At 76, the filmmaker and screenwriter, at the top of his art, showed his new film, with Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver, and received a golden lion for the whole of his career.
by
While the Venice Film Festival negotiated the turning point of the first weekend, a well-deserved golden lion was handed over, on Saturday September 3, for his entire career to the American screenwriter and director Paul Schrader, 76 years old , one of the last Hollywood snipers in the 1970s, whose work explores the meanders of the human soul. At the end of the ceremony held in the vast Sala Grande was also presented, out of competition, his last and twenty-third feature film, a film of old master at the top of his art, undoubtedly the most beautiful object seen in This stage of the festivities, all sections combined.
After the two previous deliveries on the obsession with repentance, Master Gardener ends a triptych in line with the newspaper of a campaign parish priest (1951), of his master Robert Bresson.
Like the Calvinist pastor on the way to redemption (2017) and the poker player of The Card Counter (2021), this last film takes a character voluntarily absorbed by a routine, in order to Shake the still lively burn of a cursed past, which reflected by scraps.
Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), a horticultural chief of a vast private domain, maintains for its owner, the rich Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), organizer of charity galas, the sumptuous flowery gardens that make her reputation. The meticulous care he puts there contains the germ of a takeover. Former prisoner in conditional, the gardener has a liabilities of a henchman for a neonazi militia like Proud Boys, whose shameful trace he keeps on the body: swastikas and other symbols tattooed on the chest and back. The mistress of the house, with which he maintains a very codified sexual intercourse, confides in learning her little-niece Métis, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), a young woman drifting. The niece and the gardener fall in love, not without the street and its slippery slopes remembering them, precipitating the time of choices.
elementary motifs of the redemption
Simplicity here is essential: a handful of characters, a few sets, the elementary patterns of redemption that Paul Schrader tirelessly puts back on the profession, but each choice of staging counts, each gesture, each cut, each look helps lead the drama to destination.
The practice of gardening, this art of growing flowers (which causes a very beautiful credits in the form of a bouquet in hatching), is taken very seriously by the filmmaker: the way in which his hero lives is the Order of discipline, that is to say a matter of learning and ethics, a relation to the sober and transcendental world. “Gardening is a profession of faith in the future,” he says, writing his newspaper, like the recent heroes of Schrader, who thus do their conscience. In a very beautiful passage, he invites his young disciple to smell the earth by plunging all his face into it: sensual experience of reality without which spirituality does not know a seat.
You have 24.73% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.