A simple accident
Romantic generation
What a crazy operation Jia Zhang-ke did with this film, divided into three parts, which tells the evolution of China in the New Millennium through the story of two lovers who drift apart, look for each other and find each other again. With this operation, the director also recrosses his cinema: in addition to shots taken in the past and never used, images from “Dong” and “Still Life” re-emerge, both from 2006, with the latter having won the Golden Lion in Venice and continuing to be the pivot on which the Chinese author’s poetics revolve. “Romantic Generation” thus becomes an exciting journey into memory, of cinema and of life, orchestrated by a great director who, with this film, has created perhaps his most important work ever.
Romantic generation
The Shrouds
David Cronenberg signs an extremely personal film that can be linked to the death of his wife, Carolyn, who passed away from cancer in 2017. Vincent Cassel is undoubtedly an alter ego of the Canadian author – both for his hairstyle and for his outfit choices – in this film in which he plays Karsh, a widowed businessman who invents a controversial and revolutionary technology capable of allowing the living to observe their loved ones after death, while they are inside particular shrouds (hence the title of the film). A dark and touching melodrama that unites love and death, “The Shrouds” is a melancholic operation, a constant and infinite elaboration of a mourning from which the protagonist – and perhaps the director – can no longer escape. Absolutely one of the most important works of the career of one of the greatest masters of world cinema.
The Shrouds
Queer
Luca Guadagnino has chosen to adapt the important short novel by William S. Burroughs, written in the early 1950s but published only in 1985. Like many of Burroughs’ works, the protagonist is his alter ego and the story is deeply autobiographical: in the role of Lee’s character there is Daniel Craig, an actor who gives one of the most intense performances of his career in this film. As already demonstrated in excellent films such as “Suspiria” and “Bones and All”, Guadagnino plays very well with the more visionary register, even touching on the horror genre in some passages and giving life to a truly fascinating and highly intelligent work. If at the center there is the theme of unexpressed desire and abstinence not only linked to drug addiction, Guadagnino manages to translate all this into a poetic story capable of being also very romantic in its own way. Some sequences are portentous, confirming the talent of the Italian director
Queer
The Brutalist
Having reached his third feature film, Brady Corbet reaches full maturity with a truly ambitious, very long work, shot on film and with a vintage style that is decidedly far from contemporary fashions. In the story of the brutalist architect at the center of the film there are numerous reflections on the United States of yesterday and today, but what is striking is the extraordinary audiovisual strength of a film excellent in both photography and soundtrack. Difficult, perhaps impossible, to forget it after seeing it.
