It swooped down on TIFF like a spaceship. Dune by Denis Villeneuve, present in Toronto with his team, is this Saturday the great hero of the party, after his shattering landing at the Venice Film Festival. Whether or not the critics there contained any caveats, the vast majority shed light on the extreme issues that the filmmaker successfully faced. Dune is such a global event that in Paris, a mini-festival will be dedicated to it on September 18 and 19, with conferences, screenings, and debates. The Quebec filmmaker has not finished talking about it until its release with us on October 22.
In this sum work, Villeneuve multiplies the nods to his previous films: we find there the ovoid saucers ofArrival, the grandiose dystopian adventure of Blade Runner 2049 in perpetual tension. Until the abyss sucking the giant worm of Dune recalling the title of his first feature film Maelstrom released in the year 2000. The filmmaker constantly feeds on his experiences and rides his third sci-fi film as a distinguished rider.
Frank Herbert’s (1965) novel-river, deemed unsuitable, of which the filmmaker delivers the first part in the hope of filming the second, has fallen into good hands after the failures of illustrious predecessors. The film is a visual dazzling, under Greig Fraser’s camera, with magnificent framing, a light often bathed in chiaroscuro, impressive sets and special effects that Villeneuve does not abuse. Dune remains fairly classic in its register of excess, attentive to characters in initiatory quest.
Because the fate of Paul Atréides (Timothée Chalamet), responsible for leading the planet Dune with precious resources, but inhospitable, embraces many worlds and many challenges of a humanity orphan of its lands. The social significance of an ecological novel, anti-capitalist and feminist in its own way, inhabits the film as much as the fury of combat and futuristic vessels. A climate of permanent threat hangs over Dune. Because humanity having left its uninhabitable land in a distant future, extends its empire on other planets, exporting its beliefs and its vanity, drawn from an ancient world with indestructible symbols.
The distraught fans of the Herbert saga will find their marks there, even if the film remains the digest of a very dense base material. Sections are necessarily put aside, including the fascinating glossary of the novel. The references are lightened, the dialogues abbreviated. Without sacrificing any key scene, including the young man’s painful initiation, his crucial duel and the gigantic worms in terrifying spurts.
Neophytes will take some time to decipher its mysteries, but under the watchful eye of the spectator, the scenario delivers its benchmarks. Beyond the splendor of the images as well as the artistic direction of Patrice Vermette, the fluid staging avoids the trap of heavy artillery to let the emotion of intimate scenes rise, balancing the strengths of the film. Mysterious sound effects add to the intergalactic suspense, but Hans Zimmer’s often sublime music sometimes buries the action.
Timothée Chalamet, with his disturbing interiority, his youthful features, his fragility and his strength seemed designed to embody Paul Atreides, a young aristocrat sensitive but raised as a warrior, called to assume a destiny of Messiah that he had not chosen. Women are figures both strong and alienated, as in writing. Still, Rebecca Ferguson, in Jessica, gifted mother of the young prodigy, seems a little stuck in her role but the young Zendaya in Chani appears fierce and flexible like a desert antelope.
Good idea to have played the ecologist Kynes by a woman: Sharon Duncan-Brewster who delivers the blurred outlines of her profile with a lot of ardor. Oscar Isaac in the skin of the duke, father of Leo, exudes the required majesty, but Javier Bardem seems more caricatural as an authority figure among the free Fremen of Dune, a role which will unfold in the second part.
Jordan was an ideal filming location for the long segments of the planet Dune with its sands and caves on parched mountain sides, where the inhabitants of this fiction have to recycle their body water for drinking. A dizzying desert runs through the action.
Dune on the whole turns out to be an exceptional film, magical in its style and in its rhythm. Despite the purification of the universe of Frank Herbert, the performance of Chalamet among others and the atmosphere established with an astonishing finesse for such a gigantic production, give it a superior elegance. There is no doubt that Warner Bros will let Villeneuve pursue his momentum by letting him run the second part of the saga, soon expected as much as the first.
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