THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Hardly had the Cannes Film Festival ended when a caustic fiction on the star system arrived in theaters, the aptly named Official competitione, by Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat. From movie to movie – The Man Next Door (2009), The Artist (2011), honorary citizen (2016) – the Argentinian duo explores the world of art, design or the hushed universe of literature, in a burlesque and satirical vein. But we will never find in their films the deadly venom of The Square (2017), by Ruben Östlund, a chilling portrait of a museum curator, which won a first Palme d’Or for the Swedish filmmaker, who has just won a second, with Triangle of Sadness, on May 28, at the end of the 75e Cannes edition.
Argentinian filmmakers happily work on the mise en abyme: in their film, selected in competition at Venice, in 2021, the statuettes that make filmmakers’ heads spin have a bad time. The directors denounce the vanity of prices, the internal quarrels of the cinema (films d’auteur versus entertainment), and the quirks of a profession that thinks everything is allowed.
One might fear the populist charge if the cast of the film did not precisely bring together three international actors, themselves laden with awards, accepting, so to speak, to put themselves in the hot seat – all the more willingly since the directors are not too mean to the system, of which they are a part. So here are gathered, to cut a suit for the stars, the Spaniards Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas and the Argentinian Oscar Martinez – winner of the Volpi cup for male interpretation in Venice, in 2016, for his role in honorary citizenin which he plays a Nobel Prize.
Big challenge
Penélope Cruz embodies Lola Cuevas, a fashionable director, who has already won a Silver Lion and a Palme d’Or. Thanks to an old boss of the pharmaceutical industry, seized with a sudden desire to produce a film, the filmmaker will be able to bring together on the same poster two great actors who have never played together. A daunting challenge, because they are very different: Felix Rivero (Antonio Banderas), a handsome man in his fifties, sure of himself, is a star of mainstream action films; Ivan Torres (Oscar Martinez), an aging theater actor, very identified on the contemporary scene, belongs to a cultivated elite. In the script, Felix and Ivan embody two enemy brothers, who cannot see each other in medals, a thinly veiled metaphor for the incommunicability that reigns between the two actors.
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