2023-09-08 09:00:00
At the Deauville American Film Festival, very good films and an immense work, The Zone of Interest, Journey to the End of the Night by Jonathan Glazer.
Photo: The area of interest
A cheated husband, a hitman, a private detective on the hook, a former beauty queen, a few bodies and $250,000 roaming the roads of Texas. For his first feature film, Shane Atkinson alternates gunshots and bursts of laughter and his too soft evokes the first films of the Coen brothers. Fantasia among rednecks? As a virtuoso, Atkinson multiplies characters, intrigues, atmospheres, breaks the rhythm, defuses the darkness of the whole with zany humor. And there is a solid cast made up of John Magaro, seen in Carol or First Cowthe amazing Steve Zahn (Dallas Buyers Club, Out of reach), or Dylan Baker (Happiness, The Rebel Wedding), incredible as a human Terminator. Big crush.
too soft
First film by Marina Mathias, Runner is a wonder, a pure object of staging. The scenario is beautiful and fragile like a haiku: Haas, a poor eighteen-year-old girl, is going to bury her father in her hometown, on the banks of the Mississippi. She meets a boy who has to provide for his family and who has to go as a sailor. Over 1 hour 16 minutes, the director films this brief meeting of two solitudes. She has grace. And everything goes through form. The screen is square, the camera is often fixed and Marina Mathias films the low, shadowy sky, birds passing by, a house that tears through the blue, feet wading in the mud. Each shot is composed like a painting by a Flemish master and arouses vertigo, like some Terrence Malick. The director of photography is Jomo Fray. We haven’t heard the last of him…
Runner
A GARDEN IN AUSCHWITZ
Huge shock from Cannes, awarded the Grand Prix of the festival, The Area of Interest comes to show off his muscles in Deauville. Inspired by a novel by the British Martin Amis, who died on the day of the presentation in Cannes, this area (the term the Nazis gave to the 40 kilometers around the camp) is a little corner of paradise, a cozy house with a magnificent garden adjoining the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. In this luxurious residence, Jonathan Glazer presents the daily life of Rudolf Höss, commander of the concentration camp, genius of mass extermination, his pragmatic wife and their five children. Their daily life is school, swimming, laughing, a picnic in nature, gardening, family meals, the swimming pool, the dog… From the death camp, we will see nothing, or almost: a wall, barbed wire at the top of the frame. We will see nothing but we will hear everything: the deafening noise of the ovens, the screams of the Jews being murdered, the cries of the Nazis, the explosions in the night, the dull horror that rumbles… All the horror of the world is contained in this cry in the night that we do not want to hear.
Little cinema genius, Jonathan Glazer, 58 years old, is an inventor of forms, a polisher of rough diamonds who has only made four films in twenty years: Sexy Beast, Birth, Under the Skin and today this Zone of interest. To question the banality of evil and film absolute horror, Glazer developed a narrative device in the form of a labyrinth, a trap. Very quickly, the viewer is caught up in the continuous roar of the ovens which twists the head and stomach, and soon, the off-camera devours the film, the viewer, the world. In the house, Glazer has installed a series of fixed cameras, and the shots which follow the comings and goings of the minor German civil servants and the Jewish prisoners who scour the house increase the feeling of surveillance and recall the sound device of reality TV. We then find ourselves confronted with the existential problems of Madame (played by the demented Sandra Hüller) who tries on a fur coat from the camp that is unfortunately too big for her, or of the gentleman, who obtains a promotion at the Oranienbourg camp, for shed light on matters of extermination. It is unbearable and every moment of this daily life placed under the sign of repetition sends us back to our own indifference.
A radical experience, a film like few see in a lifetime.
The Area of Interestreleased in theaters on January 31
By Marc Godin
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#Deauville #breath #great #cinema
