Bodies petrified by AIDS in Julia Ducournau's return to Cannes

Special Envoy to the Cannes Film FestivalSome films leave a sequence, a dialogue, or an image etched in your memory forever; perhaps just a gesture. But the film that Julia Ducournau presented in Cannes this Monday, it will be difficult to forget the symptoms of the fictional virus that gradually turns the bodies of the sick into stone, marble advancing through the skin and dust in the breath. In the director of Raw (2016) and Titane (2021) it is still interesting to explore the body horror and mutations, but in Alpha does so in the context of a story of internal transformations starring a thirteen-year-old girl who lives alone with her mother and who sets off alarm bells when one day she shows up with a tattoo she got at a party and knows which needles to use. "Could it be infected?" her mother, her classmates, and she herself ask themselves, victims of the state of paranoia and mistrust that has taken hold of society.

The return of an author to the Cannes competition after winning the Palme d'Or is no small feat, especially when Ducournau was only the second woman to win the award in more than 70 years of the festival. And in Alpha It is clear that the director wanted to take a step forward and offer a story much more rooted in reality, specifically in the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s. But the center of the film is the three-way relationship between the young protagonist, her mother and her heroin-addicted uncle, played by a magnificent Tahar Rahim. Ducournau's taste for the grotesque is present, but Alpha It is a less extreme film than Titane and more conventional in its narrative, despite a few dreamlike fugues that even recall Terry Gilliam in their manic energy. Generally, one misses the contemporary and radical dimension of the director's previous films, which are far less disruptive and fascinating here.

Fernão Magalhães reviewed by Lav Diaz

It's been a while since Albert Serra defends the beauty and complexity of Filipino Lav Diaz's cinema., one of the most radical directors of the 21st century, awarded at the Locarno Festival and the Venice Film Festival and famous for the length of his films A lullaby to the sorrowful mystery (483 minutes) or Melancholia (450 minutes). The 156 minutes of the film Diaz just premiered at Cannes are nothing compared to it: Magellan, presented out of competition with Catalan co-production by Albert Serra and his producer Montse Triola, revisits in an anti-colonial key the figure of Fernão Magalhães, the Portuguese navigator who led the naval expedition that made the first circumnavigation of the world, although he himself did not complete it, as he died, precisely, on the islands.

It makes perfect sense that Diaz, a regular chronicler of Philippine history, would approach the figure of Magalhães, until now told from a European perspective. Starring Mexican Gael García Bernal, the film opens and closes with the devastated landscape left by two brutal battles in Kochi, Portuguese India, and on the island of Cebu, where Magalhães dies. His exploits are stripped of epic proportions and framed within the militaristic, expansionist, and colonialist drift. Diaz's static, virtuoso compositional plans thus shape the right of the Filipino people to rewrite a key episode in human history as the true beginning of their struggle for freedom and against Western oppression.

Tarik Saleh closes the Cairo trilogy.

"We speak other people's words and feel things that don't belong to us," replies George, Egypt's biggest movie star, when an actress friend asks how they ended up collaborating with an authoritarian regime they despise.Confidential Cairo (2007) and Conspiracy in Cairo (2022), Tarik Saleh closes the Cairo trilogy with the tense thriller political Eagles of the Republic, presented in official competition, where the Swedish filmmaker with an Egyptian father focuses on the world of cinema to explain the mechanisms of repression in a society in which having a critical eye is a luxury that not even the most privileged, like George, can afford. To protect his life of luxury and his son, he agrees to star in a biopic about the current Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. However, what's missing is more depth in the portrayal of Egyptian cinema and a less archetypal vision of the movie star protagonist, played by the always charismatic Swedish actor Fares Fares, a regular in Saleh's films.