day: Kristen Stewart for The Chronology of Water

For her first length of director, she signed a powerfully sensory film by adapting the autobiographical novel of Lidia Yuknavich who told how she had managed to extricate through the literature of a toxic family environment ravaged by violence. Kristen Stewart confided in First on its process of starting twists and turns.

“”What I felt when I read The Chronology of Water goes far beyond love at first sight: he had an mind-blowing number of corpses well hidden so far in a cupboard. I even started to think about the film that I could make of it before I even finished it but it took me a lot of time to succeed in making the thousand and one pieces that make up this kaleidoscope in a single feature film. I took years to write my version of each page of the book. This scenario has therefore evolved according to my personal development. I grew up, I matured, my relationship to the book too. So much so that my final version of the script contained five different films.

But despite a tight budget, I shot everything because I was sure that it would be the only way to find my film. In fact, making The Chronology of Water looked like Free Jazz. And for at least a year, throughout the start of the assembly, I thought I had mesyy. I was going through a kind of mourning as I wanted to have not been up to the task. And then suddenly, the film appeared to me. I had managed to build my kaleidoscope. And among the fifteen possible films from my rushes, I managed to make one. Which looks like what I had felt as a reader. The trip was long and trying but I never felt so much alive“”

The revelation of the day: Nadia melliti in The little last from Hafsia Herzi

We could spend hours and pages to list why we loved the new feature film by Hafsia Herzi which marks her first selection in the Cannes competition, a few months after her César for best actress. Its vibrant staging which magnifies faces, looks and bodies, its virtuosity in the art of dialogues. Its same mastery to orchestrate agitated choral scenes as the intimate moments of discovery of flesh and love passion. The way she knew how to make her inheritance of the one she considers her mentor, Abdel Kechiche.

But in this adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Fatima Daas featuring the emancipation of a young lesbian Muslim woman, she also impresses with her sense of cast and the direction of actors. With the figurehead, that which embodies the title role, virgin of all cinematographic experience, chosen after months and months of casting. Nadia Melliti who practiced high -level football (especially in the U19 team of PSG) and whose presence, intensity, charisma illuminate as much as they cry. In chat as in listening. In moments when her character cracks as in those where she takes the lead and occupies all the space. More than just revelation, a emergence.

The perf of the day: Claes Bang in The unknown of the Grande Arche

“” “You know Claes because he had come to Cannes for The Squarea square, there it is for a cube. Claes, you are the largest geometric actor there is.»

It is by this good word that Stéphane Demoustier introduced Claes Bang during the presentation of The unknown of the Grande Arche, In competition with a certain look. The crazy story of the Danish architect Johann Otto von Spreckelsen, designer of the Grande Arche de la Défense, told in a novel-investigation published in 2016 and brought to the screen by the director of Borgo. A Brutalist French who plunged us back in the 80s during the first seven -year term of François Mitterrand.

The Grand Bang carries the film on his large shoulders and perfectly embodies this dreamer, more artist than a builder, who wins the competition with everyone’s surprise and will find himself confronted with the harsh reality of a disproportionate project, taken between political constraints (including Xavier Dolan as the President’s advisor) and the pragmatism of the French architect (Swann Arlaud) called to the rescue to carry out the project. From carelessness to vanity, he marries the Icarian trajectory of his character with a crazy accuracy, even in his mastery of dialogues in the language of Molière (which he does not speak at all). A primary partition.

Tyrannia of the day: The Plague by Charlie Polinger

We didn’t really know what to expect with The Plague (“La Peste”), first length of Charlie Polinger, selected in a certain look and where Joel Edgerton (also producer) passes a head. The Cannes rumor, not completely false, spoke of a thriller in a teenager environment: we are actually closer to the drama than to the suspense film, even if the tension level is quite spectacular.

The story takes place in the United States, in a summer-polo summer camp for boys aged 12-13. Freshly arrived, Ben discovers that the other kids took one of their comrade in flu, suffering from rashes on a good part of his body and now treated like a plague. Extremely embarrassed by the situation, Ben is shared between his instinct which dictates to him to put an end to this horrible harassment and the desire to be accepted by the group …

The Plague Bruitly translates the complexity of adolescence, multiplies the visual towers (the scenes shot underwater) and reveals (at least) two young actors: the already very impressive Everett Blunck and the formidable Kayo Martin slaps. We do not yet know when it will come out with us, but we will have to respond present on D -Day.

The voice of the day: Mylène Farmer in Dalloway

After her very noticed (and very moving) tribute to David Lynch during the festival opening ceremony, Mylène Farmer returns by the small door in Dalloway by Yann Gozlan (Burn Out, black box, visions …), presented in midnight session. She is there the voice of an artificial intelligence which controls the apartment of Clarissa (Cécile de France, always super), a novelist in dry inspiration, who tries to unlock by joining an artists’ residence. But the virtual assistant becomes more and more intrusive …

A role of capital importance, on which rests a good part of the suspense and the credibility of the project. Farmer is of total subtlety, at the right border between the slightly robotic intonation of an AI and much more human modulations. Too bad the film is lengthwise and struggles to maintain the disturbance between conspiratorial thriller and potential paranoid delirium of its heroine.

Today in Cannes

We make a little Kika at the Critics Week (where also spends Evidence of love In special session), we catch up Sons of the Neon Night (the midnight session last night) and we continue New wave by Richard Linklater and Die my love from Lynne Ramsay in competition, as well as Dangerous animals to the fortnight of directors. Not bad, right?

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