Through three films confident in the capacity of cinema to show the invisible, by reactivating the power of illusion of the childhood of the 7e art or by exploring the possibilities of fantastic cinema, “The critical spirit” today probes disappeared, repressed or little-known worlds, to resurrect the landscapes, the dead or the terrors which they carry.
We successively mention Grand Tourthe new journey of Portuguese director-storyteller Miguel Gomes, and the films of two Franco-Algerian directors, animated by Emma Benestan, who takes us into the documentary and supernatural world of Camargue races, and The StormsDania Reymond-Boughenou's first feature film, in which winds of yellow sand resurrect the dead and bury the living.
« Grand Tour »
Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, whose each film has been eagerly awaited by moviegoers since his feature film Taboo released at the beginning of the 2010s, today offers a new cinematographic, historical and poetic journey, entitled Grand Tour.
Grand Tour begins in 1918, in colonial Burma, when Edward, an official of the English Crown, flees the city where he was to marry his fiancée Molly. She, convinced that he is the man of her life, sets off in pursuit, crossing different Asian countries and thus following the “Grand Tour” undertaken by a number of British travelers going from India to China and Japan, via Burma or Singapore.
But the “Grand Tour” that Miguel Gomes offers us is not only geographical, it is also a journey inside cinema itself, from the moving images of the fairground theaters which existed before the invention of the Lumière brothers to 'to the genres of melodrama and screwball comedy or Hollywood “zany comedy”, with which the film never ceases to dialogue. The film won the directing prize at the last Cannes Film Festival and has been in theaters since Wednesday November 27.
« animated »
The first feature film from actress, editor and director Emma Benestan, Fragile, took place in Sète. animated moves a few kilometers away, in the landscapes of Camargue, in the world of “gardians”, bull breeders, and “razeteurs”, on foot and without protection, whose goal is to win a cockade hung on the horns of the bull.
In this very masculine universe, Nejma, played by Oulaya Amamra, tries to win the next Camargue race, despite the concerns of her mother, who fears that a misplaced horn blow will prevent her from having children, and in despite also the supernatural phenomena which take hold of his body while other torn bodies, attributed to a rabid bull, are discovered in the region… The film was presented at the end of the Week of critically at the last Cannes Film Festival and has been in theaters since Wednesday November 27.
« The Storms »
The Storms is the title of the first feature film by Franco-Algerian Dania Reymond-Boughenou, born in Algiers in 1982, and arrived in France in 1994, during the dark decade, made up of Islamist terrorism and military repression, which struck her country caused tens of thousands of victims.
Even if Algeria is never named in this film shot in Morocco, due to lack of agreement from the Algerian authorities, it is indeed this dark decade which haunts a film choosing to go through the fantastic to tell how the repressed dead can act return, very literally, to the world of the living, as if they had simply gone away on a long journey.
This return from the dead, like Camélia Jordana who plays the wife of the main character of the film playing himself an investigative journalist, benefits from a strange yellow dust.
It covers the fields and invests the cities, until it engulfs them, giving at the same time the tone, the color and the grainy material of a film that is both post-traumatic and pre-apocalyptic.
The movie is in theaters since November 20.
With :
- Alice Leroywho writes for Cinema notebooks et Panther Premiere ;
- Salima Tenfichelecturer at Sorbonne Nouvelle University;
- Raphael Nieuwjaerwho writes both for Cinema notebooks and the magazine Studies.
“Critical Mind” is a podcast produced by Karen Beun.
