Films currently showing: "The Knife and the Laughter", "Superman", "Youth (Returning Home)", "Love"...

THE MORNING LIST

Cinema is on the move this week. In Pedro Pinho's captivating The Knife and the Laughter, a Portuguese engineer travels across Guinea-Bissau driven by his work and his desire. With Youth (Return to the Country) , Wang Bing concludes his trilogy on the textile workshops of Zhili by following the young workers returning to their villages, sometimes thousands of kilometers away. In Love , by Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, Tor and Marianne make numerous round trips by ferry between Oslo and the Nesodden peninsula. A feeling of vacation.

Not to be missed

Today, to remake the world, you have to move a little. Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho understood this well: he set The Laughter and the Knife , one of the most beautiful Cannes films, unveiled at Un Certain Regard, in Guinea-Bissau, a West African country that became independent in 1974. Where we see a Portuguese engineer, Sergio (Sergio Coragem), arriving in the first frame, smiling kindly at the wheel of his dusty car.

Laughter and the Knife is the story of a European, a priori progressive, aware of postcolonial issues, who believed he had his reading grid of the world but gradually loses his certainties. He will have to adapt, take stock, and it is through his gaze, a true changing sky, that the actor succeeds in imprinting the trouble that runs through his disarming character. A torrential work, of unstable balance and never fixed identities, Laughter and the Knife puts sparks in our retinas, given the beauty of the image, the freedom that the filmmaker allows himself, letting go of the frames of the story and the bridles of desire.

The film unfolds stories of thwarted lives, exposed to violence, which nevertheless attempt to touch the sublime, at times. We reach it, precisely, during a fusion scene at the seaside, where Sergio and the others share a peaceful moment, next to the motionless cows. In a brilliant collage, Pinho captures Gui's body in a one-piece swimsuit, from the animal's perspective... Before Gui dives into the waves, light as a drop in the ocean. Cl. F.

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