Cannes 2024 : Reality and ghosts

Yesterday, we wrote about how timely Dupieux’s Le Deuxième Acte was as an opening film for the festival, spreading unease underneath the hilarity, bringing back to the screen every pattern of crisis stirring the minds of festival-goers (sexual assaults, alienation of precarious workers, ascendancy of AI,…). « Reality is reality », says Léa Seydoux like a mantra on the screen in the Lumière amphitheatre, as the film’s only socially fragile character makes his way towards a tragic fate. At the same time, protesters from the Sous les écrans la dèche collective managed to infiltrate the Palais’s armada to unroll a banner that bore their name, in a striking counter-shot of reality.

Under the screens, not merely poverty, but sexual violence as well. The Un Certain Regard section inaugurates its selection with a foretaste of Judith Godrèche’s first feature film through her 10-minute short film, Moi aussi, in which the actress and director brings together a thousand people who have testified to the abuse they have suffered, and who have agreed to form a resilient group of people on screen, occupying the public space. In the following interview, Judith Godrèche shares her personal memories of the nightmarish double Cannes can turn into. She also explains how, faced with the raw violence of reality, she has chosen to thwart the literal staging of testimonies and opt for a stylization that elaborates « a singular language, close to that of childhood. »

Judith Godrèche took center stage in Sophie Fillières’ first feature film, Grande Petite (1994), a waking reverie and a wonderful tightrope walk. It is the director’s final film (she passed just after filming) that the Quinzaine des cinéastes has chosen to open with. Her children, Agathe and Adam Bonitzer, and her lead actress, Agnès Jaoui – fantastic from start to finish –  tell us how Ma vie ma gueule was created and passed on. The film is superb. It pushes to its very limits the author’s art of nuance and variation, and succeeds in telling the story of a vanishing, a patient and organized withdrawal from the world, in an ethereal, clarified, poetic and almost playful way. Haunted though it inevitably is, Ma vie ma gueule is incomparably gentle.