CANNES PREMIERE – OUT OF COMPETITION
Martin “magic” Scorsese, 80 years old like Harrison Ford, who preceded him at the gala screening at the Théâtre Lumière in Cannes, seems to have lost nothing of his flow. With his machine-gun delivery and impish face, this graceful master of war came with tears in his eyes for his share of love and recognition on Saturday, May 20, from a crowd of spectators who were killing each other for tickets a day before.
Killers of the Flower Moonhis new film, begins for connoisseurs of American film history as a discreet reference to an earlier title, The Honeymoon Killers. This mythical film, directed in 1970 by Leonard Kastle, was a cinematic adaptation of the misdeeds of a couple of serial killers, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck. The young Martin Scorsese, then author of a promising first feature film (Who’s That Knocking at My Door), was to direct this film, before being fired a week later. Half a century later, “Marty” has returned with a $200 million allocation from Apple, adapting journalist David Grann’s 2017 bestseller of the same name into film.
Killers of the Flower Moon is the story of a native, the Osage tribe, who bled dry by the West’ conquest, was confined to the arid Gray Horse Reservation in Oklahoma, where it was hoped they would turn to stone. Yet the decimated nation finds itself on the largest oil field in the United States. The tribe is, by a clear irony of capitalist history, rolling in gold. But she is also a victim of mysterious deaths, which turn out to be serial murders. In 1921, the case was entrusted to the Bureau of Investigation (the future FBI), headed by an ambitious young man named Edgar J. Hoover.
Bloody epic poem
twenty years after Gangs of New York − a bloody account of the gang war between the “Natives” and the Irish − Scorsese gives us a new retrospective look at the origins of the United States, in an epic poem about a country undermined by violence in its very constitution, of which Scorsese would become one of the most convulsive heralds in Hollywood.
It all begins with the return of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) from World War I. His uncle William Hale (Robert de Niro), a local power, immediately takes him under his charge and pushes him into the arms of a rich Native girl, the beautiful and sweet Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), with whom he falls in love immediately.
The plans of this Machiavellian uncle from America will gradually become clear to his idiot nephew: to kill, one after the other, all the women of the Native family into which his accomplices married, in order to gradually recover their immense fortune.
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