Hôtel Woodstock
(Taking Woodstock)

With Taking Woodstock, Ang Lee shifts his gaze: after exploring intimate and historical fractures, he turns to the explosion of a collective utopia — and here, celebration is anything but innocent. The joyous disarray of bodies and the confusion of desires unfold like the birth of a world where liberation becomes spectacle. The gaze opens, breathes, loses itself in the crowd — yet retains the melancholy of a lucid witness. As in The Ice Storm, youth dreams of breaking free from inherited frameworks, and within this indecision the film finds its central motif: the impossible coincidence between vital impulse and social order. Beneath psychedelic bursts, Lee films less a myth than an exhaustion — that of a century still searching for the shape of its own freedom.
Jérôme Baron