CANNES Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

Wed. May 22 at Cannes: Dolan and Desplechin.


XAVIER DOLAN IN MATTHIAS & MAXIME

Matthias & Maxime (Xavier Dolan). Competition.

After two ambitious turnoffs - a "one-two stumble," one critic calls them - that seemed to bring his career to a crisis, despite the first winning a big prize at Cannes, Dolan is back in secure, comfortable territory, says Guy Lodge in his admiring Variety review, with a tale of uneasy male friendship starring Dolan himself and Gabriel D’Almeida Fritas, as longtime pals, one (Dolan) a mess (with a toxic mom à la Mommy), the other (Freitas), a together young lawyer. They may be more then friends: having to kiss in front of friends acting in a friends' short film reminds them they've done so for real before. Now Matthias' pending promotion and Maxime's upcoming two-year sojourn in Australia forces them to decide. The "warmth and restraint" here feels like maturity at last (just turned 30), says Steve Pond of The Wrap. Here says Pond, Dolan returns to "the sweet spot he hit so often in his earlier films." Dolan depicts complicated tensions with old pals and business associates, including the Beach Rats star Harris Dickinson as a kind of cock tease temporary law associate of Matthias. But Jon Forsch of Hollywood Reporter feels this film lacks the emotional urgency of Dolan's first films, their "formal and emotional risk-taking," their "dramatic richness." Dolan's formerly "messy, complicated characters, layers of provocative ambiguity, tension and stakes" all are muted or missing here, Forsch says. Moreover, the toned down, sexually repressed puzzle-relationship at the movie's center "today registers as quaint, even dated." (Matthias & Maxime wound up near the bottom of the Jury Grid with a 1.7; only Kechiche's film scored lower (1.5), and of those polled only Peter Bradshaw liked it. Kechiche's scores were more mixed, with two 3's and even a 4 but two zero's.)


LÉA SEYDOUX, ROSCHIDY ZEM IN ROUBAIX, UNE LUMIÈRE

Oh Mercy/Roubaix, une lumière (Arnaud Desplechin). Competition.

Desplechin must feel very much at home here, having had six films in Cannes Competition and several more in sidebars, served on the Jury in 2016 and opened the festival with Ismael's Ghosts in 2017 (also featured at the NYFF). Nonetheless his turn to something ostensibly more genre in Oh Mercy met with a mixed response. Peter Bradshaw in his Guardian review describes this northern French crime movie with its "annoyingly wise police captain" (Roschdy Zem) as "fatally split" in tone by Desplechin’s "lofty pretensions." It's supposed to be a police-procedural, but also wants to be a "musing prose-poem about the vanity of human wishes," says Bradshaw, and this dual role is too much for its star to put across. Bradshaw finds the film "self-admiring" and gives it 2 out of 5 stars. The narrative pieces through various cases, explains Ben Croll in The Wrap, settling eventually on the murder of an 80-year-old woman which the Zem's Captain intuits at once was done by the two drug addicts next door (Léa Seydoux and Sara Forestier, both in very unglam mode). Desplechin is more interested in "relationship power dynamics," says Croll; but the whole film seems to him more TV pilot than feature. Weissberg says exactly the same thing in his Variety review. (Weissberg's nonetheless may be the most sympathetic of these reviews.) Lee Marshall of Screen Daily thinks this a "detour" for Desplechin. It "roots in" a 2008 TV documentary and is most interested in the interrogation transcripts, some used here verbatim, for what they show about the relationship between Seydoux's and Forestier's characters, ultimately becoming, Lee Marshall feels, "a ritual of expiation and redemption" but ultimately more the portrait of a washed-up city (Desplechin's original home town) than a crime story. There are elements, Marshall says, such as voiceovers from a rookie cop's diary, that feel like fragments from an earlier draft. Maybe Desplechin wanders too far afield for a film that defines itself as of the crime genre.

Final Competition films still to come:
The Traitor, dir: Marco Bellocchio
Sibyl, dir: Justine Triet
It Must Be Heaven, dir: Elia Suleiman
Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo, dir: Abdellatif Kechiche

[Chris Knipp]

Winning animation in Critics' Week.


STILL FROM ANIMATED PRIZEWINNER I LOST MY BODY

I Lost My Body/J'ai perdu mon corps (Jérémy Clapin). Critics' Week.

French filmmaker Jérémy Clapin’s feature-length animation J'ai perdu mon corps (the original French title) garnered the top award, the Nespresso Grand Prize, at Cannes’ Critics' Week, the prestigious parallel section aimed at emerging directors and showing shorts and first and second-time films. "It's time for animated films to stop being considered a separate genre," Clapin delcared. The film concerns a young man's severed hand that goes looking for its body. It stood out, says Variety's Guy Lodge, for being the only "toon" in the sidebar, and also for its "blend of morbid humor and touching drama.:" The film's producer Marc de Pontavice said in an interview in AlloCiné it was the challenge of arousing audience sympathies for an object that drew him to the story, and he liked the idea of a part longing for the whole rather than the reverse. The film will go to the big Annecy animation fest, and is looking for a distributor.

[Chris Knipp]

DAKOTA JOHNSON, ARMIE HAMMER IN WOUNDS

Wounds (Babak Anvari). Directors Fortnight.

This Netflix-sponsored horror flick, an adaptation on Nathan Halligrud's novelThe Visible Filth, is British-Iranian director Anvari's sophomore film following his 2016 Under the Shadow (" a retro spook story set in ’80s Tehran" - Variety), but is much cruder and a bust, says Peter Bradshaw in his Guardian review. Armie Hammer is a college dropout tending bar at "a rough dive in New Orleans" who dates Dakota Johnson's Eng. Lit. grad student but is enamored of Zazie Beetz, who drinks at his bar with her boyfriend. Things get supernatural and super-creepy for Armie when there's a bad fight and a student leaves behind a cell phone with a video of it that Armie opens. (The debt to J-horror is clear.) Hammer, says Bradshaw, seems to be competing "for a bad-acting award" and givesWounds 2 out of 5 stars. Variety says it's "a spooky, silly body-horror flick that's thrilled to torture Armie Hammer." Amy Nicholson's Variety review suggests this may be a fun picture for younger audience members, and Bradshaw may miss the humor in how Armie is used by Anvari in it, but not a very good movie: Screen Daily says it has "some shockingly uninspired jump-scares" and Erlich in IndieWire calls it "a woefully underwritten jump-scare machine." It debuted at Sundance; perhapas there was no need to review it here.

[Chris Knipp]

WILLIAM LEBGHIL IN ALL ABOUT YVES

All About Yves/Yves (Benoît Forgeard). Directors' Fortnight.

The French director Benoît Forgeard's second feature closed out the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes. It is a screwy comedy something like if John Waters made a movie where a "wannabe rapper" (William Lebghil), his dream girl (Doria Tillier), and a talking fridge all have sex at one point, says Jordan Minter in his Hollywood Reporter review, which says it "overstays its welcome" but is also "a memorably weird experience." Yves is the name of the fridge, which Lebghil's character is a product-tester for, "a Sub-Zero-type device inhabited by the mind of 2001’s HAL 9000 and the musical prowess of contemporary beatmakers like Drake's 40 and Boi-1da," says Mintzer. The whole thing is a "spoof" on "where artificial intelligence is headed" with "smart" appliances if you imagined them capable of competing in "the Eurovision song contest," says Lisa Nesselson in her Screen Daily review, which also praises this film but similarly says it "overstays its welcome." Last year Lebghil costarred with Vincent Lacoste in the popular in France med school film The Frehshman/Première année reviewed on Filmleaf in February (R-V 2019).

[Chris Knipp]

Parasite tops the Jury Grid.

As predicted, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is the critical leader now in Competition films, according to Screen Daily's latest Jury Grid compilation of ten critics. It's now

Parasite 3.4
Portrait of a Lady on Fire 3.3
Pain and Glory 3.3
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 3.0

With Sciamma's and Almodóvar's films tied. Xavier Dolan is "struggling" notes Screen Daily with a 1.7; only Peter Bradshaw liked it much. But while Dolan's It's only the end of the World got a 1.4 in 2016, it won the Grand Prix and the Jury Ecumenical Prize. Sometimes a Jury goes its own way.

[Chris Knipp]

Sidebar Cannes films.


WILLEM DAFOE IN TOMMASO

Tommaso (Abel Ferrara). Special screenings.

Mainly to be watched for the performance of Willem Dafoe, who fortunately is on screen most of the time, says Todd McCarthy in his Hollywood Reporter review. This is an autobiographical piece by Ferrara about a "director and recovering addict living in Rome" to which Dafoe brings "a pulsing gusto," says McCarthy. This costars Ferrara's own wife and child, Owen Gleiberman's Variety review explains, and is a serene, literally sober piece: Tommaso is clean-and-sober and goes to 12-step meetings.



Lillian (Andreas Horvath). Directors' Fortnight.

A long-in-the-making biopic by the Austrian director/photographer Horvath of Lillian Alling, a mysterious woman who walked from New York to Alaska in 1926-27 and has been much written about, explains Deborah Young in her Hollywood Reporter review. The lead is played by newcomer Patrycja Planik, who does not speak during the film. A strange tale of a homeless person headed back to Russia because her chances of work in America have vanished, this is a foreigner's depiction of the US (perhaps an updating of Robert Frank's The Americans?).



The Bare Necessity/Perdrix (Erwan LeDuc). Directors' Fortnight.

Debut feature from a French sports journalist is another sui generis creation featuring WWII relics, a crateful of personal journals, and nudists, an oddball family with some sleeping around and a police captain in a sleepy village in the northeastern Vosges region, says Boyd van Hoeij in his Hollywood Reporter review which calls this "Not perfect, yet easy to love." The aim is an amorous comedy, and an examination of love, and features a sleeping-around Fanny Ardant as " host of a radio show called Love Is Real." The film should "consolidate the reputation" of lead actor Swann Arlaud, following his s"tar-making turn" in Bloody Milk in the 2017 Critics’ Week, which was "a drama with fascinating thriller and genre notes," says van Hoeij.

[Chris Knipp]

Cannes May 23


PERFRANCESCO FAVINO IN TRADITORE

The Traitor/Il traditore (Marco Bellocchio). Competition.

This is the only Italian film in Competition at Cannes this year. It features another Tommaso, Tommaso Buscetta, "the highest level Mafia don to sing to authorities." This tale of a Mafia "pentito" is "a master filmmaker questioning the nature of repentance," says Jay Weissberg in his Variety review. Weissberg was expecting another theatrical film on the order of Bellocchio's Vincere, but this is mostly surprisingly "straightforward," he says; the director must have figured the story had "built-in theatrical flourishes" enough. Popular actor Pierfrancesco Favino was "never better," says Weissberg. He makes his character "a commanding presence as Buscetta — imposing but also unknowable," says Tim Grierson in his Screen Daily review. Buscetta revealed "Sicily's criminal hierarchy" in a series of "dramatic testimonies" some of which are available on YouTube. Weissberg explains that he turned because the Cosa Nostra had betrayed its own family values, its leaders beginning to murder women and children, "a step too far" for him. Luigi Lo Cascio is featured as a fellow informer, hitman Totuccio Contorno, speaking in Sicilian dialect. The courtroom scenes are the centerpiece of the film, but the ones showing the lead-up are important. Weissberg suggests more of Buscetta's criminal life might have been shown. The grand picture is handsomely done, but Bellocchio risks " making Buscetta look like an attractive ladies’ man who did a few bad things in his life but repented when he realized how much he loved his wife and kids." Grierson is more critical, but both he and Weissberg compliment dp Vladan Radovic for tiving the film visuals, which encompass scenes in Brazil as well as Italy, "the scope and grandeur of a crime epic" (Screen Daily). David Erlich's IndieWire review finds The Traitor "lively but scattershot and exasperating biopic," best when it departs from historical fact, too seldom cracking its own "brittle surface," its courtroom drama section "repetitive and somewhat impenetrable."