“The Illusion”, “Shana”, “Backrooms”, “The Whale and the Musician”… Our film reviews of the week

She was the big absentee from the last Cannes Film Festival, even though she had won the Caméra d’or in 1997 for Suzaku and ten years later the grand prize with La Forêt de Mogari…: Naomi Kawase, also author of the tasty The Delights of Tokyo (2015), returns to the screens with this twelfth fiction feature film, L’Illusion de Yakushima.

As she has often done in her previous films, she combines an invented story with quasi-documentary moments. Here, it is the story of Corry (Vicky Krieps, always exceptional in its deep mystery and immediate charm), a French doctor, specialist in heart transplantation in children, who lives and works at the Kobe hospital. She lives with Jin, her companion, met during a hike on the island of Yaku, who one day decides to disappear into the wild without explanation. But the intimate and loving aspect of the scenario, despite a few moments of grace, gradually gives way to the clear desire to be interested in the medical dimension of the main character.

For both philosophical and ancestral moral reasons, Japan is not comfortable with the Western practice of surgical transplantation. It is therefore very difficult to find organ donors there, and the figures we hear on this subject in the film are chilling. Through the character of Corry, Kawase inevitably transforms his film into a fascinating immersion into this culture so different from ours…: the definition of the moment of death is not the same as in Europe and that changes everything or almost.

By situating her realistic story in a pediatric ward, the filmmaker obviously reinforces the emotional charge of her subject, without ever falling into excessive pathos. The debates between Japanese doctors and the heroine who tries to convince them to overcome their prejudices in order to save lives are certainly very intense.

To this, we must add another dimension usual for the filmmaker: the extreme attention she pays to nature, viewed with infinite respect and vigor. A nature that is sometimes peaceful and idyllic, as during the first romantic meeting of Corry and Jin, sometimes unleashed and worrying when a hurricane threatens to call into question a vital surgical operation. Kawase thus reminds us of the fragile balance that reigns at all times between our environment and us.

🎬 L’Illusion de Yakushima, de Naomi Kawase, avec Vicky Krieps, Kan’ichiro, Ojiro Nakamura, Misaki Kakano. 1 h 52. Released Wednesday June 17.

Presented in Cannes at the Filmmakers’ Fortnight in May, ShanaLila Pinell’s first film, caused a sensation there. Firstly thanks to its main actress, Eva Huault, who thus made her sensational debut in cinema. She plays Shana, a young girl with very green language, very light outfits and a very hectic daily life. She constantly oscillates between the Jewish bourgeois environment that she left and the world of petty suburban crime with her companion Moise, an imprisoned drug dealer.

The director, also a screenwriter, could have been content to film this colorful character, as annoying as he is endearing. But fortunately the film goes further. By opening with the evocation of the ten plagues of Egypt and returning regularly to them, it places Shana’s chaotic journey in another dimension. Her gradual emancipation is at the heart of the story as the heroine wants to put an end to the violent and toxic relationship that binds her to Moise. Without falling into the anecdotal and the picturesque, the film happily combines drama and comedy, like Shana’s tempestuous relationship with her mother (played to perfection by Noémie Lvovsky). With this film is born at the same time a filmmaker and an actress whose future creations we can’t wait to discover.

🎬 Shanaby Lila Pinell, with Eva Huault, Noémie Lvovsky, Inès Gherib, Anaïs Monah. 1 h 20. Released Wednesday June 17.

Adaptation of the web series created by Kane Parsons in 2022 and pure creation of Internet culture, Backrooms takes up one of the favorite topics of Reddit-type forums: “spaces” liminaries “, with their aesthetic and the terrifying fictions that are invented there. Deserted, abandoned, these abstract spaces cause unease… empty offices where only a damaged armchair remains, rooms with indeterminate use bathed in yellowish light, familiar but loaded with anomalies…; we feel foreign, observed and in danger.

It is this distressing playground, here the infinite basement of a furniture store in liquidation, that Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), owner of the store, and Mary (Renate Reinsve), his psychotherapist, explore. With Backroomsthe young 20-year-old filmmaker skillfully combines science fiction and psychological horror, but above all signs a work that goes beyond its digital origins to recall the narrative madness ofAlice in Wonderland than the aesthetic of Salvador Dalí. Both delight and torture, its extreme surrealism, however, requires a warning…: the sensations provided by this phenomenal film – already 220 – million dollars at the worldwide box office for a 15 – million budget – are very strong and largely disturbing…

🎬 Backroomsby Kane Parsons, with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass. 1 h 51. Released Wednesday June 17.

Rone, a French composer of electronic music, has a lot to do with silence. In the delightful documentary The Whale and the Musician, he explains: through his art or writing, he communicates much better than through words.

The voice of this self-taught musician is not an instrument and he does not always find the words. His surprise is thus touching when he discovers several videos of sailors which all show the same strange phenomenon: when his music is played on the surface of the seas, whales appear. His music “ would speak “so to these cetaceans, themselves known for “ chanter  ? The idea deserves to be explored and it is therefore on board a sailboat for exploration and protection of the environment and accompanied by scientists, including a bioacoustician, that Rone will plunge microphones and speakers under the surface of the Indian Ocean.

He modulates frequencies, searches for common tones, saturates and distorts sounds, experiments. Objective: to establish through music, supposedly a universal language, communication and, perhaps, to create with these marine mammals.

Initially enthusiastic, Rone will come up against questions that he had not anticipated. Do the sounds and melodies it sends to the whales risk disturbing them? What will their answers be? Is he really in his place here? Behind the famous musician, we discover Erwan Castex, his name in the city, an ambitious and naive artist, a human so lovable but so insignificant in the immensity of the oceanic world. The fragile poetry of The Whale and the Musicianwhich delicately recounts the moving limits of an encounter between man and animal, touches the heart.

🎬 The Whale and the Musicianby Valentin Paoli, with Rone. 1 h 23. Released Wednesday June 17.

Broadcast this year for the first time in French cinemas, although it was shot in 1989, this film by the British director Derek Jarman, who died in 1994, is not the simple rendering of Benjamin Britten’s sumptuous work War Requiem, of which he bears the title.

The filmmaker could have been content to illustrate this oratorio, created in 1963 and which recounts the horrors of the First World War, through the memories of an old veteran who became impotent. But that was ignoring the singularity of this filmmaker who notably adapted Shakespeare for cinema and gave her first role to Tilda Swinton, who we also find here, alongside Laurence Olivier, whose last appearance on the big screen was this. The result is more than striking.

With this exceptional cast, Jarman mixes fiction and archive images to better match Britten’s music and restore its funereal scale. Constantly moving from the present to the past, War Requiem establishes itself as a major film within the classic works brought to the screen, a category which has few real successes.

🎬 War Requiemby Derek Jarman with Nathaniel Parker, Tilda Swinton, Laurence Olivier, Patricia Hayes. 1 h 32. Released Wednesday June 17.