THE MORNING LIST
The effervescence in Cannes over, the cinema industry, which is facing the crisis, is getting back to work on releases. By making fun of herself copiously, as in the Argentine comedy Official competition, or by declining portraits of women. A savage struggling with her sensuality in Costa Rica (Clara Sola), a courageous widow in Kosovo (The Beehive), a Royal Elizabeth in England (Elizabeth, singular gaze(s)).
“Official competition”: a playful satire of the cinema world
Hardly had the Cannes Film Festival ended when a caustic fiction on the star-system arrived in theaters, the aptly named Official competition, 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.
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 taken by a sudden urge 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 painting, a thinly veiled metaphor for the incommunicability that reigns between the two actors. Clarisse Fabré
Argentinian, Spanish film by Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat. With Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Oscar Martinez (1 h 54).
“ Clara Sola”: the awakening of a wild woman to desire
Occupied with nothing, except observing animals and nature, Clara lives with her mother, Fresia (Flor Maria Vargas Chaves), who takes care of her, and her niece Maria, pretty of a girl in blooming adolescence (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza) whose presence radiates throughout the house. Clara finds in nature an enveloping and moist cradle to which she entrusts her flesh. This sensual body-to-body, filmed with extreme delicacy by the director, could appear as an ideal return to the Garden of Eden. It is actually a minefield where Clara, until then forced to remain a saint in the eyes of all, learns through enjoyment to get rid of her chains. It will take the arrival in the vicinity of a boy for her to manage to free herself from it definitively. In other words, so that the Madonna becomes a woman.
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