Red »… The cinema releases of the week

THE MORNING LIST

A strange creature in the sky of California, the private and family diary of a migrant journey, the adaptation of a famous manga, a crazy bird… the program promises to be eclectic, this week, in dark rooms.

“Nope”: a fantastic epic

With Boophis third feature film, Jordan Peele fulfills a real dream of popular fiction, mixing the depth of the fantastic with the horizons of the epic, revisiting Hollywood mythologies – cavalcades in the desert, man measuring himself against wide open spaces… –, to breathe new life into them, returning to the primitive sources of cinematic pleasure and wonder.

The story of Boopuntranslatable onomatopoeia signifying a flippant refusal (” Nope “), revolves around a family of horse trainers, the Haywoods, who work for the film industry. Following the accidental death of their father, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) hold the family ranch at arm’s length, on the outskirts of the Californian desert. One evening, OJ sees furtively in the sky what looks like a flying saucer. Brother and sister smelled a favorable opportunity there: if they managed to capture an image that could be used on television, fame and fortune would then be within reach.

Thus the challenge of the film will be strictly cinematographic: it is a question of taking a shot in order to attest to the reality of the strange machine in the clouds. That the main roles are devolved to the Afro-American (OJ and Emerald), Asian-American (Jupe) or Latin-American (Angel) minorities is obviously not insignificant: it is to them that the role in reviving these mythologies. Peele continues here his anti-portrait of America by its margins.

One of the greatest successes of Boop arguably lies in its creature, whose beauty avenges us for decades of ghastly digital monsters. Half-aquatic, half-aerial, an undecidable body between inflatable or organic matter, it floats in the atmosphere which infuses it with a thousand metamorphoses. It responds commonly to these two forces of crossed fascination that are the cinema and the living: like a form in perpetual motion. Mathieu Macheret

American film by Jordan Peele. With Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott (2 h 15).

“Far from home”: the dream of a better life

“And my Bleu de Chanel, I take it? » In Beirut, Jamil, a young man of Syrian origin, hesitates while packing his bag for the big departure. You have to make choices, take what is strictly necessary so that you don’t have to throw anything overboard if the boat rocks. In a few hours, Jamil will fly to Turkey, from where he will secretly board a tub for Greece before rolling on to Stockholm. A hundred kilometers from him, his brother Milad gave his last music lesson in Damascus. He too dreams of a better life in a city abroad. He thought of Berlin. This is where he wants to fill the concert halls and make a rock star destiny for himself. We are in 2015, Syria is not coming out of the war.

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