Cannes was awarded the Palme d’Or of discord – Francesco Boille

The Cannes 2022 palmarès, not a little criticized at home, also because it is frankly a bit ridiculous, was a tragedy announced, right from the composition of the jury. But before delving into this aspect we want to open the final breaking latest news of the festival with the latest feature films screened in competition and in particular with what would be our Palme d’Or.

Its title is Pacifiction and in the last two days of the competition it has peeped into the cinephile sky, already full of so many titles if you look at all the sections, like the coveted UFO, like the great surprise that almost no longer expected.

The author, for the first time in competition, is the Spaniard Albert Serra, considered one of the greatest directors of the new generation on the international scene. Revealed at the beginning of the 2000s by the Quinzaine des réalisateurs with rarefied, picaresque and archaic works out of any known register, then awarded in 2013 at the Locarno festival with the Golden Leopard for Story of my deathwith this disturbing and visionary reinvention of the myth of Dracula that merges into Giacomo Casanova, Serra begins a metaphysical-sensorial reflection, but with strong intellectual implications, on France, old regimemonarchy, enlightenment, aristocracy on the crest of the French revolution, divided into four films and ending with Freedom, presented in 2019 at Un certain regard – the “antechamber” section of the competition – with the heretically libertine environments of Louis XVI’s France at the center. Pictorial, surreal, disconcerting and dirty, to use a term suitable for the time of setting, the title has a clear ironic value.

However with Pacifiction Serra moves the frame of his camera twice: the lens is focused on contemporary France, but seen through the prism of the exotic environments of French Polynesia, and to better criticize the emptiness of power from the outside, from the periphery of the Kingdom, or of the Republic (which in some way are equivalent here). Kingdom and Republic in capital letters like the High Commissioner and the Admiral: because in postcolonial France everything is as pompous as it is ridiculous.

The film lasts more than two and a half hours and in the middle of it you may perhaps feel a little bored by this succession of worldly and often empty conversations, but at the same time also pleasant and full of nuances and information, where a resumption of the nuclear tests in Polynesia, it is not even known by whom. China, Russia, the United States? France no longer seems to really matter and besides, as has been said, the superiors of the High Commissioner are no better than the Admiral: minister and young president “are idiots”.

But if you don’t give up, you are rewarded. Because there are the actors, including several Polynesians, all very good. Particularly true for Benoît Magimel who carries on his body, as powerful as his speech, the entire film, enclosed in the character of High Commissioner De Roller, masterfully interpreted by him. Serra reinvented and launched to the actor on the spot the dialogues that Magimel made of him with great ease: the result is that the dialogues seem completely genuine, spontaneous, while maintaining a certain theatricality.

And then because there is the direction, there are the images. Images, sequences, sometimes as never seen before. Pacifiction it should absolutely be watched, and contemplated, on a giant screen. It opens with a panoramic view of the port of Tahiti where motorboats dock with French sailors and officers on board: in the background a sunset with a thousand shades, enveloping, penetrating. Right from the start we are in a cinema utopia of the seventies or early eighties: the cuts of the shots, the camera movements, the photography, are sumptuous and sensual, indeed they express a sort of psychedelia of sensuality: bodies and colors are one thing alone and impregnate the viewer.

Soon it is night and we move to a night club, dancing beautiful women and men, but with ambiguous charm. There is something of the cinema of the last Fassbinder. Diversified genres who are perhaps the only genuine characters, an expression of real life and to be loved. Perhaps. Yet, this film with its extraordinary atmospheres, from the sought chaos of suggestions that are epidermally soothing for the spirit as well as disturbing in their meaning, with visually alienating sequences, reaches a high degree of intimacy with its characters and with the spectator himself. Also due to the use of music and above all of sounds, a structured work emerges on an accumulation of climaxes that follow one another and that for this reason reaches a proximity with conceptual art, even if not exhibited. On the other hand, also Serra’s previous feature film, the aforementioned Freedomset entirely at night in a forest, it was the derivative of an installation.

Static comedy-drama in tropical humidity, almost of stasis, but with great reversals, claimed by the same production as a paranoid thriller of political fiction about power, Pacifiction makes it clear that the latter, in being laughable, in being nothing, in being inconclusive – also because now “politics is a night club” – cannot prevent something deaf, gloomy, frozen but nevertheless grandiose is outlined in the starry night of the Pacific. But maybe everything is fake, nothing more than one more Pacifiction.

An exciting film and a further revelation, hailed by much of the international critics, is Leila’s brothers by Iranian Saeed Roustaee, in his fourth feature film after his excellent one Six and a half million presented at the Venice exhibition in 2019. It follows the events of a family reduced almost to poverty, where four mature male brothers are unemployed and still dependent on their elderly parents. In opposition to the exponents of a failed patriarchal culture, the figure of Leila emerges, an independent younger sister with strength of character. Very long (two hours and 45 minutes), the film is overwhelming, almost a tsunami (as was the director’s previous feature, set in prisons). Although it is a bit dizzying in the initial part, such is the power of the staging, such is the courage for the issues addressed, yet without ever being Manichean, and such, finally, is the saraband of overturns, changes of scene, places, environments – often opposite, as opposed are the social classes approached (the rich cousins) – and of strong contrasts which, all together, go to build a hard but unforgettable fresco of contemporary Iran, which one remains speechless in front of the revelation of a great cinematic novel. We believe that it should come out not dubbed and that we should find the courage to leave this explosive energy intact, also made up of sounds and voices that are as strong as they are genuine.

Finally, the new feature by US director Kelly Reichardt deserves mention, for the first time in competition at Cannes. Able to range between various genres, a leading figure of American independent cinema and antithesis, for many, of the flat pimping of Chloé Zhao. Famous among other things for its sense of landscape (see the western masterpiece First cow), con Showing up chooses splendid minimal landscapes in perfect coherence with the general project of the film: to tell the hard concrete difficulties of living in a community of artists, without concrete help from any public or private institution, mediated the infinitesimal details, the minimum tremors of life. Of this delicate and minimalist approach, which nevertheless leads to a precise x-ray of the social, a wounded pigeon that the protagonist takes care of, despite the thousand personal problems, and the enveloping flora with intense green that surrounds it, are a splendid paradigm. each house, like a small forest with minimal and continuous variations. The epiphanic ending, also thanks to the gracefulness of the direction, is the icing on the cake.

And we come to the palmarès. As written by others, for example Libération, too many award-winning films, almost half of the selection, and too many ex-aequo; hardly any of the bravest films have been awarded. Armageddon time by James Gray is a great social and historical film told starting from the intimate: if it had been awarded, the support would have been important also for Universal, given the spread of Marvel blockbusters; and yet another Palma to the Dardenne, as good as the film is, perhaps it is a bit too much. Above all, with the Palme d’Or in Östlund after that of 2017, one gives the impression of an already seen, of a replay, that there are few innovations and no risks.

The critic of Libération Luc Chessel is right who defines Pacifiction out of any format, routine. In fact it is a work dislocated in an “elsewhere” of the cinematographic art. But the Cannes Film Festival needed to relaunch cinema with bold prizes. With films for everyone, but original, such as those by Gray, Martone or Roustaee. And with unclassifiable films like Serra’s that maybe make someone snort on the spot, but reveal something never seen before. When in 2010 the Thai masterpiece won the Palme d’Or Uncle Boonmee remembering past lives by Apichatpong Weerasethakul – award that launched the director on international markets – president of the jury was Tim Burton, that is an American who loves the different, on the jury there were a critic like Alberto Barbera and a director like the Spanish Victor Erice, master of cinema of poetry.

This time the jury was made up of exponents of national-popular auteur cinema, glossy or formatted, including the very nice president Vincent Lindon. It is the composition of the jury, an always delicate and complex factor, that provokes miracles, average palmarès or even announced tragedies.