CANNES Festival 2019

[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

[Chris Knipp]

Almodovar's Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria.


ANTONIO BANDERAS IN PAIN AND GLORY

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian says in Dolor y glória Almodóvar "delivers another sensuous and deeply personal gem" in this "wistful extravaganza" in which "life meets art," and gives it 4 out of 5 stars. Ruminative, painful, with a sense of declining powers, the director presents an aging movie director played by Antonio Banderas. Peter Debruge in his Variety review calls it a "remarkably mature metafiction." AlloCiné, whose press rating (based on 23 French reviews) is an exceptional 4.6 (even Cahiers du Cinéma gives it a rave), asks: "Is Almodóvar on the way to the Palme d'Or?" and he indeed looks like a prime contender. This clearly sounds like a very positive consensus, perhaps to remain the most admired 2029 Competition film. Perhaps the best has come first. But could this be a little too familiar a maker and topic to be up for a top prize? Time will tell.

Hausner's Little Joe.


JESSIE MAE ALONZO AND BEN WHISHAW IN LITTLE JOE

Another much anticipated film at Cannes was Jessica Haussner's Little Joe. Haussner is known for her Lourdes (2009). But Peter Bradshaw says he was disappointed, and gives it a measly 2 out of 5 stars. It's a horror film that likens the spread of antidepressants to the invasion of an alien force a la "Bodysnatchers." Erlich of IndieWire finds in this "plenty of potential to offend," though he calls the film "brilliant." Bradshaw finds " plot implausibilities" and a movie "too high on the art-house register" to notice its lack of "out-and-out thrills or suspense."

Fletcher's Rocketman.

The comparison with Bohemian Rhapsodyis inevitable: two pictures about gay glam rock stars directed by Dexter Fletcher. Nicolas Barber of BBC Culture says "this year’s Elton John biopic is superior to last year’s Freddie Mercury biopic in almost every way: funnier, more moving, more imaginative, more upfront about its hero’s sexuality." That's nice, isn't it? I wonder if the public will go along. Probably not, and later in the review Nicolas Barber doesn't even seem to like the movie so much, though he still rates it and Fletcher and Egerton high.

[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.)

[Chris Knipp]

LOUISE LEBEQUE, WISIAND LOUIMAT IN ZOMBI CHILD

Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello). Directors Fortnight.

(French film, English-language title.) The spelling follows the original Creole, which is the kind of zombies or zombis Bonello is focused on (one that slowly struggles to come back to life), along with a second story about girls in a state school, one of whom may be a zombie too. This is Bonello's first stab at a genre film,and his eighth feature, says Jordan Mintzer in Hollywood Reporter. Only the three last ones are well known, but they are very well known (and I am a fan): House of Tolerance aka L'Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close), Saint Laurent, and Nocturama). Zombi Child, says Mintzer, "feels like two incomplete movies in one, neither of them fully satisfying in the end, though there are "some graceful moments scattered throughout", particularly in the Haitian scenes. Not one of Bonello's greatest successes, perhaps, but a fresh take on the subject, apparently, marked by exquisite craft, and with great music, largely by Bonello himself as usual.


LEYNA BLOOM IN PORT AUTHORITY

Port Authority ( Danielle Lessovitz). Un Certain Regard.

From New York, first-time writer-director Lessovitz follows a young guy who barely escapes homelessness when he comes from Pittsburgh to the big city and his half-sister is not at the famous grim bus terminal to greet him, and he falls in with "New York’s Kiki ballroom scene – a carnivalesque LGBT club culture that evolved from voguing," and is troubled to be attracted to a young trans gender woman. "Port Authority is vehement, urgent and sensual – not perfect, and I would have liked to have seen more extended dance sequences. But it is made with storytelling gusto and heart" writes Peter Bradshaw, who gives in 4 our of 5 stars in his Guardian review.


LISE LEPAT PRUDHOMME IN ROUEN CATHEDRAL IN JOAN OF ARC

Joan of Arc/Jeanne d'Arc (Bruno Dumont). Un Certain Regard.

Dumont's biopic is "a stately, deadpan classical-absurdist pageant" of "a child warrior on the march," adapted from Charles Péguy’s writings about her, says Bradshaw, that's "passionless and exasperating." Lise Leplat Prudhomme, who played in Dumont's 2017 Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, (RV-2018), back again, has "undoubted charisma," and there's a cameo by Fabrice Lucchini as Charles VII (he played Percival in Eric Rohmer's Percival le Valois in 1978, an early role), but the whole thing may be a "longeur," and is often "torpid." It may best be seen as a way-station toward something more evolved by the formerly compelling director, says Bradshaw, who gives it a dismal 2 out of 5 stars. Like its predecessor, the film is full of lip-synched rock numbers, is shot on the beaches of northeastern France (and in Rouen Cathedral), and makes no attempt at historical authenticity. For Dumont completists only, and 137 minutes long. I have a lot of time for this amazing and original filmmaker, but this latest bent has not repaid my patience as well as earlier work or amused as do his recent "Li'l Quinquin" films.



Too Old to Die Young (Nichlas Winding Refn). TV. Grand Theatre Lumiere.

Not sure what Cannes category this falls under (Out of Competition, clearly), but two episodes (4 and 5) of this new TV series (Refn calls it a 13-hour film) have just been shown at Cannes on the super-big screen of the Grand Theatre Lumière there, and it has been vividly reviewed. With caveats: that it's tedius and horrifying. It concerns Los Angeles cop, played by the energetic Miles Teller, who moonlights as a contract killer and "who comes under the sway" of former military colleague John Hawkes' "apocalyptic visionary," writes David Rooney in his Hollywood Reporter review, who says it shows the Danish director's "steady slide deeper and deeper into empty genre posturing" has gone as far as it can go. Bradshaw is more taken with it, calling it a "doomy, sepulchral, and very plausible evocation of pure evil" and a "dead-eyed LA nightmare," and giving it 4 out of 5 stars. Gregory Ellwood, on Collider, thinks it's ambitious and "at times brilliant" but "not as deep as it thinks it is." Sounds to me as if cop series binge-watchers will want to take a look, but some may not have the patience for its long silences.



The Whistlers/La Gomera (Corneliu Porumboiu 2019). Competition.

This time the noted Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective, When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism , The Treasure) takes a turn into genre territory with a neo-noirthriller set in the Canary Islands and Singapore. Leslie Felperin describes it in Hollywood Reporter as an "entertaining but dense" depiction of a cop who doubler-crosses both his department and gangsters he's cooperating with. It "constantly corkscrews around in every sense, deploying flashbacks frequently as it reveals twist after twist" while the protagonist, Lee Marshall writes in Screen Daily, is deliberately cast as a "passive cipher" or "poker-faced Everyman." The shared note from Polombiu's earlier arthouse works, says Felperin, is a preoccupation with language, power, and the legacy of the corrupt and repressive Nicolae Ceaușescu regime. The result, though, "feels a little woolly and unfocused," says Marshall. Peter Bradshaw in is Guardian review, however, likes The Whistlers very much, calls it "thrilling," "knotty, twisty, nifty," and "An elegant and stylishly crafted piece of entertainment," and gives it 4 out of 5 stars.


Tomorrow:
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, of The Witch). Directors Fortnight.