Discovered via his first feature film, Magnetic Beats [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Vincent Maël Cardona
scheda film], which was presented in the 2021 Directors’ Fortnight where it scooped the SACD Prize, and having had his talent subsequently confirmed by the Arte series Grace of Heaven, Vincent Maël Cardona is returning with a second feature film venturing into genre cinema, entitled No One Will Know. The work was presented in a Midnight Screening at the 78th Cannes Film Festival.

It all begins in Versailles, in the present day, in the bedroom of a young go-getter from the finance world who’s dispensing an erudite lesson about the social pyramid to a young intern. By an epic combination of circumstances, when the sun rises Erwan (Joseph Olivennes) finds himself at Le Roi Soleil, a shabby bar where a handful of night owls have ended their evening: two cops at the end of their shift (Sofiane Zermani and Pio Marmaï), an ambulance driver (Panayotis Pascot), an inebriated young man (Michaël Bejaoui Evans), the barman (Xianzeng Pan) and his waitress (Lucie Zhang). In walks Mr. Kantz, just like he does every week, to drink a small glass of white wine and to check the lottery results. And it’s his lucky day: Mr. Kantz has won the jackpot. But the combined presence of a winning lottery ticket and a gun pretty much guarantees a catastrophic scenario and, when the bullet flies, the old man is inevitably in its path. We’re left with a dead man, a winning ticket, seven witnesses and a story which needs to be rewritten to stop the jackpot going up in smoke. These strangers united by a twist of fate must now join forces and mine their creativity in order to defy destiny and fend off the ambitions and individualist temptations which each of them are wrestling with.

Homing in on a universal theme ("magic" money turns people crazy), the filmmaker opts for a genre film in order to share his reflections on how the fantasy of a millionaire’s life messes with our values, convictions and reason. It’s a socially focused premise, taking an eminently playful form, which blends genres and plays on our tendency to lie to ourselves. It’s a kind of post-heist film where, rather than planning robberies or anticipating hazards, the characters adapt to events once they’ve happened. But the situation evolves, and it soon turns into a slasher film, where the killer isn’t so much an evil assassin as fate itself, which is helped on its way by human arrogance. The characters are the captains of their own destiny, with the story turning “meta” at the level of the characters themselves rather than the filmmaker’s or viewers’. In this sense, gambling (and chance) are at the heart of the story, driving the action forwards and speeding up the outcome. But at the last minute, Vincent Maël Cardona moves away from the genre film framework to deliver a kind of sociological-historical moral, over and above his characters who become puppets controlled by a destiny which is far bigger than they are. It’s a divisive choice resulting in a sudden drop in tension, as if the genre film vehicle wasn’t expansive enough to express the complexity of his thoughts.

No One Will Know was produced by Srab Films and Easy Tiger in co-production with France 2 Cinéma and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma. World sales are entrusted to Studiocanal.