Festival de Cannes 2024, The Substance and Horizon An American Saga

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The Festival de Cannes presented Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Kirill Serebrennikov’s Limonov – The Ballad, while the first part of Kevin Costner’s epic Horizon: An American Saga was screened Out of Competition.

Kevin Costner ©YesICannes.com

Festival de Cannes 2024 : the fifth day of competition saw the entry of French director Coralie Fargeat with her second feature The Substance, a film starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov presented Limonov – The Ballad of Eddie, an adaptation of Emmanuel Carrère‘s novel Limonov, recounting the life of Russian writer Édouard Limonov. Kevin Costner presented the first part of his flamboyant fresco in which multiple destinies intertwine, Horizon: An American Saga, which tells the epic story of the expansion of the American West, before and after the Civil War, planned in three parts.

The Substance ©DR

An American Saga by Kevin Costner ©YesICannes.com

The (horrible) Substance

Coralie Fargeat enchanted us with Revenge, her first feature-length horror film. In 2024, she enters the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival with The Substance, the goriest and bloodiest films shown at Cannes. The feminist horror drama evokes fantasies of life extension thanks to a mysterious substance. The feature film stars Demi Moore: the 61-year-old star caused a sensation in the film, which also has Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid in the cast. The Substance is an amazing film with actress prowess and an original scenario, one of the best of the selection, apart from the fact that in the end, the film turns into the grand guignol, which leaves a sour taste…

Limonov ©DR

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Limonov the provocateur

Limonov – The Ballad of Eddie, the film by Kirill Serebrennikov, was presented on the Croisette by the Russian director who was able to walk the red carpet free in 2023 after three years under house arrest. Kirill Serebrennikov, a gifted agitator of conscience in the throes of legal trouble, accused of embezzling 130 million roubles from the public purse, has been under house arrest since 2017. He has never stopped proclaiming his innocence while continuing to make films. With Leto, in competition in 2018, he evoked the emancipation of Russian youth through the emergence of Soviet rock in the 1980s on the music scene in post-Brejnev Leningrad.

Kirill Serebrennikov ©DR

Novelist of his own greatness

In his new feature film, Kirill Serebrennikov describes the adventures of the non-conformist and provocative Russian-born poet Eduard Limonov, based on an adaptation of Emmanuel Carrère’s novel Limonov. Iconoclastic and provocative, disdainful of great authors such as Solzhenitsyn, and full of his own innovative qualities, Limonov (Ben Whishaw) asks to be exiled from Russia so that, from New York to Paris, he can write the autobiographical novels of his own greatness. A portrait set to a punk rock rhythm, but with no surprises, no particular appeal, no great dimension or emotion, notwithstanding the talent of the Russian filmmaker.

©DR

Epic times

Westerns seem to be Kevin Costner’s favourite genre and he plays the lead role, as well as directing, producing and co-writing Horizon: An American Saga, a monumental historical fresco, structured in three chapters, about the conquest of the West. Both in front of and behind the camera, he evokes the fates of the Amerindians who see their lands colonised by invaders determined to settle there at any cost. The Oscar-winning director of Dances with Wolves (1990) has surrounded himself with a dream cast, including Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Luke Wilson and Will Patton.