Ghosts of the countryside and the desert

With an echo of Haneke (The White Ribbon) and Malick (The Tree of Life), like footprints macerated in the direction and grafted onto a mobile and wild camera, 40-year-old Mascha Schilinski is one of the surprises of this first part of the Cannes Film Festival. The emotional legacy of three generations of women, in rural Germany from Nazism to the present day, is the leitmotif of a journey through the spectres and forced paths, mistakes and impulses that these women find themselves living in a farmhouse.

Environmental or blood issues, it matters little, Sound of falling develops, passing through the Cold War on the side of East Germany, through a female gaze that does not exclude the male audience and, fragmenting the times, mixing them together, makes a film that seems like a fall (falling indeed) into a warm limbo, but full of pitfalls, imaginative and phantasmic, with love codes, sometimes violent and tribal. In fact, the film itself is a product of the origins and orientations of the author: the daughter of a filmmaker, she had the eye of a child psychologist (she graduated in this subject) in her choice of the little protagonist Alma, Hanna Heckt, who is of considerable weight for the film's success. Her previous debut, The Daughter, had at its centre a little girl who manipulates her parents' separation.

The other adventure is Sirāt by Óliver Laxe, a French-Spanish director who threatens a mystical intent: Sirāt in Islamism is the bridge that crosses hell connecting it to paradise. Fortunately, the film's landings are grotesque and far removed from spirituality. Catalan Luis (Sergi Lopez) is in Morocco at a rave party with his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) looking for his daughter and sister, whom he has not heard from in months. Not finding her, the two set off in pursuit of a quintet of techno nomads, devoted to adventure and freedom. Initially rejected as ballast, Luis and Esteban are gradually drawn into the caravan's habits of solidarity and strict sharing. Subtle is the psychological line with which the director renders Luis's preoccupation through his gaze, as he senses his son's attraction to the hippie's unbridled life. Roaring travails follow one another, so extreme and ruthless that they almost turn into farce. Excellent acting by father and son (too bad Lopez never loses weight, despite the ordeal) and the rave, non-professional actors do the rest. Remarkable photography by Mauro Herce, although the Moroccan scenery helps (also the set of another Laxe film, Mimosas). The scene of the assembly of loudspeakers in the desert is a cult incipit.

Classic in structure, masterfully shot, consistent in aesthetics, is Two prosecutors by Sergejs Lozņica, known at Cannes for bringing Ukrainian pro-European demands well before the Russian invasion (Maïdan, 2014, Donbass, 2018). Based on an essay by Georgy Demidov, a prisoner in the Soviet gulags, the film tells the story of a young law graduate, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), who decides, in the Russian province of 1937, to visit a political prisoner whose complaints of abuse by the secret police came in a note written in blood. And when he notices the torture perpetrated on the prisoner's body, he decides to go to Moscow to speak directly to the commissioner in charge. The latter listens to him and compensates him for his loyalty as a citizen, paying for a first-class return ticket, where he meets a couple of engineers, who may not be. A perfect film, in the claustrophobic circularity of the environments, in the cooled light (the dop is Oleg Mutu), in the Stalinist cynicism of betrayal and corruption, in the restrained acting of Kuznetsov and Alexander Filippenko, in the roles of the prisoner and the commoner.

For the rest, the Croisette churned out (rightly) on the tapis rouge stars of the calibre of Robert De Niro, Palme d'Or for Lifetime Achievement, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bono, at the centre of a documentary, Kristen Stewart, for the first time director, Tom Cruise, starring in the latest chapter of Mission Impossible, and a very French musical opening film, Partir un jour, set in the world of cooking. Songs might well have been the key to the film, but not after Emilia Pérez... Dominik Moll's Dossier 137 is a cop drama looking for nuances between good guys and bad guys in the clashes between police and yellow waistcoats, but it fails. But chapeau because the French really know how to portray the feeling of the times they live in real time. La petite dernière sees Hafsia Herzi, indomitable in Kechiche's Cous cous, reach the glories of the Competition in her third feature film. Based on Fatima Daas's best-selling novel, The Last One tells the story of Fatima's (Nadio Melliti) inner conflict between her being a lesbian and the Islamism to which she is devoted. Herzi aims the camera mainly at the protagonist to reveal herself to herself, between blind encounters and true love, and to others. But there is a timidity in the direction that is very much tied up, which ends up making the film predictable. The theme, his young age, and the talent that can be glimpsed, would have required Herzi to dare more. Finally, highly anticipated, Ari Aster's Eddington, which brought real sparkle, between Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, but little content. Beautifully acted, it is an explosive mockery of the woke, anti-abortion, Trumpian, gun-toting, scheming, paranoid culture that poisons the United States. Two and a half hours of continuous winks and nudges at the viewer not even Phoenix and Stone can save it.