Maverick”, like traveling to the past in a DeLorean

The Groeningen film – co-directed by his partner Charlote Vandermeersch, but that does not improve things; she is from the other’s sect and already wrote the script for Alabama Monroe– She wants to be beautiful too. It begins in a mountain village, with two children who grow up together, while a female voice-over recites a few paragraphs whose unusual kitsch would make Paulo Coelho pornographic. The years go by, the boys grow up and the insulting absence of neurons in the film also progresses appropriately.

The film wants to talk to you about conflictive relationships with parents, about the sacrosanct importance of friendship. But listening to the intellectual level of the conversations of the two stupid protagonists, I miss Forrest Gump. Or Captain Tan and Valentina. Dialogues of sea breams rocked by a soundtrack like country north american spot of beers, when the story is about anthropological purity and talks about the importance of the roots or the preservation of the Italian dialect spoken in the Alps. The crescendo of this crime lasts almost two and a half hours.

At a specific moment, one of the two colleagues -the one who is a bit of an urbanite, played by the excellent actor Luca Marinelli; the other is a hermit – decides to reinvent himself in India. In the next shot he appears in a taxi with a Buddha stuck on the windshield. Like a spring, several very good sense spectators jumped up and left the room, knocked out. I stayed until the denouement, the aurora borealis, because of the curiosity to see how far foolishness is capable of reaching in images and words without it rising to the point where the screen burns like the bush of Moses. At least I found some satisfaction when, over the silence of the closing credits, someone yelled, “What a joke this is!”

It’s the market, man. And Cannes demonstrates -with mindless selections like the one from The eight mountains– that above art is business. Perhaps in the fifth book of his memoirs, the head of all this, Thierry Frèmaux, whose autobiographical texts are really juicy, highly recommended, will clarify for us how we ended up one night in May 2022 watching at dawn in a film that aspires to La Palma Gold to two sea breams pretending to speak -or whisper- on the top of the Alps, with a very mumblecorewhich remains as well as of greater bovine spirituality.