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If anyone right now is the perfect repository of a tradition of Italian cinema that has to do with the transformation into myth, even sacred, of the mire of the everyday, that is Alice Rohrwacher. His cinema is mythical for returning to the narrative its densest and even primordial sense. In a world full of stories served in streaming, the filmmaker imposes the task of giving meaning to something as basic as the word made story, the verb turned into common action. We refer to a cinema that rescues from its singularity people like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ermanno Olmi or the Taviani brothers. All of them, neorealists (post-neorealists) in their own way, set out to give dignity to the supposedly unworthy, to the invisible, and in that gesture, at once political and almost suicidal, they each founded a world.

La Chimera is the director's third film to arrive at Cannes. The first, Wonderland, surprised with a delicate, voracious and lyrical description of the rural that appealed to Fellini as well as to De Sica. The second, Lazzaro feliz, was presented as a kind of anonymous legend about goodness that called in all its sincere crudeness to the crudest of the Roman poet murdered in Ostia. This time, it would seem that, one step further (not further), Rohrwacher expands the ambition without dispensing with each of his doubts, his uncertainties and even his mistakes. The result is an unstable, vibrant, unique, fleeting, deeply original and essentially warm film, for recognizable, for inhabiting that place where stories end up being everyone's memory. If the jury knows (or wants) to see the excecpionality of each shot of this miracle there is no doubt that the Palme d'Or already has a name.

The film tells the story of a group of friends, or not at all, who are dedicated to plundering the hidden treasures of the Etruscans. In reality, they are themselves descendants (whether they know it or not) of the Etruscans and what they do (knowingly or not) is plunder themselves. One of them (Josh O'Connor), English in a perfectly Italian universe, has a gift (he is able to guess like a zahorí where the treasures are) and a punishment (his beloved and the reason why he is where he is died). With these elements, not necessarily usual or at hand, the director composes a reflection at once dreamlike and essentially political rather than poetic (which also), on the traces left by the past on the skin of memory.

The film runs in several formats (in 35 mm, in super 16 mm and in a non-professional 16 mm camera) and on them, without frills or false virtuosities, the film is sponged and opened until it floods the viewer's own retina. Again, a strange and at the same time close myth is summoned on the screen in a kind of pagan liturgy in which the cinema struggles to recover a usurped space. In fact, La Chimera has something of a coven, of mesmeric and hallucinated summons to the immortal gods of an art like cinema in essence pagan, popular and completely atheist.

What is striking is, above all, the conviction. Alice Rohrwacher refuses to let a single one of the shots cease to be relevant, Now the planes are accelerated, now the screen is narrowed, now everything is darkened, now the world is turned upside down. They are not fireworks or boasts of hollow modernity. It is pure conviction that to construct a myth it is necessary above all the wonder, the flash, the aura. The last shot is starred by a red thread that unites the underground with the sky, the living with the dead, the past with the distant possibility of the future. It is a masterpiece and, as has already been said, it is a beautiful Palme d'Or.

El director Ken Loach.

Ken Loach is still there and loves us

At his side, the official section programmed as the last film in competition the first of the filmmakers. The two-time Palme d'Or Ken Loach offers in The Old Oak a new piece of himself: cinema of his flesh, meat of his cinema. This time, the director always committed to his own commitment dwells on the existence of Syrian refugees in the northeast of England, where the mines were closed long ago; where for what you pay three nights in a hotel in Cannes you can buy a house (this data is from the director himself).

The effort of the filmmaker is not so much to denounce, which also of course, as to investigate also like Rohrwacher in the now lost memory of the working class. What remained of the solidarity of the miners who now receive with rage the victims of a war? And so, Loach succeeds once again in recomposing every fold of an increasingly open wound.

The result in a film built from emotion for reunion and hope despite everything; a film that, in its own way, also makes a myth from the mud like La Chimera. Although in this case the true myth appears in the credits next to the director's poster. Ken Loach is bigger than cinema itself. And that life.

  • cinema
  • Cannes Film Festival
  • Films

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