Festival
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In a festival full of films built around heroic figures, and just as many candidates for acting awards, Pedro Almodóvar and his actresses give us a lesson in restraint, just like the Boukherma brothers who have produced a successful adaptation of “Their Children After Them.”
We got the answer to this question that was hanging in the burning air of the Mostra: why the Joker 2 by Todd Phillips, clearly the celebrity and industrial asset of this edition, has it been relegated to the end of the festival? Probably because the tsunami of fans that will descend on the banks of the Lido to celebrate Lady Gaga could otherwise have exceeded protocol and security. It is therefore without this iconoclastic character, a repellent and lover of the era, that we wonder, as the days of screenings go by: what vision of the cinema character do the films in the competition defend?
Often conveniently clinging to a heroic figure – great character = great role, the candidates for acting awards are therefore legion –, they favor stories of elevation that roll out the red carpet for the exceptional individual. The confusion is maintained between the staging and the hero’s journey, without the filmmaker ever taking the risk of biasing the point of view, of twisting it, of illuminating his journey differently than in the headlights of a great man’s destiny – these are often period films (half of the competition is in costumes), conducive to this kind of soothing exercise. Thus, Walter Salles’ film, I’m Still Here, whose title sounds like a reminder of its existence, twelve years after the decorative On the road : here is a director again from whom we were not particularly expecting news and whose cinema continues to i
