Cannes 2025 – The Mastermind: pale faces of America 70’s (critic)
The American Kelly Reichardt presents in competition a sweetness-bitter comedy around a young man without quality and draws in hollow the defeats of the ideals of a tone on tone country.
America Seventies is an inexhaustible reservoir with fantasies. In the cinema, this (de-) enchanted parenthesis gave rise to a corpus of feature films synchronous with the bustle of a country then shaken by: the Vietnam War, the Watergate affair, the police repression within universities, the successive death of the Rockstars (Jimi, Jim, Janis and the others) … The filmmakers who watch it can of a romantic pop. Kelly Reichardt (Wendy & Lucy,, The last track,, Some women,, First Cow…), don’t eat this bread.
The action of The Mastermind So at the very beginning of this decade in Framinghan, Massachussetts, a small softened town whose Wikipedia sheet is struggling to find any particularity. It was in this dead and dreary angle that the 61 -year -old filmmaker decided to look, far from the noises of a world whose jolts are discreetly reached. As we know, the American follower of a minimalist cinema, never looked for the crowd and the effusions. Here it films a sluggish country. The Mastermind is an autumn sonata. Although.
James (Josh O’Connor), son of a local notable (a judge, the thing is not trivial), organizes the theft of four paintings by the abstract painter Arthur Dove, pioneer of American non -figurative art. In the magnificent city museum, the guards are rushing on their chair. The blow is easy. Helped by two nickel -plated feet, James succeeded without too many hooks his package. The Mastermind Thus begins like a film of the Coen first way, when the brothers still knew how to watch their characters with irony and tenderness. Cold, Reichardt has fun with them but keeps a distance by staging. The deliberately faded colors of his frame cancel all disparities until erasing the beings and things that are agitated in front of him.
This tone on tone from where nothing (or almost) can arise, it is the very credo of this story, that of an average young man and without roughness which in his desire to stop the small bourgeois spiral which drowns it, will only find the mocking echoes of its own helplessness. In this the sequence in the barn where James tries painfully to hide his loot is a pure moment of pathetic burlesque.
Reichardt gradually abandons the shores of comedy for an apathetic road movie in an America that has nothing to offer. So when James believes that he can find refuge in a community of hippies, he faces a closed door. The joyful band is gone, only a tired hobo is there to welcome him. “” Funny period We hear somewhere. James is still for time events.
His film seems to dissolve himself, but Reichardt catches up with the pass with a rather incongruous jazzy soundtrack in this folk setting. The Be Bop trumpet accompanied by a thunderous battery rhythm produces a vitality which contradicts the slowness displayed. If something still lives, it does not necessarily belong at the time, at least in the image that we have of it but to an energy which would come on the other hand, almost autonomous. Reichardt leaves this tension in suspension, does not assert anything.
It will take a chaplinesque final to demonstrate all the creaky irony of this story. James in his impossibility to engage and be one with others, will be trapped at the very moment when he involuntarily joins the course of things. The fever of the time was definitely not for him. That’s All Floks!
USA. By Kelly Reichardt. With: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, John Magaro … Duration: 1h50. Indefinite exit.
