CANNES PREMIÈRE – Emma, Sammy and Cyril meet in the 1980s, and experience romance, desire, fear and happiness together, while AIDS hits them. A romantic film, which seduces with its vitality.
Victor Belmondo, Lou Lampros, Hélyos Johnson and Théo Christine in “Live, die, reborn”, by Gaël Morel. ARP Selection – Arte France Cinema
By Frédéric Strauss
Published on May 23, 2024 at 8:30 p.m.
une selection at Cannes Première, thirty years after the presentation of Wild reeds by André Téchiné, where he made his debut as an actor: this is a great story for Gaël Morel. A story of perseverance for this boy, now in his fifties, who became a brilliant filmmaker (At full speed, 1996) and absences, too few films shot. Live, die, be reborn tells all this: the connection with Téchiné and Wild Reeds, celebration of youth and love in light and gravity, the passing of time and a desire for cinema which, despite the difficulties, has never been so strong, so evident.
We are immediately impressed by Gaël Morel’s direction, the wonder he communicates to us by reconstituting Paris in the mid-1980s like a romantic Eden. Sammy and Emma begin a romance that will grow and settle down. into family life and crossing the solitary path of Cyril, a photographer whose gaze seeks grace, magic, and finds the eyes, the body, the presence of Sammy…
This impulse towards beauty, very much in the spirit of these rediscovered 1980s, is also the law of Live, die, be reborn, where each shot seduces with its composition and its vitality. Happiness is the subject of this film and, cinematically speaking, it is there all the time. The characters will see their joy of living hit by the fear of dying, with the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, turning out to be fragile, mortal. Then be reborn? The title announces it, affirming its faith in a happiness that could even be eternal, whether we experience it in the present or remember it…
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Over the course of ten years, Gaël Morel gives his intimate scenario a seductive romantic lyricism which leads everyone to change places: between Emma, Sammy and Cyril, the links are recomposed, the dazzling desire and sensuality give way to other ways of being close, of being together, and maturity is born from learning to live in rapid succession, in the urgency of the countdown that AIDS was then launching.
Focused on bodies, desire and homosexual and heterosexual pleasure, Live, die, be reborn is also a poignant reflection on encounters and sharing that become founding experiences. As moving, at times, as a melodrama, the film also has a classical solidity, a serene and meditative intensity. It is carried by three actors as inspired as their director. Lou Lampros never ceases to surprise in the role of Emma, Théo Christine gives Sammy the strength of a solar star and, playing Cyril, Victor Belmondo has the effect of an apparition, all masculine gentleness and sensitivity. An actor’s joy.
r Live, die, be reborn, by Gaël Morel (France, 1h49). With Victor Belmondo, Lou Lampros, Théo Christine. Cannes Premiere. Released September 25.
Cannes Film Festival 2024
Reviews of films in competition, meetings with filmmakers, the jury, revelations… Télérama brings you the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, from May 14 to 25.
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