Large existential questioning on the Croisette!Benedetta, Dutchman Paul Verhoeven, will he do controversial?It ideally takes a burning in competition in Cannes to stir up the festival flames.Otherwise, our little pack is bored.But what to let go of the wild beasts?
The problem with the announced scandals is the weight of expectations, necessarily followed by disappointments.Notice, if Benedetta had released 30 or 40 years ago, his alloy of lesbianism and religion could have been raised with fervent Catholics.But the hubbub around the last temptation of Christ by Martin Scorsese in 1988, appeared to today's light years.
L’action de Benedetta se déroule dans une Italie du XVIIe siècle où une religieuse (Virginie Efira) affiche des miracles autoproclamés durant un épisode de grande peste et de bûchers allumés.
Verhoeven does not see himself why devil his film taken from a real episode could shock.The fact remains that his sulphurous reputation follows him.The filmmaker of Basic Instinct, long camped in Hollywood, had already filmed in France she (2016), in which an Isabelle Huppert and raped had had a beef effect.
This time, Benedetta mainly holds wet firecracker.Yet Church homophobia remains a topical subject, the corruption of its elites just as much.Nothing works.This often laughable, with heavy and exaggerated effects, plays between drama and burlesque with humor that cannot save the austere furniture of the convent.Obviously inspired by the films on Joan of Arc de Bruno Dumont, Verhoeven overloaded her staging, but without poetry: Benedetta leaves marble.The filmmaker leads to his heroine, from her tender age, at the Pescia convent, in Tuscany.Later, her mystical visions, allied with her antics in the arms of a young droolized nun (Daphne Patakia), will be able to confuse her minds.
Small laughing nuns disguise themselves as angels;An ambitious abbot intrigues in the shadows;A debauchery and cruel nuncio (Lambert Wilson) introduces the executioner of the Inquisition, a bonus plague.There remains the abbess, played with a thousand nuances of hardness by Charlotte Rampling.The superior dares doubts about the veracity of the stigma of this pretty blonde who came to sow trouble at the convent, then oust it.
At French media, Virginie Efira declared that she had found a lesbian erotic scene delicate to play.In fact, the screen does not reveal much, if not an orgasm (simulated) with the help of a statue of the Virgin transformed into dildo.This gifted and versatile actress does not offer a performance up to her talent.Still in representation, without succeeding in making the inner dimensions of a faith mixed with hysteria at the heart of her character, she remains on the surface of herself.But it was written: Benedetta does indeed divide.Some applaud the filmmaker's cheek.Others - I am - believe that he avoided diving in his own abysses.Big damage!
The happy surprise of the fracture
It's good to say!Without appearing in the favorites of the race, the fracture, of the French Catherine Corsini (an impossible love, the beautiful season), becomes the happy surprise of this sunny Friday.Staging without moralizing a Parisian hospital overwhelmed by the injured yellow vests with all wind, with notch staff and patients on the brink of nerves, was not easy in the comic vein.And this, without renouncing his social activism.This scathing portrait of France today, on the left and the right -wing right, with institutions on the edge of the abyss, is tasted with a zest.
And what performers!Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, pushing high her chronic neurotic note in the skin of RAF, imposes a hilarious, talkative, geignard, undocumented and endearing that a fall ships to the emergency room.His partner of life (Marina Foïs, Pourcuting and Tonique) would like to divorce, but camps at her bedside without ceasing to move.Yann, wounded by barricades (hilarious Pio Marmaï) as guelard as Raf, trucker with big heart, helps the hospital standing with the two rabiboche lovers while trying to escape, for fear of losing his job.The film intersects with violent clashes between the police and the street demonstrators.Outside and inside, the hellish mess arouses the most wacky situations.
It’s punctuated, powerful, funny, skillful, well mounted and intelligent.At the charts?Who knows !I predict at least a brilliant commercial career for this so -gratinated social comedy.
No matter how much we say ... glamor passes first, here.The Croisette really has only for the American Matt Damon and his French Covedette Camille Cottin, from Tom McCarthy's Stillwater shot in Marseille and projected out of competition.The actor of Will Hunting's fate embodies in the Marseille city an Oklahoma unilingual English -speaking Oklahoma alongside his daughter wrongly accused of murder.
Red carpet, crackling of cameras, go to the public: he no longer knows where to turn.Cannes constituted his first post-Cavid-19 and Damon outing is very excited.He applauds the game of actresses in the film, encourages the passage of the Marseille football team, shows his beautiful profile while saying that celebrity is not too much his thing.But this year, all the stars, still shaken by confinement, say that, more or less.Unique and disturbing pandemic cuvée…
Odile Tremblay is in Cannes at the invitation of the festival
