Armageddon time is a deeply human masterpiece – Francesco Boille

After the grand opening with the Italians (but the highly anticipated will arrive next week in competition Nostalgia by Mario Martone), in all the sections in Cannes you can see the first beautiful films and even some great titles. The competition presented some very diversified works but united by the common attention to atypical figures and somehow on the margins.

The new work by the American James Gray, a Universal production, marks the return of the director originally from Queens New York to his early stories, refinedly intimate within a precise social framework, after having transited into other genres and in large productions such as the adventure and exploration films or science fiction. Gray, who presented almost all of his films in Cannes, after his debut in Venice in 1994 with the notable Little Odessaof those first films renews the unique ability to suggest an atemporal dimension, suspended, even though the narration falls into a precise moment of time: in this case the end of the seventies and the emergence of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Here we are on the side of autobiography and an exciting narrative minimalism, a first for one of the few directors of his generation, if not the only one, who makes one think of the greats of New Hollywood of the seventies, such as Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino or Francis Ford Coppola. And theArmageddon Time of the title certainly refers to the Jewish origins of Gray, to the book of the Apocalypse, but at the same time it assumes an ironic and tragic connotation in the context of the portrait of a microcosm, the family one, which here takes on a universal value.

Social predestination
Paul Graff is a rather dreamy kid and eager to be an artist. The Queens school where he studies, although it is a bit lacking in means and chaotic, he likes it and above all he gets along very well with a black boy with a precarious family situation – he lives with his elderly grandmother – which leads him to things that would be considered by us to be jokes but which in that context are almost micro-apocalypses. They mark the individual to the point of building a sort of social predestination for him. Although Paul comes from a somewhat nonconformist family – politically they are clearly Democratic voters, very interested in culture and art – this does not entirely save them from the anguish of social success, public image in the social sphere and prejudice. racial disguised.

Paul ends up in an expensive private school, starched in rules and with humanly horrible kids: the Kew-Forest school – where Gray actually studied – funded by Fred Trump, which we see repeatedly speaking to the boys. It is the beginning of an ordeal for Paul as well as for Johnny, his black friend by now also kicked out of state high school. When Paul meets Johnny in the fenced courtyard of his house, it is clear that he feels in prison, while Johnny, apparently free to go wherever he wants, is actually only theoretically: he is so poor that he does not know what to do and takes refuge in the courtyard of the Paul’s home, in the little house built for him by his father, to escape the social workers who want to take him away from his grandmother.

Armageddon time it is a masterpiece on social determinism and not just of mere social criticism: without the coldness of the gaze of an entomologist of behavior, it is indeed a profoundly human film. The refinement of the social analysis passes through the refinement of the analysis of family relationships, of the feelings between two kids who in their dream of an “other” life in the end dream only of a decent and perhaps a little special life. Without victimization, devoid of any emphasis, sober, dry, the film manages to construct an unexpected narrative with pleasant slowness and gradualness and to move deeply. The teachings of his grandfather, a great unifying and stabilizing figure in the family as well as truly nonconformist – beautifully embodied by Anthony Hopkins – will raise a new awareness of life in Paul. It is the end of a childhood that bordered on adolescence. But without anticipating too much, when Armageddon arrives, and of various kinds, it is truly a turmoil. And it’s certainly not the one prophesied on television by then California Governor Ronald Reagan.

On this James Gray feature film, which paradoxically leaves a feeling of serenity because it is deeply human, there will be a way to go back on the occasion of its release in theaters. For the moment we add only that it would surprise us if the jury chaired by Vincent Lindon left a film that looks like no other without a prize.

There is again an intimate and familiar upheaval, also here between two children, who will then find themselves as young adults, at the center of The eight mountains by the Belgians Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch and based on the novel of the same name by Paolo Cognetti, who participated in the making of the film.

It is the story set between the mountain pastures and the peaks of the Aosta Valley of two de facto friends and brothers, who as kids used to climb mountains together before life separated them. If the part of childhood and adolescence is a little pulled away – too many important intimate situations – in the adult life of the two friends-brothers, the larger, the film finds its own beautiful balance and reason. to be.

Very well interpreted by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi, who return to work in pairs as in the magnificent Do not be naughty by Claudio Calegari, is the comparison between two specular personalities, equal and at the same time opposite, one destined to get lost leaving the other stunned forever, as for the two halves of an intense heterosexual relationship. However, it is the sober, classic visual form chosen to make an important contribution to the success of the film: an almost skimpy television format, in theory a blasphemous choice for filming impressive natural landscapes, and naturalistic photography without apparent refinements. Yet in this way the gaze is always focused on the landscapes, for example on the narrow paths of the mountain peaks, as to seem so in relief to be able to touch them: the mountain in the cinema filmed in this way has almost never been seen and ultimately the film experiments without exhibiting it.

Incredible film, completely crazy but rigorously constructed, is that of the Polish Jerzy Skolimowski who, at the age of 84, returns with a short but intense and truly original work. Skolimowski, Venice Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2016, also awarded in Venice for two feature films (including the masterpiece Essential killing 2010), but not always distributed (11 minutesalways presented in Venice), although his films are always very strong and compelling, with There are looks at society and the world through the eyes of a donkey. He was from the days of Random balthazar (1966), one of Robert Bresson’s masterpieces, which did not happen. This circus donkey suddenly finds himself “free”. Representation of innocence continually put to the test of an often mad and potentially rapist world, the film manages to be both realistic and social, documentary and dreamlike, psychedelic and science fiction, fairy tale and rural, silent and spoken, human and relentless.