Paul Schrader returns to Cannes for the first time since 1988, bringing with him a film which is a twisted and minimalistic meditation on the windings of memory, the power of recording and the illusion of a a life that was believed to be successful.
Having completed his « redemption » trilogy with last year’s Master Gardener, Paul Schrader now adapts Russell Banks’ penultimate novel, Foregone, published in 2021, just under two years before his death. While we wish Paul Schrader, who is clearly at the top of his artistic abilities, to direct many more films, it’s impossible not to see in his choice of transposing this book a way, if not of delivering some last wishes, at least of settling some scores – while broaching the theme, as usual, of redemption…
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In a surgically precise introduction that sets the stage for the rigor of the process to follow, a couple of trendy documentary filmmakers set up their cameras in the living room of another legendary documentary filmmaker, who was once their college mentor and whose final testimony they hope to capture before cancer ends his life once and for all. But while they try to get him to talk about his career, which began with a mythical stunt – his fleeing to Canada to avoid being drafted in the Vietnam War in 1968 – Leo Fife has only one thing in mind: taking advantage of this opportunity to provide his wife and the camera the truth about his own life.
Uma Thurman plays this part with staggering intensity, especially when Schrader films her in close-up shots in which she is quietly fuming as she listens to her careless husband. But it’s the latter who really takes the cake: Richard Gere – complemented, in the flashbacks, by Jacob Elordi – who owes his best part to the director of 1980’s American Gigolo, is at the core of a devious – and virtuoso, when it comes to form – device that plunges him into different strata of his life, with no clear idea of what’s real and what’s fantasy.
As so often, Schrader invites us into the confessional, except that this time redemption is tinged less with bitterness than with ambivalence – summed up by a pretty pun accidentally formulated: Freud or fraud? The fault the old man is trying to atone for is having been loved for the wrong reasons, without ever knowing how to love anyone in return. In short, he’s been an opportunist, having made a success of his life but feeling like a ghost going through it.
Schrader also conjures up other ghosts here: those of New Hollywood, perhaps delivering a key to understanding this generation of filmmakers obsessed with the Vietnam War when none of them actually fought in it – except Oliver Stone. His gesture with Oh, Canada – rigorous, uncluttered, almost mathematical – is the antithesis of Coppola’s with Megalopolis, but the discovery of these two films side by side at Cannes is particularly moving: the filmmakers are two magicians who, in the twilight of their work, look in the mirror and, to quote (from memory) the latter, « leap into the void in order to finally be free ».
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