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Luis Buñuel maintained that it is the stopped and close-up photography that highlights "the malice and surreal character" of an innocent object, perhaps mass-produced. It is about displacing the meaning and coming up with necessarily new semantic fields. He was referring to his 'Viridiana' razor-crucifix. Now it is

Paul Verhoeven

who adds to the shelf of sacrilegious objects, for surreal, and blasphemous, for malicious,

the virgin-comforter.

All in one. It sounds tremendous and, indeed, it is. '

Benedetta

' rose in the competition on Friday as the first film programmed in the entire history of the very holy Cannes Film Festival capable of generating '

merchandising

'You laugh at Star Wars. And the Satisfayer.

Let's say that the object of yore was undoubtedly the most notorious of a day in which the director of '

Elle

' again showed that the puddle that he is not willing to step on has not yet been cataloged. At his side, out of competition,

Tom McCarthy and Matt Damon

presented 'A

Matter of Blood

', a strange drama distantly inspired by what happened to the American Amanda Knox that also has its fetishist moment and in the foreground: the key It is on a gold pendant where the name of the Oklahoma town from which the protagonist comes (Stillwater) is read. Third, and to complete the triptych of meanings out of place, the French

Catherine Corsini

composes in '

La fracture'

an oppressive fable of our time inside the emergency room of a harassed hospital. Here, everything happens in very malicious close-up.

Verhoeven has long looked at the story of Sister Benedetta as told in Judith C. Brown's book '

Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy'.

Apparently, the minutes of the trial of the nun who was previously venerated as a saint were so full of sexual details provided by the lover that the person in charge of drawing up the minutes left a mark of his bewilderment in a letter that was more than just nervous. The film stops in a story of manipulation and intrigue where sex, religion and political power mix to the point of devouring each other.

And in the middle, lies as a tool of domination and derision.

Four centuries have passed since then and as if it were a matter of yesterday.

In the seventeenth century, when the plague was spreading through Italy, Benedetta Carlini arrived at the convent of Pescia, in Tuscany. From his earliest childhood, he is capable of working miracles. Or that makes her colleagues and superiors believe until she becomes the center of all eyes. When a new novice approaches the walls of the confinement, it will be a question of deciding the limits of passion, of any of them, and the many ways (not all pious) of using the figure of a virgin.

The actress Virginie Efira stands in the midst as incontestable as each of the heroines that make up a filmography covered by Sharon Stone, Elizabeth Berkley or Isabelle Huppert.

Verhoeven plays what best defines him: displacing the meaning of each element that makes up an always strident, mysterious and purely diaphanous narrative. The strategy is to constantly provoke the viewer, to contradict each of his predictions. When it is believed to be in a period melodrama, the film transforms into a delusion 'gore' as funny as slightly repulsive. Or just ugly. And always blasphemous. When it comes to composing an erotic scene, comedy arises. And if what you aspire to is a social or political comment, malice, if not surrealism, upsets everything.

It's

kitsch

, it's tacky, and it's simply irresistible.

We see Christ on horseback, sword in hand, splitting the heads of sinners in two. We witness the sexless nude of God on the cross. The first miracle ends with the naked bosom of a virginal statue on the aching mouth of the woman who will first be a nun and then a saint.

Verhoeven does not deprive himself of anything. He sins conscientiously

and with him, even if only in dreams, each of his characters. It was always like this.

And then there is the comforter of yore as the perfect image and metaphor of the exact point at which the sacred becomes a simple instrument of pleasure and this, the most obvious path to grace.

It is enough to turn the artifact (sacred image and dildo) upside down and, suddenly, it is not possible to imagine a more complete theological-political treatise.

And irreverent.

Like a crucifix inside a razor.

Or vice versa.

Matt Damon at the presentation of 'A Matter of Blood'.ERIC GAILLARDREUTERS

MATT DAMON, FATHER COURAGE

The McCarthy movie case is different, if only because everything is different from Verhoeven. The character of Matt Damon goes to Marseille (not to Italy, as in the true story in which he stands) to visit his daughter in prison sentenced for having murdered a friend while she was serving a kind of Erasmus in free fall. Like everyone.

The idea is to enter a story of redemption that is also a mystery.

It is tragedy with the same confusion as '

thriller

'.

The director of the Oscar-winning '

Spotlight

' takes all imaginable risks and it is there, in that effort to not allow himself to be easily defined, where A

Question of Blood

makes, by continuing with religion, sin and penance coincide, the best (little) and the worst (a lot). With the leading actor very much in his role within the figure of the average American (as noble as he is closed and incapable of understanding what moves that sophisticated Europe that cooks every day), the film progresses very aware of each of its uncertainties and its innumerable mistakes. What seems like a film destined to clarify a crime soon recombines into a family melodrama with a father tormented by his guilt, to return, at last, to the beginning. Round trip.

Unbalanced, implausible and only moved by a few emotional moments, the film ends up being all doubtful.

And in the middle, a necklace as a fetish.

Other.

The last film in competition is an energetic and very convulsed proposal by Catherine Corsini (responsible for works as luminous and irregular as

'A summer love'

or '

Three worlds'

).

'La fracture

' runs entirely between the four walls of a room packed with screams, people, wounded, fear and crisis (all imaginable).

Outside the yellow vests cry out against Macron, inside the emergency room the outcry is against everything, including Macron.

It is a tape infected with anger that vomits resentment. It is an exercise in cinema thinking to cut your breath. Everything that breathes is drowned.

Camera on his shoulder, there is no shot that doesn't vibrate or actor (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Marina Foïs in front) that doesn't get on my nerves.

The problem, which there is, is that the limitations imposed by the style book end up making the narrative advance in a way so imprecise and, at times, gratuitous. Be that as it may, it is valid as an X-ray and metaphor of, indeed, a fracture that should be intervened as soon as possible. Macron, take note. There are many reasons to criticize French cinema, but not its ability to react.

And so far a troubled day, as displaced in meaning and place as the Cannes Film Festival in July.

With or without dildo.

With the better.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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