The Odyssey, The Dream Adventure, The Last Viking: what’s new at the cinema this week
What to see in theaters
THE EVENT
THE ODYSSEY ★★★★☆
By Christopher Nolan
The essentials
Three hours, 250 million dollars, an all-star cast: everything came together for the portentous fresco. On the contrary, Nolan delivers a nervous, haunted film, a huge film about war disguised as a peplum.
After Oppenheimer and the Oscars, we feared that Nolan would rest on his laurels. But the exact opposite of the grandiloquent peplum that one might have feared, the film on the contrary moves very quickly. And we could multiply the examples of these moments of pure staging which splash the web. Circe who transforms Odysseus’ companions into a hair-raising moment of anguish; the passage to hell is fantastic. However, the peak of the film is not in the wanderings of Ulysses but in Ithaca where Nolan deploys an idea of direction which takes the film by surprise. He films Anne Hathaway/Pénélope almost always alone, in a setting that is more theater than cinema. But it is the structure of the film, which is perhaps the most powerful idea in the film. During the first two thirds, we follow the adventures of Telemachus then those of Ulysses, before a finale of hallucinatory revenge. The peplum shifts without warning into film noir or western. And his hero becomes again what he never stopped being: a killer. After hours of sea, mist, fantasy and procrastination, the epic ends behind bloody closed doors. And this is where the thesis of the film comes into its own. The war, when you win it, you bring it home, reminds Nolan. After Oppenheimer and his cursed scientist, here is his haunted king. We begin to understand, film after film, what Nolan is writing: a work about guilt and about those who can no longer return home.
Gaël Golhen
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PREMIERE LIKED A LOT
THE DREAM ADVENTURE ★★★★☆
By Valeska Grisebach
Veska (Yana Radeva) walks blindly through a Bulgarian town, Svilengrad, in the heart of desolate southeastern Europe. Here, people and goods transit illegally. Corruption and intimidation guide social relations. So it happens that things disappear without leaving a trace. Veska left young, made her life elsewhere. Here she is back. Today, she organizes archaeological excavations and approaches from the inside this earth which is everywhere rotten. Svilengrad is controlled by an omnipotent local mafia boss whom Evka knew well in her youth. Who knows, maybe they even loved each other. A tension suffocates the frame more and more. In this abandoned territory, life does not reinvent itself, it remains fixed in its ancestral principles. At the end of an increasingly tense journey, space made us feel all its terrestrial magnitudes. Like in the great westerns. Impressive.
Thomas Baura
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THE LAST SESSION ★★★★☆
By Pan Nalin
The Last Session orchestrates the collision of two worlds: that of Samay, 9 years old, restless and curious, and that of the projectionist from the neighboring village, Fazal. An exchange of good practices takes place between them – dishes cooked by the boy’s mother in exchange for lessons on the art of 35mm. So, Pan Nalin’s film takes on the air of The Fabelmans. Same wonder, same tale about childhood, same dream of grandeur. And like his young hero we suddenly (re)fall in love with cinema. But like every love at first sight, this one comes with its share of sorrows. The Last Dance is a story as alive as it is crossed by the mourning of 35mm. When the reaper (the formidable video projector) arrives, the destroyed films will be transformed into colorful bracelets that Samay will find on the wrists of Indian women during a masterful homage to cinema sequence. This Last Dance will amaze you
Lucie Chiquer
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FIRST TO LIKE
THE LAST VIKING ★★★☆☆
By Anders Thomas Jensen
Mads Mikkelsen likes to regularly go and recharge his batteries with his group of friends from the Green Butchers, the director Anders Thomas Jensen and the actor Nicolaj Lie Kaas. Here he plays Manfred, a man suffering from dissociative identity disorder and convinced that he is John Lennon, even if his look is frankly not Lennonian. The film begins when Manfred/Lennon sees his bank robber brother reappear in his life, who takes him with him in search of a buried loot, an adventure which will lead them to excavate well-buried family secrets along the way, while crossing paths with a handful of eccentric individuals… The mixture of brutal thriller and crazy comedy only works half-way, but the film, by anchoring itself to candor cracked by the character of Manfred, nevertheless tells lovely things about the very tortuous paths that one sometimes has to take to heal from one’s traumas.
Frédéric Foubert
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THE HERO OF BERLIN ★★★☆☆
By Wolfgang Becker
This adaptation of a best-seller by Maxim Leo explores the ambivalences of German reunification that has long been poorly digested. We follow the owner of a video club on the verge of bankruptcy who, for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the wall, finds himself propelled into the spotlight, by assuming, following an imprecise investigation by a journalist, the authorship of an act of resistance that he never accomplished. The largest flight of residents from East Berlin to West Berlin thanks to sabotage on a train switch, due solely to… a combination of circumstances. Here we go beyond a transparent production to savor the mischievous way in which this film questions the figure of the hero and shows that, even when deception appears, the legend is sometimes better than the truth to celebrate history with an H. A subject which could only inspire the director of Good Bye Lenin! for what will remain his final film because he died at the end of filming.
Thierry Cheze
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FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED
COMET ★★☆☆☆
By Elie Wajeman
The celestial body of the title stagnates in the Paris sky, letting its luminous traces escape. On earth, like worker ants, men and women struggle as best they can. Elie Wajeman (Night Doctor) tries again at the choral dimension after his Anarchists in 2015. Under the starry vault, there are in particular two brothers trying to get along, a theatrical troupe rehearsing Chekhov on the verge of imploding. The initial postulate that Claude Lelouch, champion of a blissful humanism, would not deny, rather seeks to explore the depths of a tenacious melancholy. The protagonists seem, in fact, to move gropingly in the darkness. But all these little people braced against their personal problems struggle to claim anything other than their egotism. The choral side produces nothing other than individualities side by side without ever really creating a collective.
Thomas Baura
WHERE THE WIND COMES FROM ★★☆☆☆
By Amel Guellaty
Alyssa and Mehdi have known each other since childhood. He easily lets himself be drawn into the not-always-the-most-honest trips of his lifelong sidekick. Above all, at his side, he begins to dream of making a living from his drawings, far from Tunisia which struggles to offer them both work and a better life. A competition seems to be the opportunity to achieve this. Too bad if they have to travel half the country to do so. For her first feature film, Tunisian director and photographer Amel Guellaty offers a very realistic portrait of the youth of her country, tossed between their desire for grandeur and the harshness of a society where a diploma rarely allows them to escape precariousness. And offers an original road movie carried by its two young performers. It’s a shame, however, that she sometimes uses the most superfluous digital effects (men with pig heads, a rooster coming out of nowhere, levitating bodies, etc.) which tend to derail the film (a little).
Anne Lenoir
THE SHEPHERD AND THE BEARS ★★☆☆☆
By Max Keegan
This documentary explores the consequences of the reintroduction of bears into the daily life of a small Pyrenean village and the way in which they divide the population between those who welcome this gesture and the peasants who discover their sheep killed, forcing them to constant surveillance, by day and especially by night, which is inevitably exhausting. The Shepherd and the Bears has the merit of giving each party time to express themselves rather than choosing a side or limiting itself to reductive punchlines from both sides. But in the end, this film does not, strictly speaking, bring anything new to everything we have read or seen on the issue. Undoubtedly aware of this, Max Keegan tries his hand at compositions of images or the construction of a dramaturgy taking his film to the borders of fiction. But this mixture of genres hardly proves convincing.
Thierry Cheze
And also
Kayara, Inca Princess, by César Zelada and Dirk Hampel
The covers
Another man’s poison by Irving Rapper
The Crime was Almost Perfect by Alfred Hitchcock
