Cannes 2021 selections; notes

[Chris Knipp]

THE CANNES JURIES: COMPETITION AND UN CERTAIN REGARD

Spike Lee, who won big Cannes cred by receiving the Grand Prix three years ago for BLACKKKLANSMAN, is going to make a strong impression this year: he's head of the most prominent Cannes Competition jury. The girls outnumber the boys on the jury, and with Tahar Rahim, a French Arab actor, a South Korean actor, and NEIGHBORING SOUNDS Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho a the other boys, a conventional mainstream viewpoint is likely to be avoided. Girls outnumber boys in the Un Certain Regard jury too. And there are two directors I greatly admire included: England's Andrea Arnold (FISH TANK, AMERICAN HONEY) and the creator of THE CLIMB, my favorite American movie of last year, Michael Angelo Covino. Cool aggregations indeed.

Main competition
Spike Lee, American director, Jury President
Mati Diop, French-Senegalese director and actress
Mylène Farmer, Canadian-French singer and songwriter
Maggie Gyllenhaal, American actress, director, and producer
Jessica Hausner, Austrian director and screenwriter
Mélanie Laurent, French actress and director
Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazilian director, film programmer, and critic
Tahar Rahim, French actor
Song Kang-ho, South Korean actor


Un Certain Regard
Andrea Arnold, British director, Jury President
Daniel Burman, Argentine director
Michael Angelo Covino, American director and actor
Mounia Meddour, Algerian director
Elsa Zylberstein, French actress

[Chris Knipp]

OTHER CANNES FILMS.


AGATHE ROUSSELLE AS ALEXIA IN TITANE

Julia Ducournau's TITANE follows her 2016 debut RAW and reportedly is just as demented - perhaps less successfully, but still with name actors and beautiful images. There are many reviews. I liked David Erlich's for IndieWire, which made it a "Critic's Pick." The focus is on a woman serial killer and "car model" who has sex with her car, and turns up at the house of firefighter Vincent Lindon, who spent several years working out to build muscle mass for the role. She poses as his long lost son, who disappeared as a boy years earlier. See also Erlich's interview with Vincent Lindon, who will appear soon in Claire Denis's new film, FIRE, a love story. "Titane," titanium, refers to a plate in the girl's head, an important part of her backstory.Director Bertrand Bonello plays the girls's irresponsible father. Peter Bradshaw gives this 2/5 stars in the Guardian and says it's "a car crash." In Competition. See the trailer.

This film was a sensation on the Croissette, but did not score high on the SCREEN DAILY CRITICS GRID. Leos Carax's ANNETTE did welll but Hamaguchi's DRIVE MY CAR did better. Verhoeven's BENEDETTA dis pretty well; other interesting looking films (including Hansen-Love's) fared disappointingly. At the halfway point in the GRID scores were on average lower than the equivalent point in 2019. Ten titles into 2019’s 21 film-strong GRID the average score was 2.5, but this year 12 titles in the average score was just 2.1. Different critics and different films; but this hints that reactions are less enthusiastic at this year's Competition.

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES, continued.

SCREEN DAILY CRITICS GRID (July 14)

At this point Hamaguchi's DRIVE MY CAR rans highest, pushing Carax's musical ANNETTE aside. Sean Penn's film has the lowest rating so far. (The descriptions of the films at the bottom of the grid represents films not rated yet.) More than half the Competition films had been seen and rated by this point. Farhadi's HERO did rather well, though there are several films above it on the grid. Juho Kuosmanen'S Moscow-to-Murmansk Russian train journey film COMPARTMENT NO. 6 is a contender. Eight films remain to be watched and graded.

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES FILMS.


SEIDI HAARLA IN COMPARTMENT NO. 6

Juho Kuosmanen'S COMPARTMENT NO. 6, about the Moscow-to-Murmansk Russian train journey to the Arctic Circle some time post-fall of communism but before cell phones, sat well with critics and may be a serious contender among the Cannes Competition films. This is the Finnish director's first feature since THE HAPPIEST DAY IN THE LIFE OF OLLI MAKI, which won the top prize in the Cannes' 2016 Un Certain Regard section. The main character (Seidi Haarla) is a student interested in archaeology who is going up north to look at petroglyphs, who was to go with her landlady/lover but winds up going alone and connecting gradually with a Russian miner (Yuriy Borisov) on the long, slow journey. A special relationship of a subtle, unexpected kind develops. Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney sums this up as "a strange, scrappy film, in its own way quite beguiling." On the SCREEN DAILY GRID it socred the same as Farhadi's A HERO (2.6), a notch below Verhoeven's BENEDETTA.

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES FILMS.



Ryûsuke Hamaguchi'S DRIVE MY CAR/ドライブ・マイ・カー(Doraibu mai kā), which has become the highest ranking film on the GRUD, is adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami. It is "a forensic anatomy of love, grief and survivor's guilt" in which stars Nishijima and Miura both give impressively internalized performances." It now has the highest score, 3.5, on the SCREEN DAILY CRITICS GRID, which is considered a good predictor of how the awards will go. This film is simple but slow-moving, three hours out of 40 pages of material, according to Guy Lodge in VARIETY, but he says it doesn't seem pushed. It "packs an awful lot into its lean sentences," and combines "a grief-stricken marriage story" with a "corrupted friendship study," both related via the "tale of odd-couple companionship." He says it may be Hamaguchi's best yet and in a class with the best Murakami film adaptations along with Lee Chang-dong's great BURNING (NYFF 2018). This film is so complex in its "simplicity," that even Peter Bradshaw's GUARDIAN plot summary seems convoluted.

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES FILMS.


DAPHNE PATAKIA AND VIRGINIE EFIRA IN BENEDETTA

Paul Verhoeven's BENEDETTA is a nominee for both the Palme d'Or and the Queer Palm. I wonder if its high SCREEN DAILY GRID rating of 2.7 is really right. Not evidently in everyone's view. Peter Debruge's VARIETY review is headed "A Guilty-Pleasure Nunsploitation Movie From the Director of BASIC INSTINCT." It is about a nun. While Verhoeven reteamed with ELLE screenwriter David Burke to adapt Judith C. Brown’s "rigorously researched" Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, Verhoeven plays it for arousal - ours, Debruge says, thus "satisfying the most basic definition of pornography." Nonetheless while the Anglophone critics on the GRID rated it low, the others didn't, so it scored 2.7/5, higher than DRIVE MY CAR and ANNETTE. To be continued.


SALEH KARIMAI AND AMIR JADIDI IN A HERO

Ashar Farhadi's A HERO (Persian: قهرمان‎, romanized: Ghahreman) was one of the two films below BENEDETTA, with COMPARTMENT NO. 6, that got a 2.6 on the GRID, so far. This is about a man in prison for debt let out to redeem himself, who finds gold coins, but choosing to return them to their owner rather than use them to pay back what he owes, he becomes a media darling as an example of a good Samaritan. Farhadi is notable for his real-seeming films full of specific detail, but Owen Gleiberman of VARIETY thinks this time it all gets too complicated and diffuse in the telling and speaks to mind too much and heart not enough. David Erlich of INDIEWIRE on the contrary thinks it's Farhadi's best film since A SEPARATION. My experience of Farhadi suggests one may need the patience to watch the film more than once before arriving at a decision. It took me a second viewing of A SEPARATION to see how good it was.

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES FILMS.

What's still to come? Work from these directors:

JACQUES AUDIARD: I'm a big fan of this top French director and so I'm excited to learn what PARIS, 13th DISTRICT will be like. From the focus on four young people in a neighborhood, I'd say the new film reflects a desire Audiard has expressed in the past to stop tackling epic productions like A PROPHET every time and focus on more modest work. [As of Wed. night, this film has shown and been reviewed. See below.]

APICHACHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL l: "Joe" for short has won big at Cannes in the past, and his great fans will be very curious what his very multi-National opus MEMORIA will bring.

BRUNO DUMONT: IT would be surprising indeed if the arresting but weird French director becomes an award contender, but his film FRANCE's topic, "A celebrity journalist, juggling her busy career and personal life, has her life over-turned by a freak car accident," and the star role for the omnipresent but alas absent Léa Seydoux represent what would appear to be a quite new direction, so that's interesting to see.

SEAN BAKER: His comedy RED ROCKET about a washed-up porn star returning home to no welcome doesn't sound like big award material, but what he does is always interesting.

ILDIKÓ ENYEDI is a Hungarian woman director who has won accolades but I'm not familiar with her work. Again this is an opportunity to observe the variety of Léa Seydoux, for in Enyedi's Competition film at Cannes this year ,[B]THE STORY OF MY WIFE[/B, Seydoux plays the lead as the woman a sea captain marries on a bet.

JOACHIM FOSSE: You'll find three reviews I've written of earlier films by this French director at this LINK. I'm not thus far a fan. The focus in his new one, THE RESTLESS, on the impact of mental illness on a family however is one there's a lot of interest in lately.

NABIL AYOUCH: I lived in Morocco once, so I'm interested to see a film from there. CASABLANCA BEATS depicts ghetto youths in a music workshop.

JUSTIN KURZEL is an Australian director. I have reviewed his MACBETH, and his TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG. I had quite a bit of time for the latter, and he is a vivid director. His star this time is Caleb Landry Jones, the American actor who performed impressively last year in THE OUTPOST, standing out most in a field of name actors and name actors' sons. As a lone gunman in NITRAM, depicting events leading up to a mass shooting, he has a powerful role here.