1653026789 A Queens boy and a Polish donkey move house in

A Queens boy and a Polish donkey move house in Cannes

At what point in our lives and more importantly at what cost do we humans lose our innocence? Do they lose it, say, the donkeys? There was a moving answer to these questions yesterday, Thursday, in the official competition section of the Cannes Festival. The latest film from American director James Gray, one of the brightest of his generation and a darling of this competition, landed on La Croisette with Armageddon Time, an autobiographical film that evokes the moment a Queens boy left college in the Neighborhood leaves for a private made for New York’s elite. His family environment, played by an amazing chorus of actors in which Anne Hathaway, Anthony Hopkins and Jeremy Strong stand out, and above all his friendship with an African American classmate are at the heart of a film set in the eighties, at the beginning of Wilder Neoliberalism that shaped the Reagan era.

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Armageddon Time is a distillation of many of the director’s obsessions with Ad Astra and Z, the lost city, but through the eyes of a child who on many occasions recalls Salinger’s Holden Caufield on his clandestine walks around New York. An unusual and talkative boy who, with his critical eye on the imperfect world around him, dreams of being an artist and doing whatever he wants. Armageddon Time is sentimental in the best sense of the word and without cynicism it’s also rough and tough. The classism and racism it portrays, with a nod to the Trump family, ends with one of those perfect and simple endings where we say goodbye to a kid to welcome a whole man.

A transition to maturity that the innocent looks of EO’s burrito will never experience. What veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski does in EO might at times remind us of the immersion in animal life suggested in more recent films like Andrea Arnold’s Cow, but it goes much further. A tribute to Au Hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson’s classic in the era of macro-farms, which received the first round of applause in the professional review viewing.

Skolimowski’s film is not in vain. Separated from a circus and its cute owner, the little donkey embarks on a one-way journey in this wonderful film, where the purity of his gaze confronts the lack of empathy and respect of a world unable to contain its hostility towards the… world reverse animal. The background of horror that hides the beautiful images and sounds of Skolimowski speaks of an apocalyptic world in which fire or scrap metal surrounds animal life that is repeatedly banished from its paradise. The fox farm for fur, the stable of thoroughbred horses or the circus from which they take the donkey after an animal protest show that the world is incapable of asking the right questions about animals.

Anne Hathaway, James Gray, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb pose before the screening of Armageddon Time in Cannes.Anne Hathaway, James Gray, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb pose before the screening of ‘Armageddon Time’ in Cannes. SARAH MEYSSONNIER (REUTERS)

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Skolimowski only makes a visual error by inserting an absurd episode starring French actress Isabelle Huppert. For the rest, his film confronts us with fundamental philosophical questions about the consciousness and communication of animals, their instincts about life and death, and even how animals, and horses in particular, have transformed art in motion, that is, cinema. until the end also prisoners of the picture. Like Béla Tarr in The Horse of Turin – a film that reversed the perspective on one of the founding moments of animalism when, in the twilight of the 19th century, Nietzsche embraced a horse that had been tearfully beaten in the middle of the street – Skolimowski (whose visual rhythm, moreover, does not allow for a second of boredom) reminds us, without dialogue or proclamation, only through the eyes of a poor donkey, that without animal innocence we lose nothing but our own humanity.

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