A handful of lucky people, bright enough to have reserved a place as soon as its screening was announced a week ago and filled the room in a few minutes, therefore found themselves “botched” by Thierry Frémaux at the Pathé Bellecour in Lyon, Tuesday, October 18 at the evening, to discover Steven Spielberg’s new film, The Fabelmans, as part of a Festival Lumière at cruising speed. Presented for the first time at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, from where it left with the Audience Award, the film is screened for the first time in France, before a national release scheduled for January 25, 2023.
That is to say so few people have seen it, and if the favorable rumors announcing it demanded to be verified on the spot. At least we were sure that the film would revolve around Spielberg’s childhood, and that, as such, it represented a challenge for its author. Firstly because the filmmaker, whose work is closely linked with childhood, notably through this canonical film that is AND the alien (1982), confronts, with The Fabelmans, for the first time explicitly to his own childhood. Hay science fiction. Crazy alien. Another pair of sleeves. The second reason is that Spielberg actually waited twenty years before carrying out this project, paralyzed at the idea that his parents could see it.
This context alone says the sensitive issues of this film. We draw a priori admiration for the delicate gesture which consists in having waited so long, at the same time as for the spiritual necessity which pushes a 75-year-old filmmaker to evoke so intensely, and so subtly, the figure of his parents. Admiring, one can be so a posteriori, so moving is the film, so much does it deal with the cruelty of life, so much does it also consist – by its Bergmanian filiation – in this sort of great intimate and romantic spectacle whose scarcity on the screens is heartbreaking.
ghosts of the old world
So here is, to reveal nothing more, the story of a young American Jew and a filmmaker in the making during the 1960s, who puts a lot of grace and seriousness into correlating the story of a couple who comes undone to that of a boy that this defeat will end up constructing. In this film, Spielberg does not paint his self-portrait so much as he addresses himself, in the abolished or rediscovered time of cinema, directly to his parents, to embrace them filially in the impotent suffering of their separation, and to express to them at the same time the price it will have cost him. That of his own childhood, which he will constantly reinvent in his films. Michelle Williams as the mother, Paul Dano as the father, Seth Rogen as the best friend of the father, the young Canadian actor Gabriel LaBelle as Sammy Fabelman, and even David Lynch in a surprise appearance are remarkable.
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