Cannes 2025 – Day 9: Jodie Foster in Resistance, the voice of Paul Mescal, Thomas Ngijol to counter -employment
Every day, the hot point live from the 78th Cannes Film Festival.
The film of the day: The History of Sound d’Oliver Hermanus
With The History of SoundOliver Hermanus continues to explore the tiny lives and the contained emotions started with Living. Adapted from a short story by Ben Shattuck, the film weaves a rare delicacy sound and visual tapestry. Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor compose a duo of students who meet at the beginning of the 20th century around the piano of a smoky bar. These two musicologists quickly fall in love, but the years (and war) will separate them after a brief summer spent traveling the wild forests of Maine to record folk songs.
Hermanus’ camera records the inexpressible – looks that last a second too much, fingers that suck by manipulating a fragile wax cylinder. And each gesture is a confession, each silence carries the weight of a desire. The landscapes, filmed with the same melancholy light as the gray offices to live, become the theater of a romance as deep as discreet and ephemeral.
Angular stone of this great film on the lives that we have not experienced, on the stories of irresolved loves and on preserving what is dear to us (voices like feelings), MESCAL finds in lionel a character who evolves on decades – of the young farmer who became a student in music to the man wall seeking the meaning of a amputated life. His perf, all in nuances and modulations, is like the film: subtle and minimalist.
The trip of the day: Pilgrimage of Carla Simon
It spins in Cannes. It even finds it. After the halllu Alphaafter the seismic account of L’Agent Secretvoilà Pilgrimage. Carla Simon’s new film (Autobio) begins in a linear way before leaving in a dreams in its last part. In this beautiful melancholy film, she deepens her exploration of family flaws and traumas, flirting with the porous limits of memory and imagination. For an hour, we follow Marina, an 18 -year -old girl who returned to her father’s family who died of AIDS. The fricked grandparents, the nice but clumsy uncle, the cute cousin … And then suddenly, the story of the end of the father becomes mysterious, thickens with taboos. Until a night, after an evening of bamboo, the film operates a fantasy embodiment, a dive into the dream.
The heroine suddenly finds herself precipitated in the past of her parents, witness to their island isolation and their invaporated lives. It is no longer just a flashback, but a visceral reincarnation of their experience, where the temporalities merge and intertwine in a dizzying choreography. This space-time flaw tears the veil between generations to reveal the underground transmission of family traumas (we find it Alpha). Emotional stigmata take flesh, become tangible in this parenthesis where heroin is witnessing a past that is not hers. The camera becomes an accomplice of this narrative transgression, marrying the consciousness movements of its heroes with tactile sensuality. After the Ducournau film and that of Mendonça Filho, Pilgrimage Also questions the weight of inheritances and traumas by changing the story.
The video of the day: Harris Dickinson
We talked a lot about the passage behind the camera of Kristen Stewart and Scarlett Johansson before and during the Cannes festival, but that ofHarris Dickinson Maybe is the most remarkable. The young actor of 28 years (which was notably loved in Iron Claw) presented Urchin To a certain look, the story of a homelessness that struggles to fit into society. We were able to question him about his transition to the realization. A process that he had already started on the set of Filterlesswhere he showed one of his short films during a mini festival organized in Greece and benefited from the precious advice of Ruben Östlund, the filmmaker with two golden palms.
The counter-employment of the day: Thomas Ngijol in Indomitable (2025)
Finished laughing. As soon as a director-actor labeled “Comedy” plays the drama card, the Cannes cinephile ways can finally open up to him. We barely exaggerate. When the selection of selectionIndomitable From Thomas Ngijol to the fifteen of filmmakers, his general delegate Julien Rejl said: “He had rather accustomed us to comedies as an actor or director, but this time he changes a whole genre for our greatest happiness.“
So here is Thomas Ngijol in Cameroonian father mode in a bubbling yaoundé. His character is also and above all a police commissioner with violent methods. Indomitable is a transposition in fiction of a documentary from Mosco Levi Boucault whose work had already inspired Arnaud Desplechin for Roubaix, a light. Njigol, met before the Grand Raout in Paris, confessed to us: “I didn’t want to hide behind laughter … although comedy can also reveal intimate things. Following my show, the eye of the tiger where I discussed my role as father, I wanted to continue in this idea transmission vis-à-vis my children …”
That there is no mistake, Njigol does not seek performance. He keeps this kind of nonchalance, natural setback, gentle charisma. It simply added the Cameroonian accent for authenticity. Accent which disturbs a little reading in the first minutes before the work of actor definitively comes to pose natural above. Nice work.
The scene of the day: Privacy de Rebecca Zlotowski
We explained to you yesterday the simple pleasure of pointing in front of a comedy on the Croisette between two slightly secos dramas. We hadn’t seen yet Privacy Who – at least we think – is not supposed to do in the disconnect. The film by Rebecca Zlotowski knows how to be hilarious in spite of himself, as in this scene where Jodie Foster goes up without shouting in a previous life during a hypnosis session. A little masterpiece of comedy where the psychiatrist she embodies finds herself in a concert of classical music, in the heart of Paris occupied by the Germans … Total zygomatic vertigo, we even flirt with Grandpa makes resistance When Vincent Lacoste comes to finish us with a large number in the skin of a collaboration. How good is to laugh!
The revelations of the day: PrinCia Car and the casting of Girls desire
In 2018, PrinCia because founded an alternative cinema school in Marseille with the ambition to integrate this art into the daily life of young people often kept away from culture due to economic or educational difficulties. And the adventure is already going beyond his dreams. With her students, she founded her own troop where everyone plays and participates in the writing of the various projects. And after a first short, Barcelonaselected in Clermont-Ferrand in 2019, they go into a long format with these Girls desirepresented at the fortnight of filmmakers. And of which Prïncia Car wrote the structure with the screenwriter Léna Tuesday before improvising each scene with her actors, joined by a newcomer, the irresistible Lou Anna Hamon.
We follow the return to the Marseille city of Carmen, the childhood friend of Omar, an airy center instructor, respected by all. An ex-prostitutes who will shatter the small band (99% male) who surrounds her and especially their relationship hitherto rather primary to sex and love. Doped by the energy and the authenticity of its interpreters, the film amazes by its way of foil absolutely all the clichés on the men-women’s reports among young people in these working-class neighborhoods. Or more specifically to reinvent the codes through in particular an unexpected sorority which develops between the girlfriend of Omar and Carmen with whom the latter nevertheless deceived it, in place of the usual ranging of grabs. New voices that make a lot of good.
Today in Cannes
The festival enters its last straight line. Critics’ week ended on Wednesday, this Thursday it will be the filmmaker’s fortnight to lower the curtain with a big expectation of the editorial, the new Nadav Lapid (Yes). On the side of a certain look, we will follow Pile your Face (Head or cross), a humorous Italian western with Nadia Tereszkiewicz and John C. Reilly. And in competition: Womand Child by Saeed Roustaee and Resurrection de Bi gan. But it is the arrival of the future of Cédric Klapisch which will make the most noise on the red carpet of the Grand Palais.
