CANNES Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

Cannes 2019 Un Certrain Regard jury



President: Nadine Labaki
Lukas Dhont (Girl)
Marina Foïs (L'Atelier)
Nurman Sekerci-Porst
Lisandro Alonso (Los Muertos, Fantasma

Belgian direcor Lukas Dhont, French actress Marina Foïs, German producer Nurhan Sekerci-Porst, and Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso have joined Nadine Labaki on the jury for Un Certain Regard a this month’s Cannes Film Festival (May 14-25).

Dhont participated in the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence in 2016 with the script of his first acclaimed feature Girl, which won the Caméra d’Or for best first feature in Un Certain Regard in Cannes last year. He is now working on his second feature.

Foïs was nominated for the César for most promising actress in Filles Perdues, Cheveux Gras in 2003. She followed that up with best actress nods for Darling in 2008, 2011 Cannes Competition selection Polisse in 2012, Irréprochable in 2017, and Un Certain Regard 2017 entry L’Atelier in 2018. The actress appeared in the 2018 Gilles Lellouche comedy and Cannes 2018 selection Le Grand Bain, and earlier this year garnered a Molière awards nomination for her portrayal of Hervé Guibert on stage in Les Idoles by Christophe Honoré.

Buenos Aires-born Alonso’s Los Muertos screened in Directors’ Fortnight in 2004. Two years later, he completed his trilogy with Fantasma. Liverpool screened in Cannes in 2018, and Jauja, set in 19th century Denmark and Argentina and starring Viggo Mortensen, which won the FIPRESCI award in Un Certain Regard in 2014.

Şekerci-Porst has worked with German director Fatih Akin since 2005. They co-founded the production company Bombero International in 2012 and produced The Cut and In The Fade, which premiered in Cannes 2017 and earned Diane Kruger the best actress award.
-Screen Daily

[Chris Knipp]

Cannes opening night film: Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die


STILL FROM THE DEAD DON'T DIE

Opening Night at Cannes. Some reviews.

Mixed reports, but a sense this will worth seeing for Jarmusch completists but not particularly invigorating. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian: "Jim Jarmusch’s undeadpan comedy is laconic, lugubrious and does not entirely come to life, despite many witty lines and tremendously assured performances by an A-list cast." "Lethargic," and has "more brains than bite," says David Erlich in IndieWire. The premise is that an excess of polar fracking has warped the planet’s rotation and reanimated the corpses at the local morgue. The theme, Erlich says, is "When Hell is full, the dead will walk the Earth. And when the Earth is fucked, the living will do whatever they can to sleepwalk through the nightmare." Many interesting cast members including Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Danny Glover, Chlöe Sevigny, Caleb Landry Jones, Steve Buscemi and Tom Waits, with Tilda Swinton as a Scottish immigrant mortician whose "delightful performance shoots the movie full of fresh embalming fluid every time it starts to rot. Which is often." Owen Gleiberman of Variety typecasts this as a "hipster zombie comedy" and says it "congratulates itself for doing what other movies have done better." Nonetheless there are some original plot twists, as you'll learn if you read Todd McCarthy's Hollywood Reporter review, which tells all about the flick's plot-line. Current Metascore: 64%. Hipness level: surely much higher. Note: A favorite of mine, Dead Man, has a Metascore of 62. Todd McCarthy's concluding words:

Typically for Jarmusch, the songs, led by the title tune, and score are outstanding, enlivening nearly every scene. And the sheer diversity of the castmembers, along with their individual senses of humor, sustains one’s attention even when inspiration sometimes lags. It’s a minor, but most edible, bloody bonbon.

[Chris Knipp]

From the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, his "top ten must-see films" at Cannes


LEO DICAPRIO IN ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD


Peter Bradshaw is one of the few high-profile English-language film critics who provide detailed daily coverage at Cannes so if you want to follow it day-to-day and your language is English, he's invaluable. His list but my notes. Note: I continue to miss Mike D'Angelo, whose thumbnail tweet-reviews were very useful. Let's hope the fest offers more than what's below.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)
Leo DiCaprio is a fading TV star and Brad Pitt his stunt double in Hollywood, late Sixties, as the Sharon Tate murders occur. Bruce Lee is a character. Much anticipated, at first not expected, promoted by Cannes Festival director Thierry Frémaux who declared QT is "a friend."

Portrait of a Lady on Fire/Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma)
Noémie Merlant plays a young painter asked to do a portrait of a young woman (Adèle Haenel) without her knowledge. The 40-year-old French woman director Céline Sciamma is noted for female-centric gender-conscious films. Her first three, Water Lilies, Tomboy, and Girlhood, have brought her rapid prestige in a 12-year-period. She also did the screenplay for the animation My Life As a Courgette/Zucchini. In French.

Little Joe (Jessica Hausner)
English philosophical comedy with Emily Beecham and Ben Whishaw concerning a botanist who develops a flower she nicknames Little Joe that can induce happiness in all those who grow it properly, but when its developer takes it home, she comes to suspect it may have a dark side. (The theme somehow makes one think of Alexander Mackendrick's 1951 English classic, The Man in the White Suit, starring Alec Guinness.)

Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach)
Loach continues his worker-centric filmmaking with the study of a delivery driver having hard times. With longtime cowriter Paul Laverty. Loach's last film, I Daniel Blakek won him his second Cannes Palme d'Or.

The Swallows of Kabul/Les hirondelles de Kabou (Zabou Breitman, Eléa Gobé Mévellec)
Animated film based on a novel by the very prolific Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra (who writes in French, and is actually a man), about Kabul in the late Nineties and a young love affair threatened by the Taliban. In French. You can see a clip of this on IMDb, but without English subtitles. Un Certain Regard.

The Dead Don’t Die (Jim Jarmusch)
Cannes regular Jarmusch, who two features ago delivered the swoony, gloomy vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive] (NYFF 2013), offers the festival "a bit of unwholesome confectionery" (Bradshaw) with this Opening Night film, a slow-moving zombie comedy-nightmare set in a small town, with an offbeat A-List cast including Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Steve Buscemi, Adam Driver, Selena Gomez and Danny Glover and with an appearance by Iggy Pop. (Already reviewed: Opening Night film.)

An Easy Girl/Une fille facile (Rebecca Zlotowski)
A romance set on the French Reviera. Bradshaw desribes Zlotkowski's Grand Central (R-V 2014) as a 'cult classic.' I was not so impressed, though I certainly liked the stars, Tahar Rahim and Léa Seydoux. Directors' Fortnight. In French.

Frankie (Ira Sachs)
Isabelle Huppert stars (with Brendan Gleeson, Marisa Tomei and Greg Kinnear) in Ira Sachs’s film about a family on holiday in Portugal. In English. (I don't think Huppert is as good, ever, in English, as in her native French. It loses the edge.)

Sick, Sick, Sick/Sem Seu Sangue ["Without your blood"] (Alice Furtado)
Debut feature by the young Brazilian director depicts an obsessive and tormented high-school love affair (with Nahuel Pérez Biscayart of 120 Beats Per Minute). Directors' Fortnight. Tragic, deranged finale. IMDb summary: "An introspective young girl falls for the new boy in class, an outcast who is also a hemophiliac." For a longer summery, go H E R E. In Portuguese.

Diego Maradona (Asif Kapadia)
The hand of God descends with this documentary from British filmmaker Asif Kapadia, who made the successful doc about Amy Winehous, Amy, about the troubled football genius. Emir Kusturica has already done a film about him but Bradshaw says this "promises a treasure trove of new material." Already bought by HBO Sports. See article H E R E.

[Chris Knipp]

Other anticipated titles at Cannes


TARON EGERTON AS ELTON JOHN IN ROCKETMAN

Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher)
A biopic about Elton John with Taron Egerton in the lead role. Egerton is the handsome 30-year-old British TV actor-singer known for the series "Smoke" and the 2014 action comedy Kingsman: The Secret Service. Dexter Fletcher, who was memorable (briefly) playing the young Caravaggio in Derek Jarman's film, got lucky last year by landing the job of finishing Bohemian Rhapsody. This film's screenplay is by Lee Hall, who did the writing for Billy Elliot, and is costars Jamie Bell as John's longtime songwriter Bernie Taupin. When shown the photo above Elton John is said to have thought it was him. Premiering Out of Competition.

A Hidden Life (Terence Malick).
A German-language film with Bruno Ganz and August Diehl about the Austrian Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector who refuses to fight for the Nazis in World War II. Competition. This seems to signal the end of Malick's long period of navel-gazing. Why he chose this subject matter remains to be discovered.

Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria (Pedro Almodover)
This stars Antonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Penélope Cruz, Julieta Serrano and Leonardo Sbaraglia. It's a kind of retrospective, being focused on a director (played by Banderas) who ponders on his life choices as he finds the world crashing down on him. This opened in Spanish theaters (Sony) in March, but is in Competition at Cannes nonetheless.

The Traitor/Il traditore (Marco Bellochio)
Bellocchio's seventh time in competition at Cannes, but he has never been a winner. Depicts pentito Mafia boss (Italian word) Tommaso Buscetta. Pierfrancesco Favino stars as Buscetta with Maria Fernanda Cândido and Luigi Lo Cascio. The only Italian film in Competition at Cannes this year. Buscetto claims "I am and remain a man of honor. It's they who betrayed the ideals of Cosa Nostra." Caught in Brazil, where he managed the drug trade, he saw the killing of sons and brothers in Palermo, and the film shows his trial.

[Chris Knipp]

Reviews from days one and two.


SCENE FROM BACURAU; SONIA BRAGA, CENTER

Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles, Kleber Mendonça Filho 2019): a tale of hunting people for sport in contemporary Brazil. Competition.

Kleber Mendonça Filho is the director of the excellent Neighboring Sounds/O Som ao Redor (2012) and Aquarius (2016), both of which were reviewed on Filmleaf. Here he codirected with his production designer/producer, Juliano Dornelles. They take a new direction in what Peter Bradshaw in his Guardian review yesterday (Wed., May 15) called a "disturbing ultraviolent freakout." David Erlilch in IndieWire calls it "Seven Samurai Meets Hostel" and a "Delirious Brazilian Western." It's set some years in the future, where a group of rich Americans have come led by Udo Kier to hunt the locals (a matriarchal village) for their sport, as Peter Debruge explains in his Variety review. The film becomes, says Debruge, "an almost Buñuelian science-fiction thriller, shot to look like a spaghetti Western, complete with weird zooms, arbitrary crane tricks, and horizontal wipes." It suffers as a genre piece, however, Debruge says, because it's too complex and sophisticated, demanding "the extra labor of unpacking its densely multilayered subtext to appreciate." Sonia Braga is back (from Aquarius) playing an alcoholic doctor. Ominously, Bacarau suddenly is wiped off of online maps. It becomes clear soon enough that the town is going to have to fight for its life, because a high-tech ultra-rich safari has come to amuse themselves by pick;ing off the inhabitants one by one. Critics seem agreed that this film is stylistically brilliant, even if its point is not so clear other than to make some clear "broad swipes" (Erlich) against the current anti-native, anti-environment, pro-wealthy policies of the unprincipled new right wing Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro.

Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher 2019) Out of Competition.

The Elton John biopic starring Taron Egerton opened tonight, making Paramount the first major studio to present gay sex openly, says Tatiana Siegel in a Hollywood Reporter article, one of several on this topic. She explains her claim by saying this is aimed at a "broader" audience than did Brokeback Mountain and Call Me by Your Name, which of course also showed gay sex in films not made purely for niche audiences. There is no Metascore out on this movie yet, or any online reviews, but much discussion of its presumed trailblazing boldness (which Fletcher himself however discounts). Fletcher has pointed out this is a musical, and Bohemian Rhapsody was a biopic, hence the two shouldn't keep being compared (as they are). Rami Malek was outstanding as an actor; Taron Egerton's task is more to sing.

Litigante (Franco Lolli 2019). Critics Week.

The Colombian director's second feature is a subtle treatment of family relationships, not a legal drama as the title implies. It might be considered a "belated breakout vehicle" for the lead Sanin, says Guy Lodge in his Variety review, because she's unfamiliar and so good, except that she's actually a non-pro Colombian writer and academic. Lollo has also cast another non-pro, his own mother, Leticia Gómez, in a key role. The film's "many scenes of loaded domestic conflict have a nervy authenticity that perhaps betrays Lolli’s close-to-home casting preferences," says Lodge. One of these two characters has terminal cancer, yet the two women go on bickering even in the hospital. An excellent complex family drama that keeps many balls in the air, Lodge concludes (a mom with cancer, raising a son alone, a scandal at work) - till it ends in an anticlimactic finale. Leslie Felperin in Hollywood Reporter calls this "an engaging if hardly groundbreaking work."

Deerskin/Le Daim (Quentin Dupieux 2019)

"The latest oddball concoction from French iconoclast Quentin Dupieux stars Jean Dujardin as a man who falls in love with his jacket", says Boyd van Hoeij in Hollywood Reporter of this film that opened Directors Fortnight at Cannes. I know what he's talking about because I just reviewed his previous one, Keep an Eye Out!/Au poste! a couple of months ago as part of this year's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. Dupieux is definitely a droll, but also silly and frivolous filmmaker whose work can't appeal to more than a small segment of the French public, and smaller one of the non-French. But he is fiendishly clever, and commands good casts. This one also has the talented and fiery Adèle Haenel.

The Unknown Saint/Le Miracle du Saint Inconnu (Alaa Eddine Aljem 2019). Critics' Week.

This debut feature by the young Moroccan director Alaa Eddine Aljem was also reviewed by Boyd van Hoeij in Hollywood Reporter. It begins with a thief burying his loot at the top of a dune in a desert as police sirens are heard approaching in the distance. He goes to jail, and when he gets out the fake grave where he buried his swag has become a place of pilgrimage to an "unknown saint" so he can't get at it. Van Hoeij says this is a "bone-dry comedy and light drama," and "an absurdist tale about superstitions, beliefs and just plain bad luck." He suspects it won't do well outside the realm of festival audiences or at least "might be just a little too undernourished for more than niche theatrical action." More positively, Alissa Simon in her Variety review calls The Unknown Saint "Beautifully shot and ideally cast" and says it's "a droll, entertaining, absurdist fable about spirituality and greed that signals an important new talent."


SCENE FROM ALJEM'S THE UNKNOWN SAINT

[Chris Knipp]

More Cannes 2019 reviews.


MAME BINETA SANE IN ATLANTICS

Atlantics/Atlantique (Mati Diop 2019)

This is one of the four women directors who got a film in Competition this year, enough to make it known widely. She is Senegalese and more known as an actress but her shorter films have gained her notice as a director leading up to this feature debut, whose plot has the sound of myth or fable: and even the bare words evoke striking images. It's the melancholy story of a Ada, young woman about to be married to the well-to-do Omar when she truly loves Soleiman. And just then, Soleiman is lost at sea with a group of others he went out in an open boat with heading for Spain, leaving her devastated. The lost men worked on a big building on the edge of Dakar and were owed a lot of back pay. Their ghosts return and inhabit the young women to demand the money. Focus shifts to Issa, an investigator called in when the marriage bed is set aflame. There have been numerous films focused on the men lost at sea trying to escape to Europe, Jay Weissberg says in his Variety review, and it's refreshing to see one focused on the women they leave behind. Weissberg finds narrative or structural weaknesses in this movie, but it sounds potentially vivid and beautiful. In his enthusiastic Guardian review Peter Bradshaw calls it an "intriguingly ruminative and poetic movie," "a Voodoo-realist drama, or docu-supernatural mystery" whose strangeness doesn't keep it from saying some very "pertinent things" about the "contemporary developing world." He gives it 4 out of 5 stars.


MATI DIOP AT CANNES [GUARDIAN]

[Chris Knipp]

Review


OPENING SCENE FROM LES MISÉRABLES

LES MISERABLES (Ladj Ly 2019). A powerful French cop thriller with sociological bent. In Competition.

Though it bears little direct narrative resemblance to the eponymous Victor Hugo tome, this crime thriller (the feature debut of a former documentary filmmaker) that examines the tensions between Paris anti-crime police and poor Muslim populations they torment is set in the housing estate of Les Bosquets in Montfermeil, in the département of Seine-Saint-Denis that figured in the Hugo novel. It also shows the same extreme injustices still prevail. David Erlich of IndieWire says this shows Ly grew up in the influence of Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 La Haine (about social tensions in Paris) and (as others also say) invites comparisons to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Erlich calls this "a gripping and grounded procedural," "never more tactile and kinetic than in the breathtaking prologue," "powered by the raw muscularity of its filmmaking." There's a kind of police riot, which a ghetto kid captures on film with a drone. The banlieue setting is Ly's own home turf. Guy Lodge's Variety review (and others) praises highly with some reservations. He calls this film "a furious work of social geography that satisfies slightly less as a character piece," dramatizing the "violent anxieties on both sides" but perhaps "selling some of the victims a little short." The cops are not seen sympathetically, yet most of the action is through the point of view of a three-man crime unit, two vets and a newbie, on a single day. Still the whole social topography of Montfermeil is also depicted. according to Jordan Mintzer of Hollywood Reporter, who relates this to David Simon's iconic TV series "The Wire." Peter Bradshaw hails this film's "striking and even glorious pre-credit" sequence (of Paris celebrating France winning the World Cup) and thinks it excels at its ordinary, everyday moments. But then he thinks it tries to work on too broad a scale and turns too violent. Not a pan, though: he gives Les Misérables 3 out of 5 stars. Ly also was codirector with Stéphane de Freitas of the uplifting César-nominated doc Speak Up/À voix haute : La Force de la parole.


LADJ LY