“Memories”, “Leila and her brothers”, “The Green Shutters”… Films showing this week

THE MORNING LIST

It’s back to theaters, with a masterpiece of Japanese animation (Memories), and headliners of French cinema – Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant in Green Shuttersor Franck Dubosc with Rumba life. Also worth noting is the revival of FJ Ossang’s first three restored feature films.

“Memories”: virtuoso science fiction of Japanese animation

Under the title Memoriesit is an unknown film, and yet a jewel of world animation, which finally arrives in French cinemas, twenty-seven years after its realization and the long purgatory of its video exploitation. Memories takes the form of an anthology in three independent parts, including Katsuhiro Otomo, genius draftsman and author of the cult manga Akira (1982-1990), only directed the last segment, entrusting the other two to young stars: Koji Morimoto and Tensai Okamura. All three have in common to be formidable science fiction stories, dark, ambitious, desperate, with a great power of evocation.

The first section, Magnetic Pink, signed Morimoto, consists of a space opera using the codes of the haunted house film. A crew of space garbage collectors receives an emergency call from a strange, dilapidated station, turns it into the megalomaniac space tomb of a singer from the distant beginning of the 21st century.^e century. Magnetic Pink finds in the cosmos a reflection of the limits of the human spirit, these abysses where petrified memories diffuse a deadly essence. Stink Bomb, the second part, paints a biting fable on human incompetence, and manages to astonish by playing the comic card. A pharmaceutical laboratory employee is transformed, after having ingested a bad test pill, into a devastating bacteriological weapon, spreading an unbearable smell in his path.

Otomo closes the ball with a bang with the shortest Cannon Fodder, twenty-two minutes of incredible strength. Emancipating himself from the manga graphic school to reach the shores of modern art, somewhere between Fernand Léger and Marcel Gromaire, he depicts a day in a warlike city-state bristling with huge cannons, where all society, represented by a typical family (the father, the mother and the little boy), is organized to fire shells against an invisible enemy. The film is a real feat: Otomo chooses to do without editing (and therefore cinematographic language) to invent an autonomous animation, a world in the form of an infernal machine whose spaces fit into each other like so many nesting dolls . Mathieu Macheret

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