CANNES Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

Recent Cannes reviews


PAMELA MONDOZA IN CANCIÓN SIN NOMBRE

Canción Sin Nombre/Song Without a Name (Melina León). Directors Fortnight.

"In a dingy clinic, a newborn child is whisked away from her exhausted mother, supposedly for routine health checks, and is never returned; in short order, the clinic vanishes into thin air too, leaving the stolen baby’s bewildered, impoverished parents with no recourse." So Guy Lodge states the film's premise in his admiring but critical Variety review about this child-trafficking tale. The Peruvian writer-director's film is a "visually striking period piece" that's "a Kafka-esque crime thriller inspired by real events" says Stephen Dalton of Hollywood Reporter. It has some similarities to Cuaron's ROMA, being about a poor peasant woman and in black and white. (Today.)


THE CAST OF SORRY WE MISSED YOU

Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach) Competition.

A "fierce, open and angry" new film about life in the British "service-economy serfdom" says Peter Bradshaw who gives it a full five stars in his Guardian review. In his Variety review, Owen Gleibeman says 82-year-old Loach has grown spryer as he's aged and now is at the top of his game and is making films that "connect, with a nearly karmic sense of timing, to the social drama of our moment." This one is about "how the gig economy screws over the people it promises to save." This is indeed perhaps the dominant, and fastest growing, labor issue in the developed world today and an even more relevant film than Loach's last one, which won the Palme d'Or in 2016. But a feeling is he won't win again. Three Palme d'Ors would be a bit much for one director. (May 16th.)


IMAGE FROM THE WILD GOOSE LAKE

The Wild Goose Lake/南方车站的聚会 (Diao Yinan). Competition.

An understatedly brilliant and poetic noir that winds up being less than the sum of its parts, says David Erlich of IndieWire. It works with traditional ingredients, a gangster on the run, a femme fatale at his side, and cops and bad guys trying to do them in, he writes. But along with that it's also a picture of "contemporary China as a vast land of exploitation and criminality." The central Chinese capital of Wuhan is the setting for a lot of eye-catching and rich seediness. It has some ingenious ultra-violence, some over-congested plot moments, style, and the benefit of Dong Jinsong, one of the dp's of Bi Gan's visually entrancing Long Day's Journey Into Night. Jessica Kiang of Variety says Diao has made a "sumptuously sleazy film" in which he shows "an extraordinarily elastic mastery of form," and has a superbly precise sound design. This may, Kiang says, wind up being "the last word in Chinese crime noir." For fans of Asian neo-noir, this film is a must-see, maybe a cult classic. The images are so ravishing I was sorely tempted to reproduce more than one here. (Today.)