Cannes Directors’ Fortnight: Thomas Salvador’s ‘The Mountain’ takes Best French-Language Film Award

variety.com:

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentIn the second big prize announcement by a Directors’ Fortnight partner, “The Mountain” (“La Montagne”), from emerging French auteur Thomas Salvador, has won the SACD Prize, awarded by France’s Writers’ Guild for the best French-language movie in the section.The second feature of the French actor-director after 2017’s promising “Vincent,” selected for San Sebastian’s prestige New Directors section, ”The Mountain” is sold internationally by Le Pacte which will also handle distribution in France.From a screenplay written by Salvador and Naila Guiguet, which was selected for Critics’ Weeks’ Next Steps 2020, “The Mountain” turns on Pierre, 40, played by Salvador, who makes a sales pitch for his company’s robotic arm in Chamonix, the capital of the French Alps.

When his colleagues return to Paris, he stays on, pitching a tent just below the Aiguille du Midi cable car station, a spectacular pinnacle at 12,600 feet, in the lap of Mont Blanc.

There he strikes up a friendship with the head of the station’s restaurant (Louise Bourgoin) as a mysterious glow glitters in the deep mountains – and the movie in its last third makes a dramatic tonal shift into the supernatural.Little explanation is given to the finale, as little was made as to why Vincent, in Salvador’s debut, acquires super-human powers  when in contact with water.Salvador  told Le Film Français in an interview that Pierre is “searching for what he really desires in life and to strike a balance between that and his relationship with other people.”“Prizing ‘The Mountain,’ we are prizing the prodigious audacity and radiant simplicity of generous filmmaking.