the YOUNGEST Of FRESH WATER In the rooms, the 09/08/2017

Majestic in many respects, CADET FRESHWATER devotes an artist, Buster Keaton, a philosophy, burlesque, and a work of masterful.

At the cinema, Buster Keaton has never ceased to be a child. Adorable, but often childish and failed. A child warm, which becomes pitre involuntarily, in spite of his quest for unhoped-for of intellectual emancipation. A child is timeless, who walks around in the heads of movie-goers, who laughed with wonder at the multiple and yet specific cascades of friend Charlie chaplin.

In Cadet Freshwater, Charles Reisner (The Kid,The Pilgrim, both with Chaplin) offers him a role against the job, that of an extravagant bohemian with his beret and his ukulele – it uses superbly as soon as he has the opportunity-come to Boston to visit, so unlikely, his father, old captain of a ship completely dilapidated.

The director manages to find an important source of inspiration in film, with the use (as in The Mechanic of the “General“) a very clever parallel editing immersive, that makes us switch from one perspective to another, at any time. He realised also at that time, the importance of the depth of field, especially when W. Canfield is brought unjustly in prison, with the use critical to the background of Kitty King. Keaton, meanwhile, got rid of the constraint of the realization, is like a fish in the water and turns out wonderful, with the gags of cabaret with a disconcerting ease. They impress us as they come to mislead us and to serve a narrative that is just, that gets to the right port.

Cadet Of Fresh Water, in addition to his comic appearance essentially noticeable, is an engaged and moreover disturbing. Disturbing because she is critical of virulemment, in a geopolitical context american morose (a year before the stock market crash of Wall Street), the manners and the society is conformist, patriarchal and individualistic. In fact, the film, opening on to a very successful panoramic on the “River” upon the arrival of a beautiful boat, put in place, from the first minute, a social differentiation quite wide, between John James King, a rich browser and adored by the crowd, and William Canfield, commander of rustic, worn and jealous – quite logically, it has to be said – for the success of his rival in a boastful way.

This is going to build a sub-about interesting (on the law of the strongest, insecurity) during a good part of the film, except during the epilogue, where the different statuses evaporate by a path primary : survival, and the fear of dying. Thus it is that the character becomes aware – at the same time as us – of his true identity, that of a surly philanthropist willing to do anything to meet ” his ” humanity founder : his father-in-law, his fiancée, and his father.

The child prodigy, we love to be pampered, we have wandered for an hour. We thank him, and there was only one desire : to see him again, and soon !

Pablo C.

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