a utopian vision of the lost American paradise

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MASTERPIECE

Kelly Reichardt will probably not have her name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame tomorrow., this Los Angeles sidewalk dotted with stars bearing the names of stars. She is nonetheless one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema. A raw shine of independent production, such as we had not seen since John Cassavetes. And yet so different from him. Cassavetes brought out his inner thunder on American cinema.

Reichardt, in the light of a soft melancholy, revitalizes and repetitions America’s founding myths, as if Hollywood had hardly ever existed. Its primitive cinema smells of wet grass, the air we breathe is that of its origins, women regain their place in history, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman seem to secretly collide there. Two proofs in support of the grandeur of this work, of which we can only be delighted to be the contemporary. A retrospective at the Center Pompidou in Paris shows the seven feature films made since River of grass (1994).

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers Retrospective: Grandeur and melancholy of Kelly Reichardt’s cinema at the Center Pompidou

And the release in all good French theaters of his new film, First Cow, variation on the time of the pioneers like the post-western The Last Trail (2010), an epic reduced to the Beckettian dimensions of humanity, staged from the women’s diaries of migrant women of the time. Like the latter, First Cow is a film from the Frontier, located in the far west of the United States, in this Oregon which is also the country of Kelly Reichardt, long since escaped from his hometown, Miami, to settle in Portland and n ‘in addition to moving.

Total ecological film

The story of the film, which takes place in 1820, could fit on a donut recipe. Two emigrants, Otis Figowitz, known as Cookie, an itinerant cook and orphan who is supposed to have come from Eastern Europe, and King-Lu, a straight fugitive who arrived from China, form a deep and sudden friendship at this end of the world. And our two ragged to start dreaming, properly, of America.

Trained during his travels to a baker in Boston, Cookie started making donuts. King-Lu imagines ways to showcase them in order to better sell them, in what cannot yet be called a street, to the people who inhabit an important fort in Oregon. These few grams of finesse in a world of brutes cause the dazzling success of the product, which also makes the notables come running. A trade secret explains the reason: the two budding businessmen put cow’s milk in it. Or to put it better, milk from the only cow in Oregon – which the august representative of an English company, a runt who pushes himself off the collar, brought in at great expense for his personal use. Suffice to say that the tandem, every night comes, clandestinely refuels itself with fresh milk from the nose and beard of the potentate. Until the day when he orders them a “clafoutis” (in French in the text) with blueberries, just to hold the dragee high to a captain of his friends who, always aware of the latest Parisian fashion, would tend to laugh at the rusticity of local customs….

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