“Showing Up”, the art and material of Kelly Reichardt

OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION

Show-Up, eighth feature film by Kelly Reichardt, is also the first to join the ranks of the Cannes competition, late recognition for this first-rate work. Indeed, it took time for this slowly decocted cinema to emerge from the fog of American independent production, to the minimalist affections of which it has often been assimilated. However, the term “minimal” does not suit the work of Reichardt who, it is true, attaches to modest, even marginal characters, caught in minute situations. On its scale of proximity, it appears on the contrary soaked in the materials and rustlings of the world, filled with human and animal presences, innervated with everyday stories, and therefore infinitely rich in all other things.

From the artist, Kelly Reichardt here undermines the golden legend, eradicates any romantic conception

Composed again with sound by

writer, Oregon novelist Jon Raymond, Show-Up describes a detour in Reichardt’s work, usually pastoral, but which for the first time approaches the life of an artist, the pangs of creation, not without the part of reflexivity that its theme automatically suggests. Her heroine Lizzie, whose director once again entrusts the interpretation to Michelle Williams, after Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Some women (2016), is a sculptor, seized at this crucial and anxiety-provoking moment which precedes, by only a few days, the hanging and the opening of her next exhibition.

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It is therefore a particularly tormented character that we are dealing with here, obsessed with her deadline and at the same time harassed by all sorts of related problems which distract her from her work – a series of glazed ceramics representing women in the process of to dance or in postures that approach it. Nuisances as trivial as a broken water heater prevent him from taking a shower, or even a big brother in distress (John Magaro, the pastry chef of First Cow), which requires sustained assistance. To which is added, incongruous detail, this injured pigeon entrusted to him at the worst moment by his owner Lu (Hong Chau), also an artist in the process of hanging, and who also demands attention and care.

A beautifully woven weft

The film first deals with drawing up a picture of the objective conditions in which operates, today in the United States, an artist who can claim neither international notoriety, nor a supervisory framework, nor of a providential patron. That is to say of an overall precariousness where the act of creation must constantly tear itself away from the invading necessities and hassles of everyday life. So Lizzie has to put up with a “food” job in an art school, where she prints teachers’ catalogs and flyers. She must also suffer the inconvenience of a housing-workshop with a rent that is too low to complain about. Or depend on a colleague (rapper André Benjamin of the group Outkast) who will graciously know how to operate the oven to fire his ceramics. On the opaque face of the sculptress, even in her out of phase attitude, one reads much more than a fatigue: an annoyance, which, better than any other affect, attaches to the creative vocation.

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