Criticism 'Sundown': the dark everyday light according to Michel Franco
Review Last night in Soho or the irresistible 'cool' terror of Edgar Wright and Anya Taylor-Joy
Criticism And 'Dune', finally, became flesh and inhabited among the classics
Criticism Jane Campion delivers a huge apology and refutation of the western: 'The power of the dog
Critic Parallel Mothers: Almodóvar gives birth to her most beautiful and political approach to motherhood and memory
That the Venice Mostra is on a roll this year is shown by the fact that the weather forecast on the phone has stopped showing clouds in the middle of the week and that directors such as the French Xavier Giannoli, who usually appears in the paragraph that stays out of the chronicles, claim your place in the first of them. Nothing suggested that an adaptation of a classic novel subjected to the rigors of period cinema would suddenly unveil as
an exercise in cinema as agile, contemporary and rigorous as it is faithful.
I said, neither it rains nor there is a day that the 78th edition of the Venice Festival receives the pertinent blessing.
To situate ourselves, the director of the very disconcerting and slightly cloudy
'The Apparition'
(2018) and the fun and populist (rather than popular)
'Madame Marguerite'
(2015) dares to face one of those career-killing challenges. '
The lost illusions,
published in three parts between 1837 and 1843, wanted to be, in the words of the author, "the capital work of the work." The aforementioned was the monumental and unfinished
'Human Comedy'
. The story of the young Lucien (Benjamin Voisin) is told from his quiet, provincial and native Angoulême to the tumultuous, capital and always strange Paris.
Balzac's hero pursues not only glory, prestige, the recognition of an uncertain title of nobility and, therefore, even immortality, but also, and this is what is important, love.
Nothing different, therefore, from the obsession of all the heroes that have populated the planet.
Giannoli, to make it even more difficult, places the burden of proof on a constant voice-over that, in addition to commenting on each of the young Lucien's actions, describes them at times in a repetitive double game (you can see what same that is heard) that, far from stopping the narrative, endows it with a rare and brilliant depth. Let's say that the film avoids with unusual clarity the risks that always haunt cinema set in other times:
the stiffness or exactly the same aggressive
dirty
ugliness
that directors with excess budgets always go to. Neither old nor too modern.
It seems that the director's strategy is transparency. It is about showing the stage of the drama without hiding neither the scaffolding that supports it nor each of the doubts that keep the characters standing.
And always with a blind faith in the capacity of the spectator
to make his way through a universal drama that, suddenly, the sharpest reading of the miseries of our time is discovered.
Indeed, Balzac, among many other subjects, writes about the determining role of the incipient free press. So free that it only depends on the money that supports it. That is to say, it is informed, it is given opinions, it is censored, it lies and it is praised based solely on the economic capacity of the new newspapers to continue informing, lying, censoring and giving opinions. It is a power game between royalists and republicans, between the aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie, between the privileged and those who aspire to be, in which anything goes and which, by chance in history,
exhibits a frightening parallelism with the world. digital that concerns us
(with their social networks, their
'fake news
', their lazy oligarchies and their bodice). And it is ashí, in his capacity for evocation and surprise, where Giannolli wins the game. It is not about recalling again that the classics are eternal, it is enough to realize that the engine of ambition of then is always the same as it is now. And so.
The cast composed, among others, by the Canadian actor-director
Xavier Dolan
, the incombustible
Gérard Depardieu
, the always irreverent
Vincent Lacoste
and the always perfect
Cécile de France
do nothing but abound in the idea of the director's more than brilliant idea.
Far from disguising its academic character, the film exhibits it with pride, but without bombastic gestures.
The reconstruction is there, but without overwhelming, they are turning the art director into the star.
Without a doubt, a very good surprise.
And it still doesn't rain anyway.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
Paris
theater
cinema
culture
literature
Culture100 years of Fernando Fernán Gómez: cinema, theater and books
SERIES 'TRASPAPELADOS SERIES' (AND VII) Juan Larrea, the exorbitant of 27
MusicMarina Abramovic interprets the myth and death of Maria Callas
See links of interest
Last News
Holidays 2021
Home THE WORLD TODAY
Almeria - Malaga
Fuenlabrada - Lugo
F1: Dutch GP, live
Burgos CF - Real Valladolid
Spain - Georgia, live