Cannes 2022: we saw David Cronenberg’s return to horror, the new film by the director of Bac Nord and a Korean romantic thriller

Future Crimes by David Cronenberg (Official Competition)

He wasn’t sure he would ever make movies again. However, 8 years after the presentation of Maps to the Stars in 2014 – still in Cannes -, David Cronenberg come back. This time, no film noir or psychoanalytical drama, but a science fiction story about the body, its evolution and a future where pain no longer exists. In The Crimes of the Futurehe directs – for the fourth time – Viggo Mortensen, who plays Saul, an extreme performance artist who has his organs removed in public. No doubt, we are at Cronenberg’s.

As always with the filmmaker, it is not a question of shocking gratuitously, but of questioning the spectator on the world which surrounds him. The story, of immense richness, is full of subjects: extreme art and its liberating power, the quest for freedom, but also the state of a world at the end of its life left in the hands of a young generation already condemned. From his opening scene, David Cronenberg challenges.

He surrounds himself with his two most faithful collaborators, Viggo Mortensen – excellent and magnetic in a role of performance visionary -, but also Howard Shore, who composes great music. Léa Seydouxwho enters the “Cronenbergian” world, impresses, infusing his role with just the right amount of sweetness and mystery.

The 79-year-old director once again manages to surprise with a film that deserves several viewings. A modern, sulphurous and necessarily transgressive proposal. We need it.

Thomas Desroches

November by Cédric Jimenez (Out of Competition)

StudioCanal

After the huge success of Bac Nord, Cedric Jimenez is back with a muscular new thriller on an even more powerful and delicate subject. November comes back, as its name suggests, to the attacks of November 13, 2015, which shook France, and more particularly to the police services mobilized on that tragic night and the days that followed.

The film follows the unprecedented hunt of the anti-terrorist sub-directorate of the PJ (the Sdat) to find and eliminate those responsible for the massacre. We are then immersed with the various specialized teams who have worked tirelessly to locate the terrorist cell at the origin of the attacks. For his fifth feature film, Cédric Jimenez proves once again that he is a master in directing detective films and Novembre exudes urgency, breathless rhythm and adrenaline.

He does not forget to be so touching, by his subject obviously, but also by some of his characters, in particular those of Lyna Khoudri and Anaïs Demoustier, overwhelming in their accuracy and humanity. The two actresses bring a lot of thickness to a film, certainly dotted with certain moments of emotion, but ultimately quite factual and cold in what it tells.

Megane Choquet

Decision To Leave by Park Chan-wook (Competition)

Film Tray

Six years after Mademoiselle, Park Chan-wook is finally back at the Cannes Film Festival and it comes back with a delicious and amazing proposal. His new movie, Decision To Leave, follows the investigation of Hae-Joon, a seasoned detective, into the suspicious death of a man which occurred on top of a mountain. His meeting with Sore, the mysterious Chinese wife of the deceased, will destabilize him to such an extent that he suspects her at the same time as she attracts him.

The South Korean screenwriter and director has fun with this new film by mixing impossible romance and dark thriller and provides clever and intoxicating entertainment by summoning Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher. The meticulous, precise and playful staging of Decision To Leave reflects the burlesque, sentimental and tragic love game between this investigator and this suspect, embodied by the excellent Park Hae-il and Tang Wei.

Thanks to a finely written screenplay, which leaves no detail to chance, we are quickly taken by this elegant and funny story, which dissects the intense feeling of love, the one that turns to obsessive passion and which consumes us from the inside. This romance inscribed in a thriller, with magnetic photography and a neat soundtrack, takes on a whole new dimension and quickly becomes exciting when it is impossible and always subject to twists and turns.

Megane Choquet

The Five Devils by Léa Mysius (Directors’ Fortnight)

F Comme Film – Trois Brigands Productions

Five years after her first film Ava, Léa Mysius has completely changed her scenery and swapped the beach and the sand for the mountains and the forest in Les Cinq Diables. The screenwriter and director who collaborated with Arnaud Desplechin, Jacques Audiard and Claire Denis, tells in her second feature film a story of family and thwarted love by mixing drama and genre film.

With sets conducive to the fantastic and enhanced by 35mm film, which brings thickness, warmth and an almost magical texture, Léa Mysius offers her characters a mystical and complex aura. The Five Devils tells how Vicky, a strange and lonely young girl, will use her overdeveloped olfactory faculties to be transported to the memories of her family, her village and her own existence while the arrival of her aunt upsets everything in her balance. and his unconditional love for his mother Joanne.

In addition to a disturbing atmosphere perfectly framed with images that stay in mind, Léa Mysius claims a more political purpose by highlighting the invisible and the oppressed. She also questions racism, fear of the other, fear of madness and homophobia in this suffocating and moralizing little village which has reinforced the malaise of its inhabitants but which has also seen love reborn from its ashes. . Special mentions to Adèle Exarchopoulos, still so magnetic, and to Sally Drame, a real revelation.

Megane Choquet

Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind by Ethan Coen (Special screenings)

A24 Movies

Don’t call them the Coen brothers anymore. For now at least. While Joel signed, in solo and black and white, an adaptation of Macbeth put online on Apple TV + at the beginning of the year, it is Ethan’s turn to go it alone. With a rock documentary dedicated to Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the last living legends.

Played by Dennis Quaid in a feature film released in 1989, Jerry Lee Lewis is as famous for his songs and his frenzied performances as when he hit the headlines by marrying his then 13-year-old cousin. So many aspects of his career and his life that the feature film, entitled Trouble in Mind, does not spare, in particular giving pride of place to interview excerpts in which the main interested party reacted to the facts.

If the character would have a place in the filmography of the Coen brothers, for his humor and his colorful side, the documentary could disappoint connoisseurs, who will not learn much from it. But it is amusing to see that the feature film serves as a link between two of the films in the selection: Elvis, since the King is quoted by the Killer (as well as his manager Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks at Baz Luhrmann). And Top Gun Maverick, because Miles Teller covers “Great Balls of Fire”, a tube by Jerry Lee Lewis that Anthony Edwards performed in the first opus.

Maximilien Pierrette

The Super 8 Years (Directors’ Fortnight)

“In reviewing our super eight films taken between 1972 and 1981, it occurred to me that these were not only a family archive but also a testimony to the tastes, hobbies, lifestyle and aspirations of a class social, during the decade following 1968. These mute images, I wanted to integrate them into a story at the crossroads of history, the social and also the intimate, using my personal diary of these years there.”- Annie Ernaux

The Directors’ Fortnight offered its viewers a real nugget: the first film directed by Annie Ernaux, with her son David Ernaux-Briot. The Super 8 Years feels like opening up a time capsule, with its archives showing the life of a family 50 years ago. The voice and words of Annie Ernaux accompany all these images, so intimate, but at the same time so universal, witness to an era. We smile, we are moved. And for readers of Annie Ernaux, this documentary is exciting because it shows her life as she was about to be published for the first time. Release: December 14, 2022.

Brigitte Baronet

The Worst (Un Certain Regard)

Distribution Pyramid

A filming will take place quoted Picasso, in Boulogne-Sur-Mer, in the north of France. During the casting, four teenagers, Lily, Ryan, Maylis and Jessy are chosen to play in the film. In the neighborhood, everyone is surprised: why did you only take “the worst”?

Les Pires is the first feature film by Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, noticed with the short film Chasse royale (awarded at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in 2016) and with the series You prefer for Arte. Les Pires is in line with these previous projects, with again this mise en abyme of the filming of a filming, inviting the spectators behind the scenes of a creation.

With its realistic approach, moving camera, the duo of directors adopts the codes of social cinema, like the cinema of the Dardenne brothers. There is a lot of life, scenes sometimes joyful, sometimes more dramatic. We quickly get attached to these characters and young actors that they bring to light. The distribution also includes Johan Heldenbergh, seen in particular in Alabama Monroe. Released: November 23, 2022.

Brigitte Baronet