From one end of life to the other? The two most beautiful films of this 1is January 2025 are not dedicated to birth or death. Metaphorical, their titles rather refer to a flight in Andrea Arnold and at Carson Lund to landings at the end of what we believed we were building an existence around.
It is beautiful that films thus invent, in different ways, individually in England, collectively in the United States, ways of capturing journeys. The art of movement, cinema is fully here, in the sense that it develops sensual translations of the developments that affect beings – a young girl, aging men – in all their dimensions.
«Bird», d’Andrea Arnold
Now a sure bet in European auteur cinema, the British Andrea Arnold imposes sequence after sequence both a true cinema heroine, Bailey, and her own way of telling her story.
It starts loudly, with the thunderous sound of hard rock and the violent exuberance of the voices, which respond to the aggressiveness of the tattoos and gestures. In the deprived cities ofPoor England, between wasteland, squats and rotten buildings, there is no real meaning in being a 12 year old girl.
This is how Bailey sees it, who asserts an intractable maturity and combativeness, facing his childish and possessive father who is getting married, his half-brother whose 14-year-old girlfriend is pregnant, the guys who hang around, show off or threaten.
However, something else will make its way, which does not change Bailey, but makes her stronger and more complex, when she meets in the open field the curious guy who says his name is “Bird”. And who, in fact, seems to spend most of his time perched on the roofs. What happens between her and him, just as perched when he comes down from the roof to survey the countryside, is one of the common threads of the film, but not the only one.
One of the beauties of Bird, one of the very happy discoveries of the last Cannes Film Festival, is not to stick to one story, but to summon six or seven; not to define oneself solely by the “societal” universe (feminine adolescence in a disadvantaged environment), but according to a multiplicity of relationships with the world, from delirious dreamlike to bare-bones realism.
The way in which, with its multiple protagonists, not all of them human (birds, horses, dogs and others still have their own role in the affair), the filmmaker of
Fish Tank (2009) andAmerican Honey (2016) circulates between these lines of poetic, brutal, playful, crazy, affectionate stories. This is the true wonder of the film.
It makes it, beyond its increasingly endearing characters, become a sort of epic tale, both very contemporary and mythological.
Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and her crazy dad (Barry Keoghan). | Ad Vitam screenshot via YouTube
The teen film in crisis is, if not a genre, at least a theme massively occupied by an innumerable number of films since Monika d’Ingmar Bergman (1953), Seed of violence of Richard Brooks (1955) et The Four Hundred Blows by François Truffaut (1959). Over the years, he has become laden with clichés, including Bird
helps us to perceive how their so frequent simplism and their willingly touting side, both condescending and exalting sides, is due above all to the way in which they are staged.
Much of Bailey’s tribulations resemble what we’ve seen happen to many teenagers in the movies. But it is, just as much as the circulation between her and human beings (father, brother, stranger) and non-human beings (animals, spaces, sea, wind, light), Andrea Arnold’s way of filming which makes the attentive and invigorating generosity of Bird.
Bird
D’Andrea Arnold
Starring Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski, Jason Buda, Jasmine Jobson, James Nelson-Joyce, Frankie Box
Duration: 1h58
Released on 1is January 2025
“Eephus, the last lap”, by Carson Lund
Coming out of nowhere, this first film with an obscure title surprises and seduces in unique ways. On a baseball field destined for imminent destruction, around fifteen gentlemen, most of them aging, are playing their last game. Other people sometimes come to watch them.
Not only can we enjoy Eephus, the last lap without knowing much about the rules of this sport, but it is quite possible that this ignorance increases the pleasure of the vision, by giving the rules of the game, the vocabulary and the rituals associated with it a mysterious side, between childish codes and absurd esotericism.
The Reds and the Blues, Ed, Rich, Lee, Graham, Troy and the others, and also old man Franny who watches from his chair and counts the points, have different ages, different lives, different problems. They are not necessarily likeable, they do not necessarily like each other. But they have something in common.
Something that manifests itself through the practice of baseball, through the uniforms of the two teams to which they belong and which have faced each other since they were kids on the field of this small town of New Englandin the northeastern United States.
Something that manifests itself in this way, but is not limited to the gestures of throwing the ball, hitting it with a bat, running from base to base around a field. What then? This is the beautiful mystery of the film, throughout this part that they refuse to finish, while evening falls, then a dark night reigns which they try to resist.
One of the two teams during one of the rituals which mark the baseball ceremonial, even when it is played as amateurs by old friends. | Capricci
The first film by American Carson Lund, member of a collective of young independent directors formed in Los Angeles, All Films (which also includes Tyler Taormina, the director of Christmas at Miller’s Pointreleased on December 11 in France), is literally twilight.
Throughout the jokes, the micro-dramas, the little cheats, the confidences, he little by little distills a very rich and singular feeling, which would be at the same time nostalgia (their world, or at least something of their world to what they attach great importance to, will disappear) and a certainty that between humans – there are almost only men in the image, but it is nevertheless the opposite of a masculinist film – secret links, precious, deserve to exist.
The title, “Eephus”, designates a way to throw the ball in baseballwhich means that during its trajectory towards the batsman it seems to slow down, perhaps even stopping in the film, causing confusion among the opposing player.
It is indeed such a paradoxical trajectory that the staging composes, linking together situations on the ground and in its immediate proximity, with numerous characters succeeding one another in rapid succession and yet ending up creating this suspended effect.
Strange sensation of hope that night will not fall on existences which are not yet over, but for which an idea of life, of their life, dissolves, in laughter, jokes, clashes between two cans, regrets, resentments, back or knee pain, childish arguments, shortening breath and failing eyesight.
There will come a time when it becomes impossible to count points. The film has not stopped, but has invented its own trajectory, which tends towards a kind of infinity, a realistic and dreamed horizon.
Eephus, the last lap
De Carson Lund
Avec Keith William Richards, Frederick Wiseman, Cliff Blake, Ray Hryb, Bill Lee, Stephen Radochia, David Pridemore, Keith Poulson, John Smith Jr., Pete Minkarah, Wayne Diamond, Theodore Bouloukos
Duration: 1h38
Released on 1is January 2025
Source: www.slate.fr
