Extravagant fable, cruel metaphor… The 2023 edition of the event illustrated in beautiful way the richness of the genre.
by Jacques Mandelbaum
Gérardmer, Hautes-Vosges, nearby Germany. It is, in winter, either skiing, or the International Fantastic Film Festival, which, after Avoriaz in other times, has gathered here for thirty years, under the leadership of Bruno Barde, an areopage of dangerous eccentrics that Concern nothing as long as the supernatural in all its forms, when it is not the happy cutting of their fellow men in pieces. Large palette, which includes, almost from the origins of cinema, the wonderful, anticipation, horror, science fiction, we pass and the best, these branches which can occasionally combine. Suffice to say that the fantastic genre, in this without real equivalent, is a kind of blob, a ductile, expansive, abundant organism, which cannot be summed up or contains.
It is this protean dimension that was celebrated again during this edition, held from January 25 to 29, in front of a faithful, young, fervent and fairly playful audience. It all started very hard, from Paris in truth, where the Gare de l’Est, paralyzed by a mysterious fire, immediately took a little postapocalyptic air. Nice kick -off of the organizers of the event, who only had to prolong at home on this high voltage line. The nine feature films in competition will also have confirmed this brass rule under which the unknown does not enchant us, moves us or terrifies us only because of his ability to be folded up on the known. And it is precisely the nature of the relationship between these two terms, its character of evidence or mystery, that the quality of the films depends.
several titles, ordering their action according to a transparent causation, thus made one think that fantastic cinema could also proceed from the Lapalissade. Memory of Water, from the Finnish Saara Saarela? Eco-feminist dystopia which loads the only men of the dark privilege of cowardice and totalitarianism. Watcher, from the American Chloe Okuno? A sort of window on the courtyard given at #MeToo time, thereby losing all kinds of ambiguity by hammering, from start to finish, the guilt of the male genre. The Nocebo Effect, of the Irishman Lorcan Finnegan? A horror film with a postcolonial spring, throwing a neuropathic fashion designer and egotist (Eva Green) in the hands of a Filipino servant Foubling against her a terrifying and just revenge.
radical strangeness
To do everything, far from these dependent socio -political files coated with the tinters of the fantastic, Blood, of the American Brad Anderson, was doing much better, although he also made the result, in a clear, ‘A acerbic conjugal discord the transformation of a charming boy into an inexhaustible vampire. But it is definitely elsewhere that the most singular films were, including the tenuous and poetic appeal to the supernatural matter, refusing any direct causal report, opened the fighters of the imaginary. Three titles will be imposed.
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