Night road - Clint Eastwood looks at America through the windshield of its Gran Torino
The Ford Coupé of the 70s is not only emblematic of the Starsky & Amp;Hutch.It is also at the heart of one of the great films of the dark and prolific American director who is celebrating soon ...
28/07/2022
Le coupé Ford des années 70 n'est pas seulement emblématique de la série Starsky & Hutch.He is also at the heart of one of the great films of the dark and prolific American director who soon celebrates his 91 years.A work where the car appears little, but where it is omnipresent.
The cinemas are closed, and should not reopen in the coming weeks.This is not an excuse for doing without great films.Especially since Gran Torino by Clint Eastwood, produced in 2008 is accessible via all the large VOD platforms and that the reasons to see it and again are numerous.But if you want to see cars make prowess, you will go your way, you are not in Bullit.If we are captivated by the way Ford has created his coupe, we can zap, we are not in Le Mans 66.In addition, this famous Ford Gran Torino, we see it quite little.But it is everywhere.
This car is that of Walt Kowalski, interpreted by Eastwood himself.He is a widower and retired from the Ford factories.The old man has all the faults: he is lonely, irascible and racist.He is one of these old white males of Detroit and the Rust Belt, this rust belt or live so many downgrades and unemployed which almost ten years later allowed the election of Donald Trump.There is only his hatred, his memories and his Gran Torino in Kowalsi, one night, a kid tries to fly.He fails, but the old man will find him, and will understand.It is a teenager from the neighborhood who wants to enter a gang who challenged him to prick the car.He lives there, with his family of emigrants Hmong, a community from southern China.
Clint-Kowalski will get to know them, open up to them and eventually defend the teenager who tried to steal his car.This car which he pampers, which he almost never drives, that is all that remains of his past, of his life before, in the detrinity of the Thirty Glorious Years, when Motown was the industrial lung of theAmerica.The old man looks at his Gran Torino in the courtyard of his Highland Park pavilion, in the suburbs now affected by what remains of Detroit who lives, with the fall of subprimes, his umpteenth crisis.In his ruin universe, he remains the almost new green coupe and music, a song written by Clint Eastwood himself, composed by his son Kyle and sung by the impeccable Jamie Collum.It is the melancholy soundtrack of a film that is just as much, the refrain of a lifetime fleeing, a world that disappears and a car that symbolizes them and serves as a transition.In the last scene, the young Mhong smiled at the wheel of the Gran Torino, whom the old Bougon bequeathed to him, after having sacrificed himself for him.