Meanwhile, in Cannes… Wes Anderson’s chic casting, Rachida Dati’s lesson and a “scapegoat” film

The most chic of the Cannes red carpets after the already glittering ones of "Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning" (Tom Cruise in majesty) or "Eddington," Ari Aster's hallucinatory neo-western (Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal)? Without a doubt, "The Phoenician Scheme," the thirteenth film by filmmaker Wes Anderson, son of an archaeologist and an advertising executive, with a meticulously crafted aesthetic and a manic obsession with detail, shot in the legendary Babelsberg studios. On the program, the tribulations of Zsa Zsa Korda, an arms magnate with a habit of plane crashes in search of an heiress (family remains the Gordian knot of the filmmaker's filmography). The cast includes none other than Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton (daughter of Kate Winslet, a clone of Anna Karina in Jacques Rivette's "The Nun"), Scarlett Johansson (excused because she is saving herself for the presentation of her own film on Tuesday), Tom Hanks, Michael Cera, Benedict Cumberbacht and so on... On the flanks of the red carpet, the armada of photographers was speechless. Just before, the team of Brazilian Kleber Mendonça Filho (Jury Prize in 2019 with "Bacurau"), had already climbed Everest towards the Lumière room, for "The Secret Agent" the only South American film in the competition on the period of the military dictatorship, between percussionists and musicians. Cannes, 78th or more decibels life.

The Minister of Culture is not above enjoying herself when it comes to making a leap onto the steps of Cannes. Last year, she was seen one day alongside Richard Gere, the next day arm in arm with Kevin Costner. This year, her program consisted first of all of lecturing the profession on Saturday. After attacking the public service live on France Inter, she went to Cannes to criticize French cinema, calling in particular for the defense of the French cultural exception, shaken by "artificial intelligence, geopolitical tensions and the battering rams of the American administration." To this end, she called on producers and directors to accompany her to Brussels. "Our diplomats, all those who work at the Commission, tell us: we are fighting to defend this French model, but we see fewer and fewer artists" coming to support this fight, she lamented before adding: "I have known people like Claude Berri and (Bertrand) Tavernier coming to defend this model." And for those who have not understood: "Some say 'no, we do not want to mix politics,' but we are not asking you to take photos with us on an election poster."

It seems her call was heard because the very next day, Rachida Dati appeared on the red carpet with a delegation of European filmmakers, including French filmmaker Claude Lelouch and French-Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras. How effective! (It was to welcome the crew of Wes Anderson's film. Glamorous, certainly, but a little removed from the famous "French model to defend," no?)

Since the start of the Cannes hostilities, the competition has been split between films that divide the press, sometimes even the editorial staff themselves ("Eddington", "Sirat") and those around which a more or less weak consensus is coalescing ("Nouvelle vague", "Two prosecutors"). "Die my love", the new work by Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, a regular at the Croisette ("We need to talk about Kevin"), revives a great classic of the festival that had been absent until now: the scapegoat film, on which a heavy barrage of criticism is poured from all sides. Including our own.

Adapted from the eponymous book by Argentinian Ariana Harwicz, "Die My Love" immerses the viewer in the chaotic psyche of Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), a young mother and writer, recently settled with her baby and partner (Robert Pattinson) in a dilapidated Montana farmhouse. The hypothesis of the housewife's alienation by the bad vibes of the fold (a wormy, backwoods version of the Overlook Hotel in "The Shining," where the former owner, an old uncle of the fiancé, took his own life) holds for a brief moment before the film stops bothering to unravel the source of the evil.

Lynne Ramsay prefers monomaniacal tragedy or the chronicle of the extreme to psychological study: the story is limited to repeating the same refrain of images, arguments and perverse schemes, flowing into a rhythm that is both stroboscopic and overwhelming. The invasive rock soundtrack, pushed to the max, streaked, depending on your point, by the couple's screams, the baby's cries or the shrill barking of the household dog, contributes to orchestrating this cyclical delirium, which pushes everyone and everything (including the spectator) to exhaustion, as if it were aiming for a sort of trance dominated by noise and fury.

Yes, but here's the thing: after a handful of minutes where the machinery starts to kick in, "Die My Love" gets bogged down in the most dull boredom, the most garish aesthetics and the most total emptiness. The purulent desire to impress, whether visual or symbolic (this gimmick of the couple writhing like wild animals in heat in the wild grass, pure discomfort on legs), kills the slightest embryo of mystery in the bud, the Pavlovian madness of Grace producing only gesticulations and farandoles of marital clichés. Barely emerging from this disaster are the few mean remarks delivered by the young woman to the saccharine shopkeepers or superficial neighbors - three gently cathartic scenes. Or this increasingly clear fascination of Jennifer Lawrence for the masochistic thing, "Die My Love" reviving the specter of the problematic demonstration of "Mother!" » by Darren Aronofsky shot eight years earlier with the star, this pretext to sadize women disguised as a #Metoo fable.

Cannes, a land of contrasts. On the one hand, actor Raphaël Quenard comes, with his usual cheekiness, to present at Cannes Classics, "I Love Peru", a mockumentary in the form of a self-portrait co-directed with a camera, "as a pirate" , in other words, on the fly, over a period of three years with Hugo David. From Jonathan Cohen to François Civil, all of French cinema has a look. On the other, Thierry Klifa presents out of competition "The Richest Woman in the World," loosely based on the Woerth-Bettencourt affair, starring Isabelle Huppert, in a fictional version of Liliane Bettencourt, daughter of the founder of L'Oréal, and Laurent Lafitte as François-Marie Banier. Money, the lack of it, the crux of the matter and the real issue. As the Festival, a glamorous showcase of a milieu that populists of all stripes reduce to a caste of the privileged, reaches almost halftime, it investigates how French writer-directors live.

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