"Chime": the director of "Kaïro" distills anguish and confusion in a short film in the form of a haiku

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While Asian cinema has been reduced to a bare minimum at the Cannes Film Festival for several editions (only one Japanese film was selected in the official competition this year, "Renoir" by Chie Hayakawa), it is always strange to note that an auteur of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's caliber so regularly remains on the fringes of the beating heart of the Croisette. His next features, "Cloud" and "The Serpent's Way," will soon have the honor of a French release, but it is "Chime" that opens the ball this week.

This short, haiku-like film (45 minutes) combines, as is often the case in his work, muffled horror and underlying melancholy in an urban setting – the great subject of Kurosawa, a Japanese emulator of Antonioni. Here, it is from the haunted mind of a teenager haunted by a demonic inner voice that the director of "Kaïro" distills the unrest. It doesn't take him long to draw a simple shudder into strangeness or make the impalpable visible through a subtle shift in focus.