100% cinema, the reviews of the films released on Friday 17 June

“Amanti” by Nicole Garcia arrives in the room without a trace, if not that of boredom. The Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul signs with “Memoria” another work at the limits of sensory experience (but not for everyone).

LOVERS

Director: Nicole Garcia

Cast: Pierre Niney, Stacy Martin, Benoît Magimel

Duration: 102 ‘

A little thriller, a little noir, a little melò. So many roads and no happy landing. “Amanti”, by the French director Nicole Garcia (who passed in competition at the Venice “pandemic format” in 2020 without a trace), arrives in the room but few will notice.

Anonymous film that plays with the classic love triangle mechanism that would like to be cursed and, instead, is just very boring. The femme fatale is Lisa (Stacy Martin) abandoned overnight by Simon (Pierre Niney), a luxury pusher forced to leave Paris after a drug accident involving a wealthy client of his.

The two find themselves a few years later in a luxury resort in Madagascar where Lisa is looking for a baby to adopt, while Simon has recycled himself as a cook. The spark sets the fire under the ashes but between them, now, her jealous and very rich husband (Benoît Magimel) stands in the way, mirroring what Lisa should give up in order to indulge in her old passion.

There was enough material for a tangle of emotions, bodies and crazy love but these “Lovers”, on the contrary, remain frozen in an academic representation, almost an export noir dedicated to those who are satisfied with a grainy version of the genre “The no triangle” with French décor. Unforgettable and, indeed, already forgotten.

VOTE: 4

***

MEMORY

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Elkin Diaz, Jeanne Balibar

Duration: 136 ‘

After all, the destiny of this Thai director is hidden in the sinuosity of his “language-melting” name to be pronounced in one breath.

It is necessary to exercise diction and, then, the gaze to fully enter his world, mysterious and fantastic, which flows from dilated images in which present and past cling to each other in a vision bordering on pantheism.

Even his latest film – “Memory” presented at Cannes in 2021 where he won the Jury Prize – is an elusive object, sometimes hypnotic even if less evocative and fascinating than “Uncle Boonmee who remembers previous lives” which he won. on the Croisette the Palme d’Or in 2010.

It is no coincidence that the title of that temporal mosaic suspended between reincarnations, ghosts and fable echoes (memory as a reservoir of memories destined to be erased and then re-emerged) in this new work that revolves around an orchid grower (played by Tilda Swinton, perhaps the most estranged and alienating among the actresses around) who is in Bogota visiting her sick sister.

Her living room is disturbed by a deafening noise that disorients and anguishes her to the point of pushing her to find its origin with the help of a sound engineer, an archaeologist and, finally, another presence in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. .

Between the subconscious that rises to the surface and a silent and enveloping nature, “Memory” is a fluid fed by its own spirituality that cannot capture everyone but, when it does, it is still a sensory experience.

VOTE: 6.5