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