Deauville day 1: Ethan Hawke in majesty, Olivia Wilde celebrates her neighbors and Roschdy Zem is afraid
In Deauville, first day under pressure: Ethan Hawke carries a heavy burden, Juliette Binoche opens an impossible door and Olivia Wilde dynamites the bourgeois couple.
After the opening under the watchful eye of Roschdy Zem, president of the jury, Deauville got to the heart of the matter on Saturday with a perfect day to measure the scope of the festival: a muddy western, a Haneckian drama on dementia, a jazz anti-biopic, and in the evening an American comedy which begins with a dinner between neighbors and ends with the dynamiting of the couple.
Yesterday, everyone had something to wear. A bag of gold, secrets, loss or fear.
Speech of the day: Roschdy Zem
Roschdy Zem doesn’t exactly have the profile of the jury president who comes to give three niceties about “the magic of cinema” before going to dinner. He has this straight, direct way of speaking, which recalls what he has been for thirty years in French cinema: an actor who listens before occupying the space, a filmmaker who prefers flaws to effects. On stage, during the opening ceremony, he returned to the engine of his career, his fuel: fear.
“At each appearance, I always had a feeling that I would associate with fear. Not the fear that paralyzes you, but a fear that transforms your confidence into modesty, your arrogance into humility. I understood later why this fear emanated from me when I was on stage. It comes from the fear of disappointing. All artists have this fear. ? Today, when I feel this fear, I am reassured. I need this fear which gives me proves that I am fragile, lively and open to you.”
Long live this fear.
The weight of the day: The Smugglers
Four jailbirds accept a mysterious job to benefit from a reduced sentence. They will have to carry gold bars in backpacks through a thick forest. The original title of SmugglersIt is The Weight, weight, which could well be the real subject of the film. The weight of gold that these men carry. The weight of the crisis of 1933. The weight of remorse and the responsibility of a father separated from his daughter… And it is Ethan Hawke, of all levels, who carries it all as if he had signed up for a western, a Stations of the Cross and a crossfit session. He is splendid. The Smugglers seeks to rediscover a vanished idea of the adult adventure film and Padraic McKinley, whose first feature this is, claims a seventies, physical cinema, quoting in each sequence Sorcerer, Deliverance Or Jeremiah Johnson. This too is sometimes heavy to carry.
Sex scene of the day: Queen at Sea
This is the opening sequence. In the film’s prologue, Juliette Binoche climbs the stairs of an apartment, opens the doors, and ends up finding her stepfather making love to her mother. The two old withered bodies are on top of each other, the ballet is mechanical. And what should have been just a family shock becomes a moral question impossible to resolve. The mother has dementia so could she really consent? The question is indeed dizzying. If this is not the case, who decides for him? The husband who loves her? The girl who wants to protect her? The doctor? The police? Institutions?
This is where Lance Hammer’s film becomes Haneckian because it locks the viewer for two hours in a situation with no acceptable outcome. Every decision damages someone. Every gesture of protection resembles violence. The film was born from a workshop between the three actors and the performances are up to par. Tom Courtenay is fabulous as an overwhelmed husband, convinced that love is still enough when everything else falls apart. Facing him, Binoche seems lost. She doesn’t have the beautiful role: she has the impossible role.
The silence of the day: Everybody Digs Bill Evans
We would have liked to hear a bit of Bill Evans yesterday morning. We almost came on stage for that. But Everybody… is not a biopic about the greatest jazz pianist. It is rather a rambling about a moment of rupture, about his seclusion in silence. Grant Gee catches Evans not at the top, but in this black hole which follows the death of Scott LaFaro (the bassist with whom he had just revolutionized the art of the jazz trio). In love with its own restraint, its chic and composed aesthetic, the film is often too formal to move. Anders Danielsen Lie (Oslo August 31) has the perfect figure, glasses, paleness and the air of constantly apologizing for existing. But by dint of playing with erasure, Everybody Digs Bill Evans sometimes gives the impression of circling around its subject without ever attacking it. We admire the outfit, the black and white. We would like a dissonance or a false note to sometimes derail that.
Film of the day: The Invitation
Out of competition, Olivia Wilde presented The Invitationcomedy adapted from Spanish Sentimentalitself taken from the play Los arriba vecinos. The principle is simple: Angela and Joe invite their new upstairs neighbors, Pina and Hawk. They expect a polite evening. The neighbors suggest an orgy. Starring Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton and Olivia Wilde, the film is a boulevard piece repainted in Sundance colors: it’s a laugh before the couple’s foundations begin to shake. Wilde was given the script as an actress before also moving behind the camera, and the cast reworked the text collectively. Which perhaps explains this feeling of permanent ping-pong: everyone comes to dinner with their own little discomfort, their anxieties and their frustrations. No one will leave with the same certainties.
