The 50th American Film Festival is currently underway in Normandy, where audiences have been able to applaud Michael Douglas at the opening, discover Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”, attend the tribute to filmmaker James Gray… and see or re-see “50 films that changed the way we look at the world”.
2024 is an important year for Deauville, which celebrates the centenary of the famous boards lining the beach, trodden by countless stars and celebrities, some even giving their names to cabins, and which also celebrates the 50th American Film Festival (which runs until September 15), an event that was created in its day to boost the resort’s attendance at the end of summer.
So it’s been half a century since the star-spangled banners have fluttered in the Normandy breeze, and the whole of Hollywood has come to stroll along the English Channel. The Douglas family alone has been here a dozen times: Kirk has been here five times, and twenty-five years after the tribute paid to the interpreter of “Spartacus”, it’s son Michael’s turn to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. The Normandy town is a “cool place” for the actor, and not just because a suite bears his name at the Royal: “I first met Catherine here in Deauville,” recalls Michael Douglas. It was in 1998, when actress Catherine Zeta-Jones came to present “The Mask of Zorro”, and the beautiful brunette went on to become Mme Douglas.
Still reeling from a hand-fucking scene on the set of the series “Franklin”, it was Ludivine Sagnier (member of the jury) who stuck to her speech of tribute to the star: “Thank you Michael for everything you have brought to cinema and to our lives”, said the French actress.
Barack Obama’s daughter
Michelle and Barack Obama’s eldest daughter, Malia Ann, came to present her short film “The Heart”.
After applauding Michael Douglas, soon to be in his eighties (September 25), the audience discovered a 26-year-old director at the opening of the festival: a certain Malia Ann, in fact Michelle and Barack Obama’s eldest daughter, who came to receive the very first Prix nouvelle génération, awarded to a “figure of tomorrow’s cinema” for her touching short film, “The Heart”, in which an old mother’s heart stopped beating one evening.
The next day, the INA’s digital award was presented to the jury’s president, French actor Benoît Magimel, who will now be able to spend a hundred hours or so watching all his French TV appearances. “I have the impression that it’s not me,” he said, after a few excerpts from his many films, including of course Etienne Chatiliez’s ‘La vie est un long fleuve tranquille’, in which he played little Momo. “He’s there, he’s present”, Magimel assures us, ‘I was a little self-conscious at first, but I quickly understood that there were no rules’. “Life is much more difficult than cinema”, says Magimel, ‘We want to make films that count, that last’. These certainly include Simon Moutaïrou’s first film, “Ni chaînes ni maîtres” (released on September 18), presented at the festival, in which he plays a villain, a slave owner who runs a sugarcane plantation in 18th-century Mauritius.
“I won’t be anywhere without this country”
Another tribute was paid to New York filmmaker James Gray (“The Yards”, “La nuit nous appartient”, “The Immigrant”, “Ad Astra”…), who reaffirmed his love for French cinema and France: “I’ll be nowhere without this country”, he said, having just returned from the Venice Festival where he was a juror, and where his first film “Little Odessa” was coldly received thirty years ago, unlike in Deauville where it won an award.
The first film screened this year was “Lee Miller” by Ellen Kuras (out October 9), starring Kate Winslet as the former muse and model turned war photographer. A sequence in the film recounts the bloody liberation of Saint-Malo in August 1944, where Lee Miller was the only photojournalist present. The Breton city of ramparts also pays tribute to Lee Miller with an exhibition of some 50 of her historic photographs (until November 3).
For its 50th anniversary, the Normandy festival has had the good idea of screening “50 American films that changed the way we look at the world”, an opportunity to see or revisit great classics on the big screen, including “West Side Story”, “2001, A Space Odyssey”, “Rio Bravo”, “La vie est belle”, “Casablanca”, “The Dictator”…
An inglorious America
In a documentary, Sabrina Van Tassel searches for “Les Disparues”, young Native American women who evaporated from the reservations where they lived.
In the “Docs from Uncle Sam” category, two French directors tell the story of an inglorious America through their documentary: Jean-Baptiste Thoret went to meet “The Neon People”, the thousands of homeless who live in insalubrious tunnels in Las Vegas; and Sabrina Van Tassel searches for “Les Disparues”, the young Native American women living on reservations, “easy prey” who were abducted, raped and killed with impunity. “Amerindian women are the most persecuted, the most murdered, and I wanted to tell the story of this injustice”, confides the director.
Among the Deauville previews, Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (in cinemas this Wednesday) is one of the most eagerly awaited films of the autumn season. A Halloween-before-his-time nightmare in which Michael Keaton reprises his role as the prankster demon, with a delightful appearance by Monica Belluci: at the start of the film, she uses a stapler to reconstitute her body in pieces, before sucking Danny de Vito dry.
Patrick TARDIT
50th Deauville American Film Festival, until September 15, 2024. www.festival-deauville.com
