Gael Garcia Bernal and Penelope Cruz in Cuban Network by Olivier Assayas - MEMENTO

  • Olivier Assayas discusses an episode of the Cold War between Cuba and the United States in a well-documented spy film, "Cuban Network", in theaters this Wednesday.
  • It is also a love story, "the story of a couple in the noise and the noise of contemporary history, with its absurdities, its misunderstandings, its failures ..."
  • After Asia Argento, Maggie Cheung or Kristen Stewart, Penelope Cruz is the new international star who appears in the world of the French director.

"It is the story of a couple in the noise and the noise of contemporary history, with its absurdities, its misunderstandings, its failures ..." This is how Olivier Assayas defines Cuban Network, his latest inspired film a true story full of twists and turns. That of agents charged with infiltrating, in the early 1990s, the groups of anti-Castrist dissidents who, from Florida, are preparing to overthrow power…

From this episode of the end of the Cold War between Cuba and the United States, the French director made a documented film, "but popular" which is good spy film and thriller rich in twists. But also with great feelings. Because at the heart of a historical-geo-political intrigue that makes Cuban Network flirt with the genre film, it is indeed the tumultuous love story between two of the protagonists played by Edgar Ramirez - Venezuelan actor that Assayas already had directed in Carlos - and Penelope Cruz, who give its full flavor to the film.

A “stimulating bet”

After Asia Argento, Maggie Cheung or Kristen Stewart, Penelope Cruz is the new international female star who has accepted to take up with him "the stimulating bet" as the director calls it, to get out of what she is used to… "But you have to convince her," he explains. Generally, a star has a clear idea of ​​what she can bring to the film, in terms of reputation or funding. In return, what she wants to hear is not that the film will work thanks to her, but that the film will give her the opportunity to show a facet of her personality that the public has never seen. "

For Penelope, it was the face of a bruised woman who feels betrayed ... until the day she discovers her husband's double life and the sacrifices he had to endure for it. You have to see her play all the registers of her passion, misunderstanding first, rage then and reconciliation to finish, to understand how his character, relatively secondary in terms of action, is actually central for the intensity and the dramatic interest of the film. “The subject interested her, and she was passionate about this role of woman manipulated by events beyond her. She took it so seriously that she devoted all of the film's preparation to speaking with the Cuban accent to be credible. "

Of course, Penelope Cruz is not the only attraction of the film. His partners also, Edgar Ramirez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Wagner Moura in the roles of these men who "were not James Bond spies, but proletarian spies, without means", as Olivier Assayas points out. And who will be brought to work for the same cause, without knowing each other and without necessarily knowing it, or even understanding the troubled game of the Americans and the FBI… All this politico-strategic ambiguity contrasts with the frankness of love passion. Unless it is the reverse. The double game of intelligence agents eventually transforming into a double game of feelings.

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