Sitting at the blackjack table of a modest-sized casino, hair carefully slicked back, upright posture and indecipherable gaze, William seems in perfect control. A professional player, he has a talent that is as particular as it is illegal: he knows how to “count cards”, which gives him an unfair advantage over his opponents and, above all, over the gambling dens. Not crazy, William goes from establishment to establishment. establishment, state to state, opting for small bets and being satisfied with modest gains. Now, under the guise of an austere and regulated existence, William, the antihero from the movie The Card Counter, fight of old demons.
The same could almost be said of Paul Schrader, the veteran filmmaker and screenwriter here re-embracing his own preoccupations and obsessions, starting with notions of guilt, redemption and, in this case especially, atonement. The subtext is very religious, which Schrader, once brought up according to rigorous Calvinist precepts, never hid.
“I come from a culture where you are responsible for everything. You are born soaked in guilt and you get even more guilty [en grandissant] », he recently confided to Indiewire on the occasion of the premiere of his film in Venice, where it was praised.
The image certainly applies to William in The Card Counter.
Former military interrogator in Abu Ghraib as we discover during a nightmare inserted early in the story and filmed in extreme wide-angle for maximum destabilizing effect, William (Oscar Isaac, superb) served a ten-year sentence in a prison military. Always tormented, or rather haunted, by his actions, he continues to reproduce in each motel room he visits the deprivation of his cell, removing the frames and covering each piece of furniture with a white sheet. The effect is striking.
So all these interchangeable casinos that William frequents are, neither more nor less, than the purgatory that he inflicts on himself. Two characters will come to break the voluntary monotony: La Linda (Tiffany Haddish, excellent against employment), who runs an agency of professional players, and Cirk (Tye Sheridan, solid), a young man whose troubled past indirectly joins that of William .
Figure « schraderienne »
William declares, shortly after the film begins, in his intermittent recounting of events: “In poker, everything is waiting: hours go by, days go by, hand after hand, every hand like the hand before. Then something happens. “
In doing so, Schrader gives a glimpse of his game, his film marrying exactly, rigorously, this structure. When the filmmaker cuts down his last card, which we weren’t expecting but could have perhaps foreseen if we shared William’s talent, we are blown away.
William who, again, stands out at every turn as a classic “schraderian” figure : a lonely man eaten away from the inside behind a cleverly constructed facade. American Gigolo (The American gigolo), Light Sleeper, Affliction, Auto Focus, The Walker, First Reformed (Dialogue with God): all feature such a protagonist. Even films seemingly atypical in the author’s filmography, such as Cat People (The feline) and Mishima : A Life in Four Chapters, subscribe to this model.
Not to mention the scripts Schrader wrote for friend Martin Scorsese, here co-producer: Taxi Driver (Taxi driver), Raging Bull (Like a wild bull), The Last Temptation of Christ (The last temptation of Christ), Bringing Out the Dead (Resurrect the dead). We are in the middle of it.
However, The Card Counter turns out to be more specifically close toAmerican Gigolo and of Light Sleeper. So, apart from the question of inner torment, this film, like the other two, is based on a character who sees himself as an island, but who ultimately sinks by making the mistake of believing that he can reach the mainland. A character who is moreover tempted, after having given it up, by a love ultimately compromised by fate.
Winning hand
Speaking of fate, William has a paradoxical relationship with it. In fact, here is a man who, on the one hand, devotes himself to thwarting chance, but who, on the other, wears as a tattoo the inscription ” I Trust My Life to Providence “(” I entrust my life to providence “). These words with religious connotations are found in this case in the song World on Fire, which can be heard in … Light Sleeper. Likewise, the last shot of The Card Counter evokes that ofAmerican Gigolo.
This intertextuality, however, does not The Card Counter a film-sum. Rather, it is a film of continuity, brilliantly written and constructed, that is, with the relentless precision shown by the main character.
In phase, the realization, punctuated, like First Reformed, passages evoking the cinema of Robert Bresson, one of Paul Schrader’s masters in thinking and filming, is governed by a concern for conciseness and admirable sobriety. In short, a winning hand.
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