CANNES.- Kevin Costner He put on his cowboy boots again this Sunday in Cannes with “Horizon”, while the exiled Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov revisited the ghosts of his country with “Limonov”, the biography of a controversial writer and activist.
To film “Horizon”, the first episode of a Western saga, Costner (“Dances with Wolves”) had to mortgage his house.
“It has been an odyssey, like the film itself. People told me: ‘no one makes two films Kevin, why do you want to make four?'” the 69-year-old actor and director explained to AFP.
With Sienna Miller and Sam Worthington in the main roles, the film is a crossroads of stories of settlers and colonized, of whites and indigenous people in a violent and dramatic West.
The example of Karla Sofía Gascón
It had been two decades since Costner had set foot in Cannes. “Horizon” is not competing for the Palme d’Or, a competition that this Sunday crossed the equator (11 premieres out of 22) with a clear favorite in the betting, the musical drama “Emilia Pérez” that tells the unlikely story of a drug trafficker who wants change sex
The 77th Cannes Festival had adopted a somewhat somber tone from the beginning, with films of social denunciation (“Diamant Brut”, “Bird”) or icy ones (“Kinds of Kindness”) before the explosion of music, color and kitsch of “Emilia Pérez”, with the Spanish trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, 52 years old.
“I’ve had a bit of a strange life. And I had a few things left to do. And one of these is this, being here,” the actress explained in an interview with AFP.
“I think it’s very nice to be an example. An example that dreams come true,” he added.
Russian chaos
Serebrennikov is a regular filmmaker at Cannes, and this time he chooses to adapt a great literary bestseller in France and the entire world, “Limonov” by Emmanuel Carrère, published in 2010.
Eduard Limonov had an extravagant life: he was a petty thief in Kharkiv (Ukraine), where he was born, a cursed poet in Moscow, a wandering exile in New York, a well-known writer in Paris, a mercenary in the Balkans and finally again in Moscow, this time as head of an ultranationalist group enemy of Vladimir Putin.
He died at age 77 in 2020, after gaining access to the global celebrity he longed for thanks to Carrère’s book.
For his part, Serebrennikov acknowledges that there is something of his “self-portrait” in this film in competition for the Palme d’Or, played by the British Ben Whishaw.
“Limonov” shows a tortured character, with a desire for success and confused political ideas, a mirror of the cataclysm that Russia suffered with the fall of communism in 1989.
Serebrennikov uses his great theatrical knowledge in his films to build an entire story between reality and fiction. He does not hesitate to show the reverse side of the sets, to make the characters jump from one set to another, from one era to another, with long sequence shots.
In the 2010s, Serebrennikov was one of the most daring Russian artists of his generation, but then his positions in favor of the LGBT community led to his house arrest in 2017.
The sentence fell in the middle of the filming of “Leto”, a dazzling portrait of the artistic avant-garde of Saint Petersburg, presented in Cannes in 2018.
In June 2020, he was sentenced to three years in suspended prison for embezzlement of funds.
Because of this, a year later he was unable to travel to Cannes to present “Petrov Fever”.
He retaliated the following year with “Tchaikovsky’s Woman”, a portrait of the genius of classical music through his wife. Since then, he has been in exile.
This Sunday, the other film in competition that will be screened is “The Substance”, by French director Coralie Fargeat, a horror film with Demi Moore.
And the veteran American director Oliver Stone, fond of portraying Latin American leaders such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez through documentaries, presents his most recent film portrait, “Lula,” out of competition.
Source: AFP
