Chazelle, Spielberg, Mendes... Some of the names of directors crystallizing the most expectations have in common to have recently produced « Love letters at the cinema ». Spoken expression designating these films that perpetuate, each in their own way, a sincere love for the seventh art. Overview in three different epistolic styles (plus a bonus of a letter yet to be written).
The Dipping Letter
From pachyderm faeces to synthetic sperm, inevitably passing through a dose of urology and vomiting, the love letter to cinema of Damien Chazelle task. Outrance in his Hollywood painting probably largely fantasized – like the book with which the film shares a certain gemality: Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger – the feature film of the French-American filmmaker overflows with everything: its length, its movements of cameras resolutely excessive, the number of its extras, its rhythm, its casting... If one is saddened at sometimes not succeeding in detailing the tingling of his scenes and at times a somewhat lukewarm will, Babylon remains a good surprise of the beginning of the year focused on the production of cinema.
The Love Letter
Cathartic feature film for a Steven Spielberg who had to wait for her two parents to die to finally give birth, The Fabelmans Touch in the heart. Animated by a desire for cinema that will go through it from one side to the other, the film focuses rather on the family relations of the Fabelman (alter ego filmique de la celle familiale de Spielberg) and the disturbing element that will shake the emerging young filmmaker: the divorce of his parents. Figuring well-targeted references (from the birth of an scopic impulse through Cecil B. DeMille to the transmission of creation via John Ford), the 76-year-old director who has just returned from the Oscars manages to create a self-fiction beginning perhaps as an ego-trip, but closed with the most beautiful proof of humility possible.
The empty envelope
Last film by Sam Mendes, Empire of Light add its stone to the building of the love letter to the cinema by forgetting to fill the envelope before posting it. The visual designer – alone (and sufficient) quality 1917 who shook his spectator with a single (false) plan-sequence against the background of World War I – returns here to the intimate. Exploring the loves, flaws and hopes of a handful of characters all employed in a small English cinema, Mendes multiplies the thematic tracks (racism, perspective on mental illness, change of era, etc.), without ever succeeding in developing them. One comes out tired by a film too long, certainly hollow and saved by some beautiful images. Too bad it might be better next time.
The letter that remains to be written
We will conclude this overview of love letters in cinema with a director who is accustomed to the theme: Quentin Tarantino. After perhaps serving us his most beautiful film (so far) with Once Upon a time... in Hollywood, a rewriting of the drama Sharon Tate/Charles Manson crossing the Hollywood of the late 1960s, he reveals to us the central theme of his tenth and final film: film criticism. If the name of the influence Pauline Kael has been mentioned, nothing is confirmed if this is a provisional and circumstanceal title: The Movie Critic. While we're waiting for her release, we can get back to Tarantino's next trial, Cinema Speculationpublished in a few days... Hopefully he's better than his novel. Once upon a time in Hollywood, a fictional rewriting that left the screenplay of his 9th film to be frankly desired.
Conclusion
Whether they refer respectively to the way in which a film is made, the way in which a filmmaker is made, or the very existence of a theatre, these three films have in common to dwell on feature films from a great cinema past: Cecil B. DeMille, Hugh Hudson, Hal Ashby... Leading directors but gradually forgotten by the next generation. As well as a certain idea of cinema, perspiring in these love letters: the room in a privileged place (well transmitted by the cinema Empire depicted by Mendes) where entertainment is master, electrifying the population in a communion in front of the film object (the final scene of Babylon) through all social strata.
A popularity that seems to have passed, a popular success that tarnishes (including for this kind of film, real ovens of the U.S. box office), the emergence of new habits encouraged by the emergence of SVOD platforms and a pandemic that didn't fix anything, is perhaps what worries these filmmakers. Fear? Pulse intake of deeper change? Fashion effect? The resurgence of these love letters probably betrays an evolution in the seventh art whose future will reveal nature to us.
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