Film, exhibition, album. This week’s editorial staff’s top things to watch and read.
An intimate portrait of the peasantry
Diamond and Valois in Cannes and Valois by students of the Angoulême French-speaking film festival. Twenty gods is one of the must-see films of this year-end. The breakthrough of an inspired and inspiring filmmaker who tells the story of rural French youth with tenderness, realism and imagination.At the helm of this first feature film anchored in the environment in which he grew up, Louise Courvois paints a portrait of Jura Totone, an idle 18- year-old child, who has to take over his daily life from day to day. life and his little sister. To meet their needs, he sets out to win the 30,000 euros promised to the winner of a competition that will choose the best district in the region.
No misery or condescension in this instructive story that intertwines its protagonist’s small joys and struggles with invigorating energy and infectious optimism. by Clément Favo and Maeve Barthélemy (César Nominated for A Woman’s Hope) category: Flawless one. M.L.
Twenty godsBy Louise Courvoise, with Clément Favo, Maven Barthelemy, Luna Garrett, Mathis Bernard, Dimitri Beaudry…
Chiharu Shiota weaves her web at the Grand Palais
Sunhee Mang
“Threads get tangled, intertwined, broken, destroyed. In a way, they symbolize my state of mind regarding the complexity of human relationships,” Chiharu Shiota explains of his woolen labyrinths, which impose an alternating circulation on those who enter them, alternately in, under, out, always surrounded. A student of Marina Abramović, born in Osaka in 1972 and living in Berlin, Rebecca Horn’s former assistant continued her patiently laboring for three decades, trapped in giant black, blood-red, or snow-white chrysalises. “intermediate” objects. Chairs, beds, dresses (photo), suitcases, keys or pianos stand in a maze of motionless, lost lines that zigzag in all directions, floor to ceiling and ceiling to wall, open but unreachable, frozen like memories the poles (below here and beyond, presence and absence) calling to loved ones, the memory of displaced peoples. So these boats are on the threshold Uncertain journeythe first of seven installations that took place at the Grand Palais, where Shiota’s retrospective stops this winter. Nearly two hundred photographs, drawings, sculptures, videos and paintings coexist with these immersive curves that require weeks, kilometers of fibers and assistants. army: “The soul trembles”, exhibition title) in a ring, even with a single-cell watercolor visible under a microscope. V.H.
“Chiharu Shiota. The soul trembles”, from December 11 to March 19, at the Grand Palais in Paris. grandpalais.fr:
The Cure, return to grace
Sam Rockman
This new album comes after a sixteen-year discographic absence, but it is shaped by the band’s concerts, which never stop and often last three hours. Songs of the lost world Builds a story with so many layers and depth that new feelings, new developments can be found with each listen. The first and last track, even in longer versions, could have made an album, since they already contain everything from the Cure : loneliness, fear, the two foundations of Robert Smith’s work, the metaphysics of fear transformed into dark pop. In the Cure, nothing goes better than slowness. Take time to sing the unspeakable. And then the voice. its unchanging simplicity, the way it navigates the guitars, its inner melancholy, its distance from everything remains of the great albums of the early 1980s, Faith and pornography. And this whole album also begs the question. What song can we sing at the age of 65? Answer: we sing for the deceased (parents, brother, etc.), we dance on the spot, we ask for Shakespeare. “Thus comes something evil,” repeats Robert Smith, quoting Hamlet and thus invoking the end of his world.What other record for 2024 than this one, both so alive and so spectral? Nothing else to listen to, to end the year. J.G.
Songs of the lost worldFiction/Polydor.
Source: Le Figaro
