Cannes 2022: we saw the latest film by Gaspard Ulliel, the craziest comedy of the festival and a drama with Virginie Efira

More Than Ever (Un Certain Regard)

The strong emotion of the Cannes Film Festival, here it is. more than evers is the ultimate role of Gaspard ulliel, who died tragically last January at the age of 37. Impossible not to be moved at the sight of this film, in which the theme of mourning, the loss of a loved one is central.

The film follows Hélène (Vicky Krieps) and Mathieu (Gaspard Ulliel), who have been happy together for many years. The bond that unites them is deep. Faced with an existential decision, Hélène leaves alone for Norway to seek peace and experience the strength of their love.

Gaspard Ulliel and Vicky Krieps are both moving in this film, often luminous, despite the harshness of its subject, with very intense scenes. The production is by Emily Atef, who previously directed Three Days in Quiberon, and more recently two episodes of the last season of Killing Eve.

Released: November 9, 2022

Brigitte Baronet

RMN by Cristian Mungiu (In Competition)

The pact

Six years after his Best Director Award for Baccalaureate, the Romanian director Christian Mungiu present NMR, a drama in which a man returns to his native village in Transylvania after leaving his job in Germany. For many, he has become a stranger. As he tries to find his place among his family, three workers from Sri Lanka settle in the small community.

Gossip, racist clichés, violent attacks… A hatred gradually sets in in the isolated village, which is nevertheless renowned for its tranquility. Cristian Mungiu draws a portrait – not very glorious – of the human being in all its complexity. He tackles the fear of the other head-on and its devastating consequences. The film does not hide its political message and increases in tension in an almost distressing second part.

Thomas Desroches

Smoking Makes You Cough by Quentin Dupieux (Midnight Screening)

Gaumont Distribution

Quentin Dupieux in Cannes is a killer tire (Rubber), Jean Dujardin obsessed with his new jacket (Le Daim) and now a group of vigilantes, the “Tabac Force” whose greening supposed to strengthen their cohesion is interrupted when an Evil Emperor decides to destroy planet Earth. In short, of the kind crossed with absurd (and conversely), a formula to which Smoking makes you cough don’t deviate. With an insane cast.

For his tenth feature film, Quentin Dupieux has brought together a handful of cinema regulars (Benoît Poelvoorde, Alain Chabat, Grégoire Ludig, David Marsais, Anaïs Demoustier, Adèle Exarchopoulos, etc.) joined by prestigious newcomers such as Jean -Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra, Vincent Lacoste and Gilles Lellouche. That the filmmaker brings together the Avengers of his cinema for a story that mixes superheroes and Tales from the Crypt is therefore not very surprising. Contrary to the result.

Tight costumes, foam villains, hectoliters of blood… Smoking makes you cough did not fail to ignite the Grand Théâtre Lumière, visibly won over by this funny, bloody, astonishing, delirious opus, capable of changing the mood of a sequence to the other. With a confirmation: when Dupieux is around, there is therefore a good chance that the Croisette will have fun.

Maximilien Pierrette

Chronicle of a temporary affair by Emmanuel Mouret (Cannes Première)

Distribution Pyramid

For lack of a festival, The Things We Say, The Things We Do had only been entitled to a Cannes 2020 label. Two years later, Emmanuel Mouret is present on the Croisette for this new exploration of the menu tender: Chronicle of a temporary affair. “The title is a program because it also contains the end,” said the director and screenwriter when announcing the project, which he also considered calling “Scenes from Extramarital Life.”

The director does not fail to openly quote Ingmar Bergman’s classic, whose shadow hovers in this story where, as always, words and feelings prevail. And where the chemistry between Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Macaigne sparks. From the first scene, their complicity is eye-popping, their energetic opposition (her sparkling side to her against his clumsiness) seduces, and makes this inevitable end all the more difficult, around which Emmanuel Mouret builds a suspense. sentimental.

Lively, fluid and engaging, Chronicle of a Passing Liaison leaves the lives of its main characters off-screen to focus on their interviews, built around a place, an idea. Often very funny, always very fair. Cannes 2021 had Julie (in 12 chapters), another fragmented story of feelings. In view of the laughter, reactions and applause, the 2022 edition may have found its equivalent.

Maximilien Pierrette

War Pony by Riley Keough & Gina Gammell (Un Certain Regard)

Felix Culpa

The shadow of Elvis Presley hangs over this 75th Cannes Film Festival. While waiting for the biopic that Baz Luhrmann devoted to him, it is his granddaughter that he illustrates with his first achievement. Assisted by Gina Gammell (co-producer of Dixieland, in which she played), Riley Keough takes her first steps behind the camera and takes us to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (South Dakota) to tell the story of the passage to the adulthood of two youngsters trying to get by. Stop falling into illegality.

Those who have seen the very beautiful The Rider by Chloé Zhao will perhaps feel on familiar ground, because the Oscar-winning filmmaker had filmed in the same region. We also think of the series Reservation Dogs, which explores the same themes, or American Honey by Andrea Arnold, already with Riley Keough in the cast, which showed an America too often left out of the cinema.

Carried by stunningly natural non-professional actors (many of whom were present for the official screening, and very moved by the applause reserved for them), War Pony impresses with its mastery, which is barely marred by a few lengths in the story. . The two directors offer us a tale that is sometimes serious and light, which slightly flirts with fantasy and does not take long to seduce us. A fine candidate for the Caméra d’Or (prize given to the best first feature, all sections combined)… and for the Palm Dog, which rewards the best dog seen in a film.

Boy From Heaven by Tarik Saleh (Competition)

Atmo CANNES

After the masterful Le Caire Confidential, the Swedish director of Egyptian origin Tarik Saleh once again strikes a blow with Boy From Heaven, which increasingly lifts the veil on the ignominies of a complex society through its major institutions. In this dramatic thriller, we meet Adam, a simple son of a fisherman, who joins the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the epicenter of the power of Sunni Islam.

What should have been a blessing for him turns into a nightmare when the institution’s Grand Imam dies on the first day of school. Following this tragic event, Adam will find himself in spite of himself plunged into an infernal spiral where he becomes a pawn for the religious and political elites of the country.

Chosen as an infiltrator in the midst of the election of the new Grand Imam, the student will be caught between the different powers at play which crystallize an entire country and which are the scene of corruption, ideological pressure and psychological violence.

For this powerful new film, the director, now banned from Egypt, calls on his favorite actor Fares Fares, remarkable in a role where he is unrecognizable, and the young talent Tawfeek Barhom, impressive in the skin of Adam. In addition to the performances of the actors, Boy From Heaven is distinguished by its brilliant, fascinating and courageous story, a veritable diatribe of a committed filmmaker who knows how to breathe urgency and a breathless rhythm into his subject of great intelligence.

Megane Choquet

Everyone Loves Jeanne by Céline Devaux (Critics’ Week)

Worso Films – O som ea furia

How to represent on the screen the torments of the soul? This is the challenge that Céline Devaux set herself with Everyone Loves Jeanne, her first feature film. The director offers us a jewel of inventiveness by mixing comedy and animation to dissect the anxieties that run through a melancholy and broken spirit, that of Jeanne, whom you are bound to love.

Jeanne is over-indebted after the bankruptcy of her ecological company which made her a superwoman. She then goes to Lisbon to put her mother’s apartment, who died a year earlier, up for sale. As soon as she arrives at the airport, Jeanne finds herself embarked on an ubiquitous series of twists and turns punctuated by encounters and reunions, which will gradually give her a taste for things, and above all a taste for herself.

Céline Devaux offers an original and authentic introspective writing by transposing on the screen the anxieties and questions that go through the head by means of a brilliant little animated character, catalyst of emotions of all kinds and common thread of a journey of resilience. as funny as it is moving served by a Blanche Gardin in great shape. The rest of the cast, Laurent Lafitte in the lead, is just as tasty.

Megane Choquet

Without Filter (Official Competition)

Film Tray

Warning, fierce film! After his Palme d’or for The Square in 2017, Ruben Ostlund sign Without filter, a feature film that lives up to its title (Triangle of Sadness in original version). The Swedish filmmaker pushes the slider of cynicism even further than in his previous film, in a feature film in three chapters. The central chapter, very provocative (with false airs of Grande Bouffe at times!), should not fail to make people react! Release: soon.

Brigitte Baronet

See Paris again (Directors’ Fortnight)

In Paris, Mia is caught in an attack in a brasserie. Three months later, when she still hasn’t managed to resume the course of her life and only remembers the event in snatches, Mia decides to investigate her memory to find her way back to life. possible happiness.

After Proxima, with Eva Green in the costume of an astronaut, the filmmaker Alice Winocourt is interested in the subject of the attacks, in a film distantly inspired by the Bataclan. This fiction takes the strong and fascinating part of showing first and foremost the question of traumatic memory. In other words, how a drama like this can affect memories.

Alice Winocour, originally from Paris, sets up her camera for the first time in Paris, and shows the city as it has rarely been seen in the cinema. She films a bruised Paris, injured by the attacks, like a character in her own right.

The heroine of Revoir Paris remains of course above all Virginie Efira, captivating, almost in all the shots of this feature film which offers her a beautiful, dense and complex new role. His connection with Benoit Magimel looks great and works great on screen.

Released: September 7, 2022