The winner of Critics’ Week is totally original

Simon has a strong tic that causes him to shake his head, meaninglessly. He dribbles sometimes. The way he looks at the world from beneath his eyebrows, especially when people talk to him, suggests that he can’t follow what they’re saying. When he meets a group of young people from a local daycare for intellectually disabled people, he naturally joins them. He befriends Pehuen Pedre (playing a version of himself) on a mountaintop, where the group hiked and found themselves in difficulty in strong winds. When they all manage to get off and back on the bus, Simon boards with them. This is where he belongs.

Simon of the MountainArgentinian Federico Luis’s moving, disconcerting and entirely original feature debut, which won top prize at Cannes Critics’ Week, is a callback to Luis Bunuel’s 1965 classic Simon of the Desert. Bunuel’s film, shot in Mexico, is an anticlerical mockery of a holy ascetic, Simeon Stylites, who supposedly sat atop a pillar in the desert for several years to show his devotion to God. Luis’s Simon is devoted to nothing, but he also seems to have chosen the path of denial.

What’s wrong with Simon? His mother (Laura Nevole) alternates between telling him to get over it and begging him to talk to her, to explain why he’s doing this, why he’s chosen to befriend these strangers, why he’s so belligerent . Her boyfriend Agustin (Agustin Toscano, also one of Luis’s two co-writers), who drives a moving truck for a living and is kind enough to hire the erratic Simon, won’t intervene.

At first, Simon’s mother seems as evil as the character of Satan who seems to tempt Bunuel’s Simon to knock him off his pillar. How can a mother be cruel enough to harass, mock and accuse a young man – he is 22, even though his petulance and impetuosity are typically childish forms of resistance – who has to live with a disability in a world that is uniformly able ? Is she just ashamed of him? Summoned to the daycare where Simon has settled without actually being registered there, she says she does not understand what she is doing there.

And even. And even! When we see Simon in a home video as a little boy, he is frolicking with his father while Dad prompts his toddler to mouth phrases of Hamlet. “Your head didn’t shake then,” observes Colo (Kiara Supini), her special friend from the center. “No, it was after the treatment,” Simon mutters. It’s a boilerplate excuse that should work. His new gang may live apart from the world, but chemical behavior modification is part of the currency of this sequestered existence. Colo sees through all of this, but she shares with her friends the spontaneity that Simon clearly craves; she just doesn’t care.

Lorenzo Ferro is extraordinary in the role of Simon. We learn almost nothing about his past; his future is up in the air. There is only his gift, engaging in crazy games with the daycare decor, shyly letting teenager Colo flirt with him while making him understand that he, at least, is not ready for sex , and go to the cinema for free with Pehuen, who knows all the tricks (and actually taught them to the director, who was a drama teacher in a center like the one in the film; Pehuen was one of his students).

The handheld camera follows Ferro closely; we never tire of his face, wondering what mood or expression will break out next. It’s still the face of that innocent little Hamlet. To be or not to be? Simon seems to have decided not to engage in slings, arrows or a sea of ​​trouble. Instead, he remains atop his pillar, perpetually coming of age. In the end, who can blame him?

Title: Simon of the Mountain
Festival: Cannes (Critics Week)
Director: Federico Luis
Screenwriters: Federico Luis, Tomas Murphy, Agustin Toscano
Sales agent: Luxbox
Cast: Lorenzo Ferro, Kiara Supini, Pehuen Pedre
Operating time: 1h 38m