Some stories never get old.
Almost sixty years ago, Robert Bresson told the life story of a donkey in "For example Balthasar", which was successively misused as a pack animal, draft animal, tourist toy, circus attraction and tool of a gang of smugglers and finally died in a shootout.
The film shows the whole world in an hour and a half, explained Bresson's younger colleague Jean-Luc Godard at the time.
Now the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski has filmed the story a second time, and everything is there again: the girl who loves the donkey like a brother, the rural and small-town environment, the wickedness of the people and the innocence of the creature.
Andrew Kilb
Feature correspondent in Berlin.
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Nevertheless, everything looks very different.
This is mainly due to the fact that Skolimowski doesn't let the images speak for themselves, but boosts almost every scene with sound effects, artificial lighting and camera gadgets until the symbolism literally flies around your ears.
It's as if he no longer trusted the donkey to move us like in Bresson's classic film.
But why did he shoot "Eo" (the title of the film) at all?
Apparently the aim was to paint a caustic portrait of modern-day Poland with its hooligans, mink farms, truck drivers and cutthroats, but even this strategy doesn't last the film for ninety minutes.
In the last third, the story jumps to Northern Italy, and shortly before the end Isabelle Huppert suddenly appears, smashes dishes,
The artistic peak of Skolimowski's career was almost exactly four decades ago.
That was in 1982, when he won the Cannes screenplay prize for "Moonlighting" (in which the young Jeremy Irons plays a Polish moonlighter in London).
Twelve years later, the American James Gray received a Silver Lion in Venice for his directorial debut “Little Odessa”, and as with Skolimowski, this award was not followed by any significant ones.
But since the turn of the millennium, Gray has been to Cannes with half of his films, and in 2009 he was a member of the festival jury.
This year his new work Armageddon Time is in competition on the Croisette.
The film is the story of a childhood in the New York borough of Queens in the early 1980s, in the fall when Ronald Reagan is elected President of the United States.
Born into a Jewish immigrant family, 12-year-old Paul goes to public school, his best friend is a black boy, and life could be wonderful if they weren't always so clumsy with their pranks.
When they are caught smoking cannabis, Paul has to go to a private school whose eminence grise and main sponsor is a certain Fred C. Trump, the father of US ex-President Donald Trump.
It remains with the milieu description
This could be the beginning of an American social panorama, especially since this part of the story is autobiographical, but the film falls short at the crucial moment because Gray doesn't succeed in linking the story of the two boys with the power relations at the Kew Forest School .
So he gets stuck in the loving description of the milieu and an overly simple criticism of racism, and if Anthony Hopkins as Paul's grandfather didn't occasionally bring a little acting brilliance into the pictures, it would be a failure even as a family portrait.
Armageddon Time is nice to look at (the camera is directed by the great Darius Khondji), but story-wise it's not a hand's breadth above a streaming series on the subject (albeit four times as long).
This is not how you compete with Netflix.
That part of film culture that is now known as art house cinema and that used to be called auteur cinema was once the domain of aesthetic rebels, outsiders and nonconformists.
Jerzy Skolimowski and James Gray were also among them, one since he wrote the screenplays for Andrzej Wajda and the young Polanski, the other with his stories from the American suburbs.
But every rebellion eventually becomes a convention, every uprising carries within it the seeds of complacency.
You can see that in Cannes, where on some days not the old masters, but the old acquaintances meet in the competition for the palm tree.