Ari Aster, individualism makes us clash, America is fragile – Cinema

(by Francesco Gallo) “Individualism makes us distrust the rest of the world and does not allow us to communicate with each other and for this reason we begin to clash. As for my country, the United States, I have the feeling that we are experiencing the collapse of a more fragile system than I had imagined. I don’t know where we will end up”.


So today Ari Aster, at the 20th edition of the Rome Film Festival with ‘Eddington’, in theaters from tomorrow with I Wonder Pictures in collaboration with Wise Pictures.


In his film the most grotesque American province possible, a bit like Coen, between white supremacism, weapons, Black Lives Matter, religious sects, ‘No justice no peace’, drones, snipers and the inevitable smartphones with which everyone films the other, all then placed in the existential driving force of Covid-19.


“Smartphones are now weapons, they are in the film as in our lives. They are weapons used against each other and, at the same time, against ourselves.” Today the United States “I see it as a very delicate experiment. I have the feeling that we are experiencing the collapse of a system that was more vulnerable than I had imagined. I don’t know where we will end up.”


The film takes us to May 2020, in the midst of the pandemic in the town of Eddington, New Mexico, on the edge of a Pueblo reservation between protests over the death of George Floyd and the November presidential election campaign. Here a fight to the death mounts between the rude sheriff Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and the mayor García (Pedro Pascal).


Reason? Cross, supremacist in soul and manner, intolerant of the protective mask, decides at a certain point, also due to the antipathy he feels for the Hispanic García, to run as a candidate in the name of all his healthy radical-republican values.


Alongside him, at least initially, is his beautiful wife Luisa Cross (Emma Stone) who builds semi-horror dolls as a hobby, but amid protests of all kinds from the few inhabitants, homeless people without masks who try to break into bars, policemen who are too black not to be accused as soon as necessary, Black Matter attacks and low blows from the electoral campaign (Cross at a certain point accuses García of having raped his wife) the film slides into a hyper-violent, splatter ending, where the ideas of the aspiring mayor become – in this contemporary western-horror-thriller produced by the legendary A24 – action, weapons and blood.

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