What films will I watch this week?
A great Japanese film, a biopic on the Williams sisters, and the return of “The Matrix” are notably on the menu this Wednesday.
“Drive My Car”
A director and the young woman who serves as his driver.
RAPID EYES MOVIES
Attention, major work. “Drive My Car”, an adaptation of a short story by Murakami, a nearly three-hour long film, is structured around two characters, a director and a young woman who serves as his driver. Forced cohabitation of two temperaments, two worlds, two looks. The two characters, however, have common wounds, losses to fill, buried pains. Selected in competition at Cannes this year, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film (already at the festival with “Asako I & II”) has long been a favorite.
The motif of the fake road movie unfolds like an undulation, a series of waves that the two characters must cross. The reflection on loneliness is accompanied here by a meditation on the theater translated by a staging as delicate as it is rigorous. We come out reeling with happiness, begging to discover a similar film every week.
Rating: ****
“The Williams Method”
The Williams sisters on the road to glory
SONY PICTURES
This is the true story of the Williams sisters, who became stars of the tennis world thanks in particular to their father’s stubbornness. Especially? Yes, because man is impossible. The real hero of “The Williams Method” (“King Richard”) is him, embodied by a Will Smith visibly happy to offer a dark and hidden face. An undrinkable parent, straw tyrant and workaholic, he hatched a vast plan for his two daughters (non-adopted, he has five in all) to become tennis goddesses. It is therefore a success story in reverse, digested by another point of view, that this film by Reinaldo Marcus Green tells, the realization of which remains very impersonal in spite of the efforts.
Overall, this feature film, which would have benefited from a few cuts depending on its length, is an excellent introduction to the world of tennis and the interest hardly ever weakens. At the same time, we are there in a relatively classic biopic, without downtime or aberrations, and which stops when the consecration occurs. A nice spectacle.
Rating: **
“A hero”
The hero of the film, played by Amir Jadidi.
FILMCOOPI
Asghar Farhadi is a happy man. His film is a big success in Iran, and in Cannes, he was talked about for the Palme d’Or. That he did not have is life! But his film appealed to the press, who emphasized the intelligence of a script denouncing the impact of networks and greed. Here is “A hero”. A film of good pupil, applied, which delivers a copy without fault. Since his beginnings, the Iranian filmmaker has operated like this. Golden Bear in Berlin, selection then opening in Cannes (the painful “Everybody Knows”) and back. Without leaving your comfort zone. Without running for poetry. Too smooth, in the end.
Rating: *
“Matrix: Resurrections”
Keanu Reeves in a world where everything becomes a blur.
2021 WARNER BROS
This fourth opus, entitled “Matrix Resurrections”, begins as if nothing really existed. Otherwise in the head of a man, the aptly named Thomas Anderson, alias Neo, designer of a revolutionary video game, “Matrix”, which was an interplanetary cardboard box. But Anderson would have forgotten everything. Overwhelmed by strange dreams, he regularly goes to see a shrink to tell him about them. And then that’s all. Or almost. Because from the moment when the dividing line between the real world and the metaverse, dream or reality, begins to become blurred, the “matrixien” world takes back its rights. The driving idea behind this fourth opus, again signed by Wachowskis who have made their transition – from brothers to sisters, a unique case in the history of cinema – is that of constant narrative disruption. The storyline carved out becomes dizzying – and it’s no coincidence that the reasons for falling into the void and suicide are so ubiquitous. Dizzying and extremely complex, as the rest could be the first three parts of the franchise.
Paradoxically, all this does not prevent readability, since the film in turn begins to function like a vast video game. Visually, the film does not try to do too much, and no scene matches that of the long battle against the Machines in “Matrix Revolutions” in 2003. This opus gives neither overbidding nor excess, the action is measured there, at times withdrawn, but on the other hand, a humor develops which was not perceptible in the original trilogy. The tendency that the characters had to strike out great philosophical truths that were hollow in the first three parts seems in part to be fading. The distance doesn’t hurt, and the papal seriousness of the heroes evaporates with the footage. All of this contributes to making this film a real spectacle that can be seen as an independent film as well as as a new addition to everything we have known.
Rating: ***
Pascal Gavillet has been a journalist in the cultural section since 1992. He mainly deals with cinema, but he also sometimes writes on other fields. In particular the sciences. As such, he is also a mathematician.
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Cine releases – Which movies to watch this week?