The Cannes Film Festival will experience one of its grander moments this Thursday with the premiere of the fifth installment of Indiana Jones, played by octogenarian Harrison Ford for the last time.
“Indiana Jones and the Call of Destiny” is the title of this new episode of one of the great film sagas screened out of competition at Cannes.
At age 80, Ford dons his fedora and whip at the behest of James Mangold, who rose to prominence in 2005 with his film biography of country singer Johnny Cash (“Walk the Line”).
Both Ford and Disney, who bought the rights to the Indiana Jones saga, have already assured that this time around is the last.
The first four episodes were directed by Steven Spielberg, who was in Cannes in 2008 for a screening of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”.
The action of this new episode takes place in the late 1960s, but the writers included a “flashback” that required several minutes of Ford’s face to be “rejuvenated” by the artificial intelligence, a foreshadowing of the changes to come. There is one more example. audio-visual field.
Spaniard Antonio Banderas, British Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“Solo”) and Danish Mads Mikkelsen, who played the villain in “Casino Royale,” join Ford in this mega-production, which was filmed in several countries, including Morocco. ,
– A 3h40 documentary –
Cannes usually alternates great Hollywood moments with more difficult proposals, and this time the feature-length documentary “Youth Spring” by Chinese director Wang Bing, 3h40 long.
Bing is the kind of director who takes his time (on this occasion five years) to leave a filmic testimony to the profound social mutation his country experiences under the iron rod of Communist rule.
In “Youth Spring,” Bing follows with his camera the young people who leave their villages in the country’s interior by the millions to work piecemeal work in textile workshops in cities such as Shanghai.
Filmed discreetly, sometimes even surreptitiously, Bing’s works have won prizes in many competitions such as the Venice or Locarno festivals.
stands “The Ditch” (“La Fossa”, 2010), a denouement of forced labor camps for political prisoners in the Gobi Desert in the 1960s under Mao’s Reign of Terror.
Bing wrote and filmed “Correspondence” with Spanish director Jaime Rosales, which was released in 2011.
Chinese directors present at Cannes another documentary, “Man in Black”, filmed in a Paris theatre, with a single protagonist, exiled musician Wang Zhelin, naked on stage.
Another Palme d’Or contender, German Wim Wenders, is also submitting two works to Cannes: a fiction feature film, “Perfect Days”, in competition, and “Anselm”, a documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer.
Frenchman Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire presents his role in competition “Black Flies,” a thriller that follows in the footsteps of Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan, both of whom play two doctors who face street violence in New York. Former boxing legend Mike Tyson is also in the cast.
