Le Deuxième Acte (The Second Act), the new film by the last great innovator of French comedy, the prolific Quentin Dupieux, opened this Tuesday the 77th edition of the Cannes festival with his usual humor, as funny as it is disconcerting. In a meta-cinematographic key, Dupieux presents five characters (four actors and an extra) facing a game of reality and fiction under the direction of a despotic algorithm. Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel and one of their favorite actors, Raphaël Quenard, make fun of themselves and their craft in a comedy that sets the stage for the next 12 days, with lines like this: “It has never served as nothing to make movies. That’s why cinema is cool, because it doesn’t make sense.” Within the endless programming of the festival and its parallel sections, we chose ten stops, with some incontestable milestones.
The resurrection of Napoleon
The big event of the first day, and perhaps of the entire festival, was the screening within the section Cinema Classics of the first part of the monumental Napoleon by Abel Gance. On the stage of the Debussy room, the filmmaker Costa-Gavras and the director of the French Cinematheque, Frédéric Bonnaud, presented a historical “reconstruction” that has taken more than 15 years of research and restoration through the archives of a pioneering filmmaker and revolutionary. Costa-Gavras referred to this prodigious cinematic epic as “a martyr film,” “a poem” made from “the passion” of “a great man for another man.” In the audience, Abel Gance’s daughter, Clarisse Gance, was able to see something never seen before: the film that her father shot in 1927 and that until now had only been partially reconstructed.
Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’
Those who know the version of Napoleon from 1983, five and a quarter hours compared to the nine hours of the full version, you will remember that when it was shown in Spain the orchestra that accompanied the screening was conducted by Carmine Coppola, father of Francis Ford Coppola and author of many of the soundtracks of his son’s movies. Carmine died in 1991 and his son returns to the festival that elevated him with two golden palms: in 1974, just half a century ago, with The conversation, and in 1979 with Apocalypse Now. As happened with Hunch (1982), the American filmmaker has embarked on a suicidal project due to its size and ambition. Megalopolis It is an obsession that has pursued him since the eighties and that now arrives at Cannes with the testamentary aura of a filmmaker accustomed to disaster and epic.
A youthful biography of Donald Trump
The Apprentice is the film by Iranian-born filmmaker Ali Abbasi (Border, Holy Spider) about Donald Trump. The director, of Danish nationality, recreates Trump’s origins in the New York real estate business during the seventies and eighties, when no one ventured his messianic role in history. With actor Sebastian Stan playing the tycoon, the film focuses on his relationship with Republican lawyer Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong), a sinister character known for being Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man during the witch hunt against communist sympathizers in the United States in the 1950s.
Four female directors among the 22 films in competition
Of the 22 films in competition, only four are directed by women: Andrea Arnold, Coralie Fargeat, Payal Kapadia and Agathe Riedinger. Of the four selected, the best known will be the British Arnold with bird, a film performed by two of the actors of the moment, Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski. Arnold is an immersive filmmaker who, in her previous film, Cow (2022), shot over four years, offered a moving insight into the life (so to speak) of a cow on a farm. Feminism and animalism from the hand of a conscientious director who a few weeks ago declared that she had not yet ready the film – the sixth in her filmography – that will be seen here this year and about which very little is known: it is the story of two brothers , one of them 12 years old, who live in an apartment in Kent County.
The return of ‘American Gigolo’
Oh Canada is the film in which the legendary Paul Schrader returns to direct Richard Gere, the protagonist of American Gigolo (1980), a title that, in addition to launching him into stardom, made the look Armani from the eighties. At 74 years old, Gere plays a writer who, like sixty thousand other Americans, moved to Canada in the sixties to avoid going to the army during the Vietnam War. The film is based on a novel by Russell Bank, a friend of Schrader (77 years old), who already adapted another of his novels in the nineties, Affliction. To play Richard Gere as a young man, Schrader has cast Jacob Elordi.
Ubiquitous Lanthimos
Not even a year has passed since the Golden Lion of Venice was awarded to Yorgos Lanthimos for poor creatures and the Greek director participates in the contest with Kinds of Kindness, also with Emma Stone in the cast. It will be one of the longest films in the competition (165 minutes) and for now there is only the hint of its suggestive series of posters, the work of one of its regular collaborators, the graphic artist Vasilis Marmatakis. A campaign that has led to the director of Canine (2009). All with the permission of David Cronenberg, who returns two years after Crimes of the future to Cannes.
Jonás Trueba and his ‘Volverás’
The only Spanish feature film in the competition is screened within the Directors’ Fortnight. In You will return, Jonás Trueba reunites his troupe of collaborators and friends (Itsaso Arana, Vito Sanz) to tell in a comedic tone the story of a couple who, after 15 years of living together, decides to celebrate their separation with a party. The Spanish participation is completed with the short The brides of the southby Elena López Riera.
Frederick Wiseman gives voice to baseball
Eephus, Carson Lund’s debut, is screening in Directors’ Fortnight. Lund also participates in that section as director of photography for Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. His film takes place in New England during an amateur baseball game that lasts an entire day, from morning to night, because it is the team’s last one before their old stadium is demolished. The curious thing is that the film features the voice of the legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, whose 1969 classic is being screened these days. Law and order.
Return to Sesame Street
Ron Howard directs the documentary about the father of Sesame Street, Jim Henson. Along with the documentaries about Faye Dunaway and Elisabeth Taylor, Henson’s, titled Jim Henson Idea Man, promises to satisfy the nostalgic vein of each year. Henson died in 1990 at the age of 53 after having changed the course of puppet theater by inventing a system that brought the television medium closer to puppets manipulated by people.
My cousin Maria
The movie Being Maria is inspired by the book My cousin Maria Schneider: A Memoirpublished in 2018 and written by Vanessa Schneider, little cousin of the late actress María Schneider, performer alongside Marlon Brando of The last Tango in Paris (1973). Directed by Jessica Palud, it is screened in a parallel section, Cannes Premiere, in a festival marked at its start by a new wave of Me Too in France. Being Maria joins the biopic trend through the controversial filming of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film, and with actor Matt Dillon in the skin of the myth. The interest of the film is above all extra-cinematic since it points to Schneider’s traumatic experience when he was barely 20 years old. According to his cousin, he never recovered from the experience, especially because of the famous butter sequence (shot without prior notice and therefore without consent), which brought him bad taste jokes and lifelong trauma.
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