2023-05-03 06:08:02
Showing Up **
de Kelly Reichardt
American film, 1 h 47
It’s almost three times nothing. A community of artists, a sculptress preparing an exhibition, a professional rivalry with her friend and neighbour, a pigeon with a broken wing and a psychotic brother in the throes of a crisis. The American director Kelly Reichardt films all these nothings with infinite grace and shows us the work of creation in all its triviality and emotional intensity, constructing her story with tiny little touches as her character models her female figures.
Selected at Cannes last year, Showing Up suffered from being thrown on the last day of the festival and its studied minimalism stood out among the demonstrations of force of certain regulars of the competition.
After the blazing First Cow in which she revisited the myth of the conquest of the West, the filmmaker returns to more purity by filming the daily life of an artist from the Portland region and finds on this occasion her favorite actress, Michelle Williams, whom the we saw recently in The Fabelmans, de Steven Spielberg.
Transcend the banality of everyday life
She interprets this Lizzie with an eternally stubborn face who lives alone, rails against her broken water heater and tries to finish her work in time, in a garage transformed into a workshop, for the opening of the exhibition scheduled for a few days later. But the daily newspaper does not cease interfering in its resolutions.
First there is the somewhat thankless administrative job she has in an art school run by her mother to, one guesses, pay her bills. The loudly celebrated success of her friend Joe whose spectacular works are more prominent than hers. This dysfunctional family whose vagaries she must manage. And a feeling of guilt over this imprudent pigeon half devoured by his cat.
The screenplay is tenuous and the dialogue rare, but all of Kelly Reichardt’s art lies in this way of transcending the banality of everyday life with its elegant framing, the soft light of late summer and a few musical notes punctuating the stages of the act of creation up to its final objective: unveiling to the public. Nothing spectacular, nor stormy in the way she describes this one.
Simply the tenacious work of the artist, who constantly returns to the profession, with its hesitations, its doubts and its misses. And especially the life that surrounds him and permanently permeates his work. We can see the pleasure of the filmmaker, to follow all this process in which she must find herself. And to celebrate a fragile way of life and work which, like his cinema, is so far removed from the dominant values of his country.
#Showing #Kelly #Reichardt #art #life