Capitalism was this or how Ruben Östlund shocks Cannes with a perfect portrait of what Cannes means

• Interview Dying in Mariúpol making movies: "A Russian soldier told me that my husband had died"

• Directors' Fortnight Cannes embraces Elena López Riera's torrential debut with 'El agua'

• Competition https://www.elmundo.es/cultura/cine/2022/05/20/62867c6bfc6c83ba2a8b4595.html

"When you look at the Cannes red carpet and people's obsession with what to wear, you realize how far the fashion industry has learned to capitalize on absurd human behavior."

The owner of the phrase is

the Swedish director who five years ago won the Palme d'Or on that same crimson tapestry he is talking about.

The unfathomable

(2017) was conceived as a second investigation, so to speak, about our favorite recreational spaces.

The target was the world of art understood as

Before, in

(2014), what passed under the magnifying glass were the '

' for skiing.

And now, in

, pay attention, the cruise ships.

But not the ones that ruin Venice, but the ones designed for people who are scandalously and deafeningly rich.

Even vomiting if necessary (and it's not a metaphor).

Once again, and as is the norm in

is difficult to describe the film in a single way.

Nothing human is alien to him.

but as it progresses it becomes the best representation of chaos imaginable.

What well looked at could pass for a moral.

It is also a reflection on how money influences matters as disinterested as, for example, love.

And they don't want to know the answer.

Disheartening to say the least.

Beauty, social hierarchies, patriarchy and even the highly debatable way in which the first world relates to any other are also part of the film's agenda.

In other words, and to summarize it, if Cannes itself, and its carpet, is the best condensation and representation of our vices, this is your film.

Nobody can accuse Östlund of not being in the right place.

'Triangle of sadness'

, which mentions the frown lines that many models operate on so as not to intimidate the client with an air of concern, tells in three acts the troubled relationship between Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean ).

The first episode (with a memorable discussion in a restaurant about who pays) serves as a prologue to the sweet grief of two perfect bodies.

And for sale.

In the second we embark.

And there will appear a communist American embodied near the miracle by Woody Harrelson and a liberal Russian oligarch of disbelief (Zlatko Buric).

Listening.

Attentive to that end of the chapter worthy of

by Marco Ferreri.

In the third and final episode, much of the crew ends up after an epic shipwreck on a supposedly deserted island.

The only one who knows how to fish, cook and manage is the Filipino cleaner (Dolly De Leon) who, suddenly, is the boss.

And the one that, excuse me, fucks.

Privileges of an unequal society in any of the circumstances.

Östlund conceives cinema as a strange observatory where the camera limits itself to wondering about everything, including itself.

The virtue of the Swedish look is his ability to turn each daily act into the result of infinite meticulously ordered errors.

Or messy.

In that or in a simple impertinence.

But without forcing anything, without parodying anything.

His cinema takes from Anderson the polysemy of the absurd and from Haneke, the clarity of imposture.

The film, far from dissecting customs, leaves an enormous void between the gaps in each of his stories;

a hole in the fall.

And of course you laugh.

Until you stop doing it.

The result is, without a doubt, the best film seen in the competition: the most irritating, the funniest, the most violent and the most ridiculous.

Tilda Swinton at the presentation of 'Three thousand years waiting for you'.

THE TRANSPARENT CINEMA OF CRISTIAN MUNGIO

For the rest, the official section, Palme d'Or for Palme d'Or, Swedish for Romanian, wanted their big day to be completed as it should.

is yet another example of his cinema committed to reality as clear as it is concise, as precise as it is relevant.

Uncomfortable and emotional.

The director of

and

(the three winners at Cannes) now stops in a community in Transylvania where people of Romanian, Hungarian and German.

When some Sri Lankan workers arrive, the self-protection mechanism (or stale egoism) will kick in in the form of old acquaintances:

That, or since we are, the capitalism of before.

The director once again demonstrates his facility for constructing delicate metaphors.

And almost silent.

The silence of a child, spectator of an unspeakable catastrophe, guides the steps of a drama dedicated to transforming a frozen, distant microcosm threatened by bears into the best representation of all of us.

Mungiu likes to say.

And so on until a precise diagnosis of the fragility of concepts as allegedly hard as dignity or life in common is achieved.

Somehow, one by another, and from radically opposite positions, both '

and

talk about the same thing because they talk about us.

And, seen what has been seen, there is no reason to be happy about anything.

Out of competition, and as one of the stars of the day,

was called in Spanish), by

You cannot speak of disappointment because rarely has a film dared so much.

The idea is to narrate the very meaning of narrating.

And do it hand in hand with the love story, which is at the same time one of mutual loneliness, between the genie of a lamp

and a university professor specializing in storytelling

The first is goblin;

the second, person.

The first, immortal;

the second, less.

It is the most absurd extravagance of digital effects that gallop through the centuries at the service of a simple conversation in a room.

As it is.

The father of

in any of his perfect and noisy deliveries now offers the most opposite of himself.

But he does it with a conviction and a sense of excess that, the truth is, there is no other choice but to surrender.

Decidedly the opposite of everything: he likes it because of his stubbornness in demolishing the canon of beauty.

So surprising that any insult that is uttered against her ends up being the most disconsolate of compliments.

And so.

There are days designed to disconcert and this one, with the brutal portrait of everything that Cannes means as light and guide, was one of them.

Goya, Buñuel and Carrier

«Buñuel and Goya are united by their contradictory ability to portray the most delicate and the most brutal at the same time».

It is Carlos Saura who draws the line that unites one hand with another, one deaf with another.

The speaker is also Aragonese.

His statement is the soul of the documentary

by

presented in the Cannes Classics section.

The director says that his idea was to compose a cinematographic fresco of the painter as he had previously done with El Bosco.

But along the way he ran into Carrière, the one who was Buñuel's screenwriter and in his own way an expert in the artist of Fuendetodos, and everything changed.

Suddenly, the film is much more than a collection of crossover tributes.

Carrière's free, brilliant and inexhaustible conversation occupies everything and illuminates everything.

«We met to talk about Goya and ended up talking about everything.

Pure improvisation and pure genius”, says López Linares and, indeed, it is.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more

• Facebook

• cinema