Deauville – Day 2: Andy Garcia revives film noir, an animated gem brings the festival to tears and Mouse hits the mark

In Deauville, day 2, we face the mourners: a missing friend, a mother who fades away, and Andy Garcia who transforms film noir into a refuge from the violence of the present.

In Deauville, on Sunday, we mainly talked about mourning: a friend disappeared in Mousea mother who fades into Hodgepodgeand the old thrillers that Andy Garcia tries to revive in Diamond.

The emotion of the day: Méli-Mélo

For the first time in its history, Deauville put an animated film in competition. And it was flawless. Adapted from the autobio graphic novel by Sarah Leavitt, Hodgepodge tells the story of a young woman’s return to her childhood home when her mother begins to lose her memory. The subject could make you fear the worst: the tearjerker, the solemnity, the lesson on Alzheimer’s… Leah Nelson avoids all these traps. It does not minimize the cruelty of the disease but is never overwhelming. Funny, lively, Hodgepodge draws on the experience of Sarah, a queer woman, to better tell this feeling of being stuck between two worlds: the one we are leaving, the one we are trying to build, and this family that we suddenly have to look at differently when it becomes threatened.
In fact, the film instantly finds the right distance. Thanks to the beauty of his line and his dynamic staging, Hodgepodge plays the string of emotion, never that of blackmail; brings humor, without dodging the pain. And multiplies visual inventions. The heroine’s plane journeys, transformed into hilarious little psycho capsules, are one of those ideas that say everything about the film: as the memory becomes disrupted, as the inevitable draws nearer, the drawing gains in freedom, humor and speed. In the darkness of the CID, we could hear tears flowing between laughter.

Surprise of the day: Mouse

We thought we knew this kind of film by heart. Especially in Deauville where, at one time, we saw wheelbarrows of them every year. Two inseparable teenagers, a tragedy, a grieving mother, a summer and a year at the end of which everything will have changed… But Mouse advances without forcing, without cheating, with a fairly rare accuracy and authenticity.

Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson film grief as something that circulates between the characters. Minnie doesn’t know who she is without Callie anymore. Callie’s mother no longer knows how to deal with her grief. And the film never hands out the right answers. The emotion always remains at the right height thanks to a subtle blend of comedy and drama. The real surprise is this: we thought this cinema had disappeared, but it is still vibrant. The truly great little American independent film, the one which does not confuse modesty and weakness, pain and pathos shone on the stage. Special mention to the main actress, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, impeccable in the role of Minnie, this heroine who constantly moves forward in balance.

Film of the day: Diamond

With Diamondout of competition, Andy Garcia does not reinvent film noir. First he puts it back on his shoulders like an old, threadbare trench coat. From the first sequence, he plays a tired detective. There is jazz, club chairs and plumes of smoke… Joe Diamond adjusts his fedora and we are propelled into the 40s (Andy Garcia even made a Bogart face for the occasion). However, surprise, when he goes out into the street, he is stopped by a Google car… Could Joe Diamond be a kind of black Captain America? A guy defrosted from the forties and lost among Teslas, selfies and TikTok? If we think for a moment about the series Sugar with Colin Farrell, however, this turns out to be a false lead.

He has a case to solve (prove that a woman did not kill her wealthy husband) and drinks with his friends (Bill Murray as a lawyer-bartender and Dustin Hoffman as a forensic doctor). But we gradually understand that if our hero lives in the past, it is not to carry out his investigations. There is a good reason. Black is not just a movie buff’s vanity, but an armor, a parallel world where Diamond can continue to stand. Andy Garcia doesn’t replay old codes to look pretty. He films a man who took refuge in a mythological universe because the present had become unbearable for him.

This is where Diamond gradually becomes touching. Reside. Because beneath the veneer of pastiche, there is something else: the portrait of a man who does not play old-fashioned detective out of snobbery, but because thrillers offered a form to his own melancholy. A love letter to a genre, and especially to fiction in general, the film is beautifully strange. In Deauville, on a day marked by mourning and ghosts, Garcia’s old costume suddenly looked damn good.