Festival de Cannes 2024, Emilia Perez

©YesICannes.com

The Cannes Film Festival competition continued with Caught By The Tides by Jia Zhang-Ke and Emilia Perez by Jacques Audiard enchanting the Croisette.

Carla Bruni ©YesICannes.com

Festival de Cannes 2024 : the fourth day of competition saw the screening of Caught By The Tides, the tenth feature film by Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke and Emilia Perez by French director and screenwriter Jacques Audiard, a highly acclaimed film that will be hard to beat…

©X Stream Pictures

20 years of love

Jia Zhang-Ke has been a regular at the Cannes Film Festival, and this is the sixth time he has been selected for the Official Competition. He has already enjoyed success with films such as Platform, Still Life (Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival), A Touch of Sin and, more recently, The Eternal Ones. Jia Zhang-ke has returned to document the history of China, seeking to counterbalance the official narratives in a country plagued by negationism and the repression of criticism. In China in the early 2000s, Qiao Qiao and Guao Bin are in a passionate love affair. When Guao Bin disappears to try her luck in another province, Qiao Qiao sets out to find her. In following her destiny in love, Jia Zhang-ke delivers an unprecedented filmic epic that runs through all his films (the first images of Caught by the Tides were shot in 2001) and 25 years of the history of a country in the throes of change, from the north to the south of China.

@Shanna Besson

Emilia Perez sets the bar very high

Well… We’re going to have to come up with some superlatives to describe Jacques Audiard’s dazzling tenth feature film, Emila Perez, which is at once sparkling, astonishing, stunning, beautiful, strong, incandescent, fascinating, and so on. After Sur mes lèvres, De rouille et d’os, Un Prophète, Les Frères Sisters and Les Olympiades, the French director has dazzled the Croisette with a Spanish-language musical that features singing and dancing stars such as the American-Dominican actress Zoe Saldana, who is used to playing the role of a strong woman who, and despite suffering from Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, still displays great energy in her choreography. She is joined by singer and actress Selena Gomez and, above all, in the role of Emilia, a brilliant Spanish trans actress, Karla Sofia Gascon. Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez and Mark Ivanar complete the cast.

@Shanna Besson

An obvious Palme d’Or winner?

Jacques Audiard has been walking the Red Carpet of the Festival de Cannes for some time now: he already won the Best Screenplay award in 1996 with Un héros très discret, the Grand Prix in 2009 with Un prophète and, above all, the Palme d’Or in 2015 with Dheepan. He has a second Palme d’Or in his sights with Emilia Perez, a thriller treated as a musical comedy, with musical performances that, lyrically and musically, could constitute an LP album, given the depth and sophistication of the lyrics and the contemporary music. Audiard is a virtuoso of image: the staging has a choreographic dimension, the lighting is magnificent, cushioning the characters like jewels, even when it favours shadows; it gives meaning to the emotions that run through the characters, but without mawkishness.

@Shanna Besson

Against the cartels backdrop, the delicate question of gender

The Mexico of the drug cartels smells of sulphur. In a bloody world of limitless brutality, a drug baron wants to change his life and realise the feminine side of his personality, which has imposed itself on him since the age of reason. He will offer wealth to a lawyer to help him in his transition. But he can’t live without his children, and again calls on the lawyer to take them back and live with them in his new existence, as an “aunt”. This change of life is soon accompanied by redemption, the desire to make amends for the crimes he has committed, which have caused so much pain, tragedy and the disappearance of often innocent protagonists, leaving families in turmoil. Finally, there is love, because “A life without love is a fall without end”…