😍 2022-11-22 06:00:00 – Paris/France.
Sebastián Lelio, the Chilean director who won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2017 for a fantastic womanmakes its debut The Prodigy, with Florence Pugh (Don't worry my dear, Black Widow). The feature film is based on Emma Donoghuey's novel set in an ultra-Catholic village in 11th century Ireland where an XNUMX-year-old girl claims she hasn't eaten in four months and is miraculously survives thanks to 'Manna from Heaven', it is now available on Netflix after its fleeting run in cinemas.
“We are experiencing a moment of transition, but also of contradictions and paradoxes. The film wouldn't exist without Netflix., but I would have liked it to go through more countries, more cinemas, more rooms… of course. But at the same time, I am very grateful to them for having been able to do it”, recognizes the director in an interview with Europa Press in which he reflects on the necessary coexistence of theaters and traditional platforms.
In this sense, Lelio ensures that the 'sorry' that he feels his latest film 'hasn't been in theaters everywhere longer' This is partly compensated by the "curiosity" that arouses him that overnight his film will be available on 240 million screens thanks to the platform. "I'm trying to understand, I too am new to this," insists the Chilean filmmaker, who distances himself from these voices, some very authoritarian and prestigious, who see in the "boom" of Streaming the beginning of the end of cinema.
Starting from a “not apocalyptic, but integrated” vision, the director hopes that little by little the panorama will clear up and give rise to "a more hybrid relationship" which, without denying "the popularity and the enormous reach of the platforms", will allow the existence of cinema in theaters". declares his death since his birth. He was going to be killed by sound, TV, VHS, cable… and of course, the internet. I believe that cinema in theaters will not die, but blood will flow along the way,” he predicts.
In his reflection, Lelio places special emphasis on the protection and care of this "small, even middle-class cinema", which is "cornered" on the billboard by the big blockbusters. " I can't conceive of a contemporary city without movie theaters (…) But it takes multiple looks and readings for the cinema to fulfill its function”, proclaims the director who, returning to 'Le Prodige', admits to having been “fascinated” as soon as he read Emma's novel Donoghué.
« I emotionally connected with Lib, the head nurse. A rational, scientific and modern woman who is summoned by a group of men from Ireland in 1862 to observe, but without intervening, a young girl who has probably not eaten for four months", says the director who highlights the “magnetic” and “almost bewitching” of Florence Pugh but also of the younger Kíla Lord Cassidy.
science versus fanaticism
Two characters, underlines the director, who “need to save themselves” and between whom a bond of “sorority” is established which is transformed little by little to “become an almost maternal love”. A complex relationship in a radicalized and hostile environmentjust a decade after the Great Irish Famine, in which Puig's character will face "a journey of sanity to confront religious fanaticism and the moral dilemma of what to do with the girl".
« We don't deal with the existence or not of God, the film doesn't talk about that. It talks about two ways of reading reality and the power of fiction in our lives. About the way stories, stories, become power and political control”, defends Lelio, who precisely with this alert challenges the viewer at the beginning and at the end of the film. A kind of “warning” to transfer to the other side of the screen “the responsibility to question what we believe” so as “not to let our beliefs, our religion or our ideology think for us”.
These are, according to the director, the "forces" that clash in The Prodigy where on one side is " the religious fanaticism of the community which has found its truth, she operates from there, she distorts reality from there and is even ready for a girl to die to retain the power that this truth gives them” and on the other hand the “versatility and intellectual elasticity” of Lib, the head nurse "who because she is a scientist has a greater connection with uncertainty, the ability to conform and to question".
A shock, that of “this elasticity and this rigidity”, which is also “very 2022”. “The film has something of that, of telling the viewer 'Let's wake up! Alert ! Don't fall asleep to the power of fiction, not even the film itself, beware of history, even this one.' sense, the film tries to be the problem in itself when it turns to the viewer to ask what type of believer they are, whether they believe in what they believe, whether rigid or elastic “, exposes the director who defines himself as “elastic” to try have a "scientific attitude towards reality"
"I distrust all the stories, but at the same time I admire all the stories that have beauty", says the director who The Prodigy introduce the viewer a very ambitious proposal intellectuallybut also visually, with raw but imposing real locations and careful photography that elegantly handles Ari Wegner's chiaroscuro.
To achieve precisely this balance between "to honor the themes it explores, which are delicate and harsh against which one cannot be frivolous, and the visual pleasure“, was Lelio’s big challenge in this film. “Alfred Hitchcock said that a film should not be a piece of life, but a piece of cake. And I think there is some truth there, because finding the balance between the aesthetic pleasure and the pain of the themes was the most difficult (…) We wanted aesthetic splendor and thematic acuity and that the two things don't cancel each other out,” he concludes.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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