«Le grand chariot» by Philippe Garrel, as a testament in the form of a comedy – Corriere.it

The consequences of the pandemic made themselves felt at the Berlinale. Films have abandoned the traditional openings on the outside world (in the past read through politics) to fall back on an often problematic and sometimes unsatisfying intimism, but which in the more reactive directors has opened up interesting spaces for reflection.

Seventy-four-year-old Philippe Garrel with “The Grand Chariots” signs a film that would have been said to be testament (perhaps it is) were it not for the lightness and joy of comedies. The mature manager of a puppet theatre, precisely called «Le grand chariot», has always involved his three children in his business (Louis, Esther and Léna Garrel, the director’s three real children), but when he dies the partnership breaks and the company is in danger of disappearing.

The new generations want to follow different paths from those of the fathers and the film not only accepts it but also ends up encouraging change, demonstrating that they will not necessarily go bankrupt: Garrel father is well aware that the cinema he stubbornly pursued for years has no more space today and leaves in inheritance to the children the invitation to new experiments, to new adventures, in a kind of handover without regrets or melancholy.

Fifty-year-old Christian Petzold, on the other hand, puts himself on the line with «Roter Himmel» (Red sky) telling of Leon (Thomas Schuibert), a young novelist who retires with a photographer friend to an isolated house near the sea to re-read his manuscript while waiting to meet his editor. But a family friend has also moved into her house, Nadja (Paula Beer), who not only disturbs the peace of the place with her sexual prowess but also turns out to be a lucid literary critic. Putting Leon even more in crisis.

Impossible not to see in the protagonist almost a mirror of the director, forced to deal with the themes of audience expectations and creative crisis (as in 8 ½?) but also with an outside world that doesn’t move as he would like and that interferes with his programs, where even a forest fire (the “red sky” of the title) forces him to rethink his work. Forcing him to measure himself with that reality that he wanted to remove.