À la moitié de la compétition du 79eAt the Cannes Film Festival, it is still a little early and risky to predict the film that will win the Palme d’Or on Saturday May 23. Nevertheless, among the works broadcast, several films and performances touched us.
Coincidentally with the programming, it was films by actresses which opened the competition. In the first place A Woman’s Life by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet. Léa Drucker is amazing in the skin of a woman head of the maxillofacial surgery department, managing the meager budget of her department as much as a mother suffering from Alzheimer’s. As if that wasn’t enough, her relationship with Henri (Charles Berling) will be turned upside down when she meets Frida, a novelist (Mélanie Thierry).
Léa Seydoux is also formidable on the poster of Gentle Monster by the Austrian Marie Kreutzer. She plays Lucy, a renowned musician discovering that her husband (Laurence Rupp) is accused of child molestation. The French star brilliantly plays this woman struggling to protect her son and trying to navigate through her husband’s lies. Catherine Deneuve comes to support this intense film, a personal story for its director: the main actor of Corsageson précédent long-métrage, l’Autrichien Florian Teichtmeister, a été condamné pour pédocriminalité.
A weekend dedicated to actors
We had to wait until Saturday to see the most crucial performances among the men. L’Être aimé by the Spaniard Rodrigo Sorogoyen (already released in our cinemas) features an impressive Javier Bardem in the shoes of a film director trying to reconnect with his daughter, an actress, around a film shoot.
Equally notable are Adam Driver and Miles Teller in Paper Tiger by the American James Gray, an old-fashioned thriller around two brothers who find themselves entangled in a dirty affair linked to the Russian mafia, where the actors play complex and deep characters. With the support of a moving Scarlett Johansson, the film succeeds in its dive into the depths of the American dream.
Between brevity and length
The two most notable films are both the shortest and the longest in the competition. In 1:22, Fatherland (or 1949) by the Polish artist Pawe Pawlikowski, tells the story of the return after the Second World War to Germany of the writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) with his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller). It’s meticulous, very well performed, and the ending hits us with its emotions.
En 3 h 16, Suddenlythe first film in French by Japanese director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi describes the brief and intense friendship between a nursing home director trying to change her care methods (Virginie Efira) and a Japanese playwright in the terminal phase of cancer (Tao Okamoto). The end of life, as a whole, is central. But we are dealing with a sum film, which also deals with capitalism, its impact on our bodies, theater, and sorority. All in a bright tone that manages to make a conversation at 4 a.m. with cold coffee and a whiteboard overwhelming. A mark like any other of a great film.
