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Cannes Film Festival |  Elvis is looking for himself and can’t find himself

Cannes Film Festival | Elvis is looking for himself and can’t find himself

(was) one wonders what it is ElvisThe new movie by Baz Luhrmann. Is it a musical, a biographical drama, a comic book adaptation, a superhero movie, or a play? The Australian director himself doesn’t seem to know that much, so he often changes the taping in this 2 hour 39 minute movie that fails to move people by drowning in acting tricks.

Posted at 9:16 p.m.

Mark Cassivi

Mark Cassivi
Journalism

World premiere of the movieElvisPresented out of competition at the Grand Théâtre Lumière on Wednesday evening, it was undoubtedly the most anticipated event of the 75H Cannes Film Festival. The film, of course, received thunderous applause at the end of the show. The opposite would have been almost unthinkable in the presence of Luhrmann and actors Austin Butler, Tom Hanks and Priscilla Presley, the king’s widow, who has been interested in the film on social networks for a week.

Baz Luhrmann is a regular at the Cannes Film Festival. his first feature film, Strictly ballroomShown this week as part of the Cinéma à la Plage series, it was presented in the Un Certification section in 1992. Red Mill! The festival and competition opened in 2001, and The great Gatsby It was also the opening film in 2013.

Photo by Christophe Simon, Agence France-Presse

Baz Luhrmann and Austin Butler

Luhrmann says he chose Austin Butler, 30, to play Elvis “because he is an actor who can naturally replicate not only the body language and vocal qualities of this unique performer, but also his weakness.”

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Butler transformation, which we see especially in Once upon a time…in HollywoodBy Quentin Tarantino, It’s amazing. He gave his voice to Presley’s songs, sometimes reinterpreted and rearranged to suit today’s taste…but not always to the best of taste.

Photo by JOEL C RYAN, JOEL C RYAN / INVISION / AP

Tom Hanks, Baz Luhrmann and Austin Butler at the movie premiere Elvis Presented on Wednesday evening in Cannes.

Film director’s problem Red Mill! That’s because we don’t believe any of his characters. It’s very cartoonish and has depth – and magnetism – a cardboard movie poster. “I’m a superhero,” says Elvis, and Luhrmann seems to have made him, in his usual way, a character from Cartons.

Tom Hanks, who plays Empsario Elvis, the enigmatic and Machiavellian Colonel Tom Parker, is so weirdly fabricated that it reminds me of Mike Myers’ Fat Bastard character in Austin Powers. Especially he has an iota of pseudo-Dutch accent in his voice, a reminder of the ambiguous origins of impresario.

Photo provided by WARNER BROS. Pictures

Austin Butler plays Elvis Presley, Tom Hanks plays Colonel Tom Parker ElvisFilm directed by Baz Luhrmann.

M Biography Chronology and hyperactivity in the life and work of Elvis Presley is particularly interested in the dependency relationship between the legendary singer and the famous Colonel Parker, who was his business manager for 21 years. “He treated him like a monkey in a cage,” Jerry Lee Lewis says in Ethan Coen’s documentary about him, which premiered in Cannes earlier this week. “He locked me in this golden cage,” Elvis says in Baz Luhrmann’s movie.

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Colonel Parker was running a circus show when he heard “that white guy sings like a black guy” on the radio. He immediately realized that he was holding a rough diamond in his hands. The story of Elvis is also told from the point of view of the colonel, who, apparently, gave himself 50% of the receipts protecting him.

Luhrmann suggests that the two men were at odds at times and that Elvis may have had less under his thumb than one might think, but he wasn’t independent enough to shake it off. Parker has always found a new trick (residence in Las Vegas, for example) to convince Presley to stay loyal to him. The scenario, unfortunately, does not allow us to fully understand the foundations and properties of their dynamics.

This saint biography of the King of Rock and Roll touches very little on the artist’s dark side, except for making us understand that due to being under house arrest in Las Vegas by the Colonel, Elvis, exhausted at work, ends up becoming an addict. barbiturates; It’s not a detail in his story, but it happens like a hair in soup, and suddenly Elvis Presley died, bloated, in 1977, at the age of 42.

Colonel Parker confirmed at the end of the film that he did not die of a heart attack or an overdose of the pills. He died of the love of his fans more than his life.

Baz Luhrmann attempts to contrast the presence of this larger-than-life figure and the boiling of time in the United States, with the struggle for civil rights and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers. It’s flat – the movie was shot mostly in studio in Australia; It’s a feeling – and we don’t understand where the exit is coming from. Do you remember Elvis’ ties to the black community? Giving social or political meaning to one’s life?

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But his film’s biggest drawbacks lie elsewhere. In his non-stop production style, in his frantic editing, to provoke an epileptic fit, in the abuse of split screen And focus on the soft violin. Everything is in place to stir up emotions. It never appears.

Elvis It is scheduled to hit theaters June 24 in North America.