Three years ago, the confined world fell in love with Paul Mescal when the BBC then Hulu broadcast the Normal People series, a sublime serial adaptation of the eponymous novel by Sally Rooney. In its pages, the Irish author, a true Anglo-Saxon literary phenomenon, develops the complex relationship of love and friendship that unites Connell and Marianne from high school to adulthood. Tested by time and differences in social status, their relationship will be made up of moments of intense connection but also heartbreaking misunderstandings. In just twelve episodes, the unknown actor, his Irish accent and his Greek statue physique have become the fictional masculine ideal of the moment. If Marianne’s score is written and filmed with equal care and its interpreter, Daisy Edgar-Jones, is up to it, the lack of male characters of this finesse, filmed in their roughness, their doubts, their weaknesses and their faults, played in favor of Paul Mescal.#connellschainAlso see on KonbiniA popular high school student and hopeful for the football team, Connell is also cowardly and does not immediately assume his relationship with Marianne, considered a bourgeois intellectual a little weirdo by his classmates. Then it is he who, the following year, does not get used to the change of scenery at Trinity College, the elitist college where they go to study together and where he gains maturity. He then learns to communicate, with his mother first, with whom he has a very good relationship of trust, then with Marianne and her shrink when he falls into depression. The shocking psychoanalytic sequence in which Connell indulges his emotions is one of the emotional climaxes of the series. If their relationship has encountered many obstacles over the years, moments of weakness and geographical distance, or new partners, Connell will never waver in his gentleness and benevolence towards Marianne, nor will he cease to concern himself with her welfare and consent. This is the main reason why we cherish Connell and his interpreter: they have been able to prove that positive masculinity and erotic potential can go very well together (other programs, such as the distressing 365 Dni, have not understood this) .The sex scenes are one of the major successes of Normal People. Supervised by Sex Education’s intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, they show explicit consent, condoms and realism, but also and above all a lot of intensity and eroticism. Proof that they knew how to titillate the spectators, the famous silver chain of Connell, often filmed in close shot during the many moments of carnal exchanges, has become a phenomenon on the Internet, fed many Twitter threads and even has an account Instagram to his glory, connellschain.Swimming with Paul MescalPropelled from anonymity to glory in twelve short episodes, Paul Mescal now has this image of the ideal man that sticks to his skin, but which he hastened to get rid of . If his first role in a feature film will have been in The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal, where he plays a friendly beach attendant in the service of Olivia Colman, at Cannes this year, we have already found the actor in roles opposite to that by Connell. We saw him in the (already forgotten) drama God’s Creatures by young directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis, presented at the Directors’ Fortnight, in which he plays a darling son back in the small Irish fishing port where he grew up after years of exile in Australia. In the eyes of his mother, embodied by Emily Watson, imperial, he is the creature of God of the title, and when he is accused of rape, she will sink into denial. The film, despite a very beautiful photography in the service of this suffocating account, is rather unconvincing and not very subtle in its denunciation of the law of silence. But this is the first script that the actor received after Normal People and the directors were able to capture something ambivalent in him and offer him this role against the grain to remind us that Paul Mescal is not Connell Waldron (although the temptation to transfer is great). We then found him in Aftersun, the first film and masterstroke of the young Scottish director Charlotte Wells, which has seduced everyone since its first confidential screenings at Critics’ Week at Cannes. It is this time on the Turkish coast at the end of the 1990s, near the swimming pool of a budget hotel, that we find the actor as a divorced father on vacation with Sophie, his daughter from 11 years old. Aftersun is a coming-of-age movie, dark and solar at the same time, which takes on the air of a summer chronicle. Swimming pool, diving, ice cream and karaoke, the holidays of Sophie and Calum seem sweet and placed under the sign of a sincere father/daughter love. The story of their vacation is interspersed with images that they filmed in turn with the small family camcorder and which remind Sophie, now an adult and in turn a mother, of this adored but elusive father. Charlotte Wells draws, between the lines of her summer memories, a darker portrait of this father who is ambivalent but entirely devoted to his daughter. In a spat at his reflection in the mirror, a fit of tears or a word of apology to his daughter, we guess a malaise that halos the story with a melancholy that drowns us in tears. Under the camera of the director who was able to capture, with rare delicacy, a moment of tragic change, melancholy and ambivalence manage to penetrate this physique of a Greek statue. From a forgotten vacation photo was born Aftersun, the most beautiful film of the yearThis performance as a loving but imperfect father hit the mark and opened the door to the Oscars for Paul Mescal. Nominated in the Best Actor category alongside Austin Butler, Colin Farrell, Brendan Fraser and Bill Nighy, and styling the post Tom Cruise, who was announced as the favorite, he could, next March, win the statuette for his first leading role. in the cinema, at the age of only 26. Also this year, Ridley Scott offered him to take over from Russell Crowe in the sequel to Gladiator, where he will play Lucius, the son of Lucilla, grandson of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and nephew of Commodus. “If Ridley Scott ever gets tired of directing it, I’ll be there to help,” Charlotte Wells told us. On our side, we will be in the front row to see him enter the arena. 2023, the rise of Paul Mescal that we expected. Article written at the Cannes Film Festival on May 30, 2022, updated on January 30, 2023.
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