In Cinema’s Blurred Mirror, with Natalie Portman and Todd Haynes

25 years ago, a news story caused a stir in the United States: a math teacher and mother fell in love with one of her 13-year-old students, before marrying him after his release from detention, a child in prison and expanding his family.

“May December”, by Todd Haynes.

The film which is inspired by it, May December, Takes place 20 years later, signed by Todd Haynes. Into this family comes an actress and television star, almost like everyone else, who is to play a role in a fictional adaptation of this story. In the purest tradition of the Actors Studio Method, she comes to observe her model, in a troubling game of mimicry that leads to vampirization. It’s not a scabrous news item, at least not directly, that interests Todd Haynes. What is undoubtedly his best film, at the same time his scariest and funniest, leaves aside the mannerisms of the American filmmakers, admirers and princes of melodrama who were Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Far from heaven

and others Carol For stage and mirror, with the greatest precision, a confrontation between two talented actresses: his fetish Julianne Moore, to whom he gave her first major role in 1995. Safe (May December their fifth film together), and Natalie Portman, at the core of the film, as she was the one who saw the first script written by the casting director, a certain Sammy Burch, and who proposed her first film as a producer. For that filmmaker, with whom she had dreamed of working. So it’s only logical that we meet Natalie Portman as well as Todd Haynes to explain to us how she did it.

“Sammy Burch’s script was phenomenal. Underlines Natalie Portman, indeed. Simple, but deceptively simple, because when you start getting down to business and catching all the subtext in every line, every word is loaded, so everyone is silent; There is a lot of tension all the time. Being able to play a scenario like this is a real gift; It raises so many questions that have obsessed me since the beginning of my career about roles, identity, acting, the ethics of art, the question of whose story to tell. (…) And when you are an actress yourself and you play an actress, you can laugh at yourself. And then the public comes with a certain number of expectations that can be changed. It’s a rare opportunity to take everything the audience has in mind, everything they bring with them when they come to see a film, and play with it.

“

“What excited me about this scenario, Todd Hahn’s echo continues as it fallss, it is this energy, this work on interpretation, on the aspect of things that is not certain, not sure. And I asked myself “How do I translate this to the attention of the film viewer: we don’t know what to think of these characters? ” Somehow, the moral information regarding these characters is really changing: that’s an invitation I give to the audience. (…)We had to make this instability vulnerable, to show people that they are always on the edge of something, that They’re never going to be completely comfortable. And, today, I think it’s very difficult for people to know exactly what to think about the images we show them. People like to go to a movie that they already know about. knows what they will think at the end, and the challenge in my eyes is to put the audience in a state of instability, where ultimately, our allegiance to one character or another is shifting, and to dive into that process. To see this film is to experience it. That’s it. Cinema is, that’s what it’s always been for me.”

To learn more about the cinema of Todd Haynes, we cannot recommend reading enough Todd Haynes, American Chimera, a fascinating book of interviews conducted by Judith Revault d’Allons and Amelie Gali on the occasion of a retrospective at the Center Pompidou last May, published by De l’Incidence Publishers. To extend, continue LaCinetekwith Far from heavenAnd several films by his muses Julian Moore and his master Douglas Sirk.

Cinema Journal

Weekend outing

• The nearly century-old filmmaker’s return to images shot for an obscure documentary project by a young man in Afghanistan in the 1960s is beautiful. An Afghan summerby James Ivory;
• The transformation of an industrial wasteland into a residential area in Bordeaux, filmed over five years, is a captivating urban poem. Brazza hereby Antoine Boutet;
• comedy genre Goodbye Lenin In the Parisian suburbs, against a backdrop of growing anti-Semitism, he is on the razor’s edge and on the ropes, Last of the Jewsby Noah Debre, with a revelation of Michael Zindel’s great comic nature;
• Mélanie Thierry’s voluntary entry into the mental hell of the Salpétrière in the late nineteenth century is highly carnal and colorful. captiveNo Arnaud des Palliereswho came to talk to us about it last week;
• The mysterious journey of an itinerant projectionist and his teenage daughter into the post-Soviet fringes of the Russian Empire is grand and depressing. GraceThe Russian Revelation of the Last Cannes Film Festival, by Ilya Povolotsky;
• An endless game of fools and masks that fall only to reveal others, that is HoundsJoseph L. Mankiewicz’s brilliant latest film, which is being released in a restored version, and which NT Binh will be talking to us about next week;
• An Inverted Pygmalion, starring the cyclopean colossus Galatea and Emmanuelle Davos as the hidden child of Sophie Calle and Marina Abramović, is A man of clayThe first feature film inspired by Anais Talenwho also came to talk to us about it last week, along with her very subtle model, actor Raphael Thierry;
• A pornographic detective who had the heyday of Club Dorothy in the 90s is back on the big screen. Niki Larson as Angel DustBy Kenji Kodama, the animated version, barely, of the manga City hunter ;
• And then finally, Viralism’s damage to the American family of wrestlers under the iron grip of a toxic patriarchy is uneven, but moving. Iron ClawBy Sean Durkin.

Plan large advertisements

Next Wednesday will be the first France Culture Session With a preview of animalBeautiful adaptation by Bertrand Bonello The Beast in the Jungle By Henry James, with Léa Seydoux and George Mackay. Of course this will be followed by a meeting with the filmmaker. It is exceptionally at 7:30 pm, as usual Majestic Bastillein Paris.

Still in Paris, the event screens this Sunday a restored version of a legendary film and a rare survivor of Yiddish cinema. Debook thisBy Michal Waszynski, It’s 3:30 pm. Rashi Centre39 Rue Broca in the fifth arrondissement.

Event Screening Again: the holocaustClaude Lanzmann’s definitive and essential film on the destruction of Europe’s Jews. It will be broadcast on Tuesday, January 30 at 9:10pm on France 2 and will also appear on france.tv for a month from the following day.not

In Brussels, it is a cinema that is in danger, the cinema Nova. In order to preserve this unique and self-sustaining space for land clearing and cinematographic experiments, a cooperative was created in the very heart of the city, by real estate developers, to which everyone could contribute. You will get information By following this link.

Finally, if you are in Geneva, do not miss the exhibition Walkerwhich resumes within the framework of Black Movie Festival A series of films shot around the world by Tsai Ming-Liang, he talked about hereIt is at the Le Commune cultural space until February 7.

Sandra Onana’s column: “Bellissima,” by Luchino Visconti (which hits theaters on January 31)

“Mamma? Che mamma?” Mamma Roma!, of course, Pasolini renamed Anna Magnani in 1961. We are 10 years earlier, in 1951, and Visconti says, Magnani is his real subject. Bellissima. In any case, he had to wait a long time to finally film her, the voluptuous Romaine.Obsession, the founding film of neorealism in 1942. And it’s also neorealism, and its flip side, that’s at issue in this film, with this casting of little amateur girls at the Cinecittà studio. A more beautiful child in Roma. But the illusory dreams of a better life promised by the lark mirror of the cinema, which separates only to be further humiliated…”Anna Magna draws light from the film’s opening, when we see her pulling herself out of the crowd at the gates of the Cinecittà, the monumental setting in front of which outsiders collapse. And we understand from this force of appearance, seduction that the film will be his. Which also tells us about the tension in this story, as this Mother Hurricane competes for our attention to the loss of her young daughter Maria, the plot’s main figure. Bellissima So it is the story of a woman who will bleed herself to make her child a star and live out her dreams of glory by proxy. Even if it means forgetting to consider the wishes of this little Maria that he loves so much. The film verges on baroque adoration, the excesses of a mother who will squander the household savings to pay for theater and dance lessons, with only the word sacrifice on her lips. But although Visconti claimed that the script gave him an excuse to set up a podium for his actress, at the same time, he Bellissima Commemorates a little girl’s tears, and legitimizes it as a subject. Because this petite actress, heartwarming to watch, will go through the film crying. And each time the camera marks it, in the figurative sense of the word, as a whole of suffering that goes unrecorded.“

Sound clips

• Excerpts from May Decemberr, by Todd Haynes (2023)
• The music of the messenger By Michel Legrand, revised by Marcelo Zarvos
• A mix of weekly releases
• Excerpts from BellissimaBy Luchino Visconti
• Music from the opening credits BellissimaBased on the theme, by Franco Mannino Elixir of love by Donizetti