Trump, Limonov and the helplessness of the new adolescence compete in Cannes | Culture

Shortly before the Reagan era, when New York was a city on the verge of ruin, a young Russian who had made a poor living selling his poems in circles of the underground The Soviet Union landed in Manhattan to forge its dubious legend. It is difficult to surpass Emmanuel Carrère’s extraordinary book about that character and Limonov-The Ballad, directed by dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov (Tchaikovsky’s Woman, Petrov’s Fever), do not get it. Serebrennikov dedicates a good part of his film to Limonov’s New York years and, although the wonderful British actor Ben Whishaw supports the character, the result – with a cameo by Carrère included – leaves too many important issues in the pipeline and ends up providing only brush strokes. imprecise images of a life that doesn’t work on screen.

The image we have of that New York usually has the grain of an experimental film, perhaps because we associate it with a countercultural roar that began to fade in the following decade. In those same streets another kind of legend also began to be forged, that of a young Donald Trump who found shelter under the tutelage of a sinister character, the far-right lawyer Roy Cohn. The Apprentice, by Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider, Border), covers Trump’s first years in public life. This is played by Sebastian Stan and Roy Cohn, Jeremy Strong. Both are award-winning, especially Strong, but the film, with a very notable work of setting, with a texture in the image that transports to that time, does not tell anything very new and in the end it is impossible not to be left with the dangerous aftertaste of hagiography well done.

Trump owes everything to a character who represents the absolute hypocrisy of his country. Cohn, the man who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for alleged espionage, right-hand man in Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt, a radical, dangerous and corrupt conservative, close to Rupert Murdoch and Ronald Reagan, died of AIDS in 1986. after leading a double life for years. The young Trump learned alongside him to always deny the truth, a strategy that has given him the best results.

Limonov-The Ballad and The Apprentice are two biopics within an official competition section in which three films about helplessness and adolescent rage have stood out. These are interesting portraits about two girls and a boy, who in France, England and Romania respectively only find loneliness and frustration.

The first, Diamond Brut, It was screened on the first day and is the only debut feature in the competition. It is directed by Agathe Riedinger and is a character film, a close-up approach to a hypersexualized teenager absorbed by that pathological cult of fame and addiction to social networks. Riedinger’s film is the nightmare of a wannabe Kim Kardashian, a crappy influencer with nails like Rosalía who dreams of living in a reality for famous people whose world is trapped on the mobile screen. The debut actress, Malou Khebizi, does an admirable job, the best in the film, playing a girl who very authentically expresses a hypersexualization that leads to terrible sexual and emotional problems in real life.

The second of the lot, Bird, by the British Andrea Arnold, is among the favorites of the contest. It also has a teenager as the protagonist, but this unfolds in the field of magical realism that Arnold, a filmmaker with strong animalistic convictions, leads to an atypical relationship with a man (German actor Franz Rogowski) with the name of a bird, the Bird of the title. She is 12 years old and lives in a kind of squat with her father, an outdated man played by the great Barry Keoghan. The dysfunctional environment she describes bird It is not very far from Diamond Brut, but Arnold enters another plane and reserves some beautiful sequences for Keoghan, especially the last one of the film. The director of Cow (2021) has an innate talent for mixing natural and professional actors, something that provides very exciting results in this film.

The third story about teenagers is the Romanian one Three Kilometers to the End of the World, by Emanuel Parvu, which details a homophobic incident in a town in the Danube Delta. A 17-year-old boy returns there for a few days. One morning he arrives at his house beaten to death. It will not be his worst experience in an archaic and corrupt community. Parvu describes a terrifying homophobia, also exercised within the family with rituals of religious fanaticism. The film is sober and well narrated, with a tension that does not wane.

As part of the official section, it was also projected The Girl with the Needle, by the Swede Magnus von Horn, whose crescendo of squalor becomes unbearable. It lacks nothing: ether junkies, disfigured faces from the Great War, abortions in public bathrooms and a serial killer of babies in the background. The polished black and white photography only masks a film too devoted to the unpleasant.

Among the big names in the contest the general feeling is one of resounding disaster. In addition to Megalopolis, which has polarized critics and continues to generate debate, has been joined by David Cronenberg’s latest, The Shrouds, that borders on the unspeakable but without Coppola’s ambition and epic. It looks more like insane reluctance and the result is a mess.

The one that came out the best, despite being unsuccessful and quite dismantled, is Oh, Canada, by Paul Schrader. It focuses on the story of an old left-wing documentary filmmaker who went to Canada to avoid being enlisted in the Vietnam War and is now dying. This man, played by Richard Gere, faces his final moments before a camera, and mixes passages from his memory, memories of his youth. Jacob Elordi and Gere play the same character in this kind of puzzle-final prayer of a life that is dedicated to the author of the novel on which the film is based, Russell Banks.

After the halfway point of the festival, the most notable film continues to be the Chinese one Caught by the tides, by Jia Zhang-Ke, which we already talked about, but the ones that have made the most noise and are vying for the throne of this edition’s event are the daring narco-musical queer Emilia Perez, by the Frenchman Jacques Audiard, and the funny and daring comedy of body horror The Substance. None of them, however, is at the level of a Palme d’Or.

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