And 'Dune', finally, became flesh and dwelt among the classics

There is an unwritten law in the cinema that says that if you are hesitating between committing suicide or being drunk, try to make a movie with a giant worm crawling through the sand. All those who have tried have been unable to solve the dilemma. They have ruined, yes, but they are alive and sober. And so until reaching the third and definitive attempt. Denis Villeneuve presented on Friday in Venice his expected and always delayed by the pandemic version of the classic of Frank Herbert where the protagonists always hidden are the Shai-Huluds. That is, the producing worms of the spice that moves the universe and that crawl through the sand. He is now drunk. And happy. And I live, of course.

The new 'Dune' makes it true what Alejandro Jodorowski and David Lynch tried before. The first - which promised a cast with Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and David Carradine, as well as the collaboration of the Moebius cartoonist, the sculptor H.R. Giger and Pink Floyd - left him in the most beautiful attempt at the history of cinema. The non-movie of him is now myth. The second, directly, did not understand anything. Or, upside down, he understood everything so precisely that he decided to move the apocalypse that proposes the novel to himself. The film that premiered in 1989 was, and it is still, the brightest self-boycott who has experienced the world of the arts. Drunkenness and artistic suicide all at once.

Villeneuve, as he already did in his rereading of 'Blade Runner', understands that it is not about telling a story (although also) like recreating a universe with a trampanto aspect so faithful to the meticulous unreality designed by herbert that would be completely real . Not in Balde, all the readers of 'Dune' know that you have to start with the Appendices, where the author details from the biology that covers his planet Arrakis to each of the vericemen of the Messianic Religion that encourages its inhabitants. That is, what matters is the ability to be of literature and cinema to convert the word not so much in metaphor and in simple and harsh reality. In short, it is real what we perceive as real.

And that is why it is the first installment signed by the Canadian director of probably the many that will come. The history of the Messiah Paul Atreidis (also known as Muad'Dib or Usul) played by Timothée Chalamet on the desert planet acquires on the screen the texture of the Irreunciable. By fantastically distant and, however, so close. Villeneuve knows about the present of a text that speaks of a time, ours, on the very edge of all precipices: ecological, politician, economic and identity. It is not that we are not able to intuit a future, it is that we simply began to doubt our past. It is not that we have lost confidence in ourselves to build a better world is that we already distrust everything that we want and makes us be what we are. We have reached a point of exhaustion in which excess memory prevents us from reminding anything.

From all this spoke 'Dune' when it was published in 1965 and of all this it can not help but reflect the film that concerns us. The director arises the history of the struggle for power between Casa Atreides and the Harkonen, with the inhabitants of the Arenal who serve the name of Fremen as catalysts of everything, as a contemporary myth narrated in a trance. All solutions, both narrative and, let's say, techniques (attentive to the brilliant solution for shields) are correct.

The EnruLed argument released 'in Media Res' (history begins by the end of Harkonen domination on the planet) with its innumerable character procession is due to the logic of a story that, in truth, wants to be cosmogony. And the setting is scene, supported by the already ritual sound in echo signed by Hans Zimmer, it is handled with the same clarity in action and in sleep. There is no other than surrendering to a mature and perfectly aware entertainment machinery that places that we call 'Blockbuster' on another level.

In the presentation to the media, Villeneuve and Javier Bardem, who gives life to Fremen Stilgar, talked about the present of Herbert's message. At his side, he was a good part of a deal on which they are Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson and Josh Brolin. "Environmental destruction is happening while we talk, which is a bit scary. It depends on governments and big corporations to find the solution to give a great step forward and that we change their mind about how we behave in this world," said Spanish . For its part, the principal could not help but add his: "'Dune' is today relevant to warn about the danger of mixing religion and politics, on the threat of messianic figures, on the impact of colonialism ... definitely , Every day is more current. I think it's time to press and make changes. "

It would be possible to add that the description of the role of large technological corporations (the brotherhood) or the time analysis of the consequences of the oligopolies in the control of basic resources complete the arc of concerns. But with everything, and despite the ability of science fiction to raise mental experiments (says Ursula K. Le Guin), what matters falls on the side of this new 'Dune' to rewrite popular cinema maybe After the pandemic. Who knows if after 'the war of the galaxies' or 'the Lord of the Rings' is the turn for a new saga that refute the superheroic obsession once.

"God did Arrakis to prove the believers," reads in the frontispiece of 'Dune'. So be it. At the moment, a film law has been refuted. Never before a giant worm on the sand looked more beautiful. And 'Dune', finally, became flesh and dwelt among the classics.