This is the first time thatAri Aster, who made the excellent Hérédité, Midsommar and Beau is Afraid, has walked the red carpet at Cannes 2025. It was an opportunity for him to present his new film, Eddington, which is competing for the Palme d'Or in official competition. He reunites with his sidekick Joaquin Phœnix, who plays the sheriff ofEddington, a small town in New Mexico.
Eddington will be released in French cinemas on July 16, 2025.
Synopsis: May 2020 in Eddington, a small town in New Mexico, a confrontation between the sheriff and the mayor ignites a firestorm, turning residents against each other.
It's the end of May 2020, in the middle of the Covid period. The town's pro- and anti-masks are pitted against each other, in the tense context that everyone remembers. The sheriff is in the anti camp and bitterly regrets the policies pursued by the town's mayor, played by Pedro Pascal, to the point of launching an election campaign to take his place.
Amodern-day Western between the two men, the film aims to portray contemporary America in all its fragmented, outrageous glory. Grating, funny, sometimes absurd, Eddington is a great satirical film, necessarily political, about the decadence of the United States over the last ten years - Trump's arrival in the White House and the moral and intellectual decay that has followed.
Woke, anti-racist, post-Metoo feminist and ecological youth who oppose the old world of conspiracy theories, fake news and guns, Ari Aster has pulled out all the stops (right down to young Americans' shameless obsession with filming the worst), even if it means making the whole thing deliberately excessive. All the more so since it takes place after the death of George Floyd, killed by an American policeman, which gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement across the country.
Two Americas clash on the scale of a small town that's about to overflow, giving rise to a sardonic feud and some frankly truculent flights of fancy. But while the first half of the film once again allows Joaquin Phœnix to show the full extent of his talent, it also suffers from a few long stretches.
This is hardly surprising for a man who was already slowly building up the pressure in Midsommar; except thatEddington, while often taking cues from the Coen brothers at their best, never quite reaches the level of madness of his earlier work.
Well... the film does, of course, end up tipping over into Ari Aster's trademarkbloody excess (if not downright heavy-handed in its epilogue, as a last-ditch attempt at not-quite-smart weirdness). Enough to delight aficionados of the New York filmmaker.
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