Cannes 2021 selections; notes

[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.

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES FILMS, continued.

Audiard.


LUCIE ZHANG AND MAKITA SAMBA IN LES OLYMPIADES

Jacques Adiard's PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT/LES OLYMPIADES, PARIS 13E adapts three graphic novels by the American Adrian Tomine into French in black and white with help from writers Léa Mysius the now known to be exccelent Céline Sciamma. The result is very sexy and up-to-date in the time of Tinder and other such hookup apps, which make life a matter of fuck first and get to know each other later. The setting of all the action is a block of tall buildings in southeastern Paris that no tourists associate with the city. VAIETY says this is "a Fresh Take on the Moody B&W French Relationship Movie, and INDIEWARE says it's "shallow." Jonathan Romney in SCREEN DAILY says Audiard "reinvents his own cinema" here. I think this is a direction I will like better than I did DHEEPAN or Adiard's US film THE SISTERS BROTHERS.

(PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT got a 2.5 on the SCREEN DAILY GRID.)


AUDIARD, LEFT, AND LUCIE ZHANG, MIDDLE, AT CANNES OPENING OF LES OLYMPIDES, PARIS 13E

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES FILMS, previously


STILL FROM PETROV'S FLU

Some catching up.

Mention by Jessica Kiang in the FILM COMMENT blog of PETROV'S FLU* (by Kirill Serebrennikov of LETO, which I reviewed, and THE STUDENT) reminds me that I have not mentioned six or seven Competition films that were shown and reviewed earlier. You will find them on the SCREEN DAILY CRITICS GRID reproduced above. Alphabetically, here they are:

AHED'S KNEE (Nadav Lapid). "An Israeli filmmaker throws himself in the midst of two battles doomed to fail: one against the death of freedom, the other against the death of a mother." Metasccore 74%. Sounds worth watching. (Lapid seems a little too slick at times, but yet his films are about important enough things or clever enough so you want to see them.)

EVERYTHING WENT FINE (François Ozon). When André, 85, has a stroke, Emmanuelle hurries to her father's bedside. Sick and half-paralyzed in his hospital bed, he asks Emmanuelle to help him end his life. But how can you honor such a request when it's your own father? André Dusollier was praised as the dying man. The Metacritic rating is solid, 70%. Reports say not deeply emotionally engaging given the subject matter, but given the subject matter and Ozon, this would be a must-see for me.

LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun) "A Powerful Abortion Drama Honors the Resilience of Chad’s Women." At 1.8 about the forth lowest score on the GRID. But it's Cannes Competition, man! MUBI has snapped it up for North American distribution. As DEADLINE says, "The topicality of this Cannes Film Festival competition entry should help it navigate to receptive specialized venues internationally."

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Joachim Trier). "Chronicles four years in the life of Julie, a young woman who navigates the troubled waters of her love life and struggles to find her career path, leading her to take a realistic look at who she really is." And Triers previous star, "his Antone Doinel" someone said, the memorable Anders Danielsen Lie, was seen in BERGMAN ISLAND earlier. And he's in this too. Peter Bradshaw called this "an instant classic" and in his GUARDIAN review gave it five out of five stars. Guy Lodge in VARIETY says this is Trier's "best since OSLO, AUGUST 31St," and that would be very good indeed. And indeed the Metascore is 87%. The GRID score of 2.4 doesn't seem quite right. (Generally the GRID is reflecting critical opinion at Cannes this year, though.) I want to see this!

THE DIVIDE (Catherine Corsini). "A traumatic trip to a Paris ER." "Two women on the verge of a breakup, in a hospital, are further stressed on the night of a big demonstration by the overwhelmed staff and by angry, injured protestors who land up besieging the building." "Leaves an indelible impression," wrote the VARIETY critic (bylines have disappeared again). No Metascore. Sounds seriously unfun.

FLAG DAY (Sean Penn) Tanked. "Summary: A father lives a double life as a counterfeiter, bank robber and con man in order to provide for his daughter." Metacritic rating: 55% GRID score: 1.1, the lowest. Weird plot. Penn seems to have gone badly wrong as a director again here, not the first time he has tanked at Cannes.

THREE FLOORS/TRE PIANI (Nanni Moretti) Fell flat. The story of three families living in three apartments in the same bourgeois condominium. It has big Italian stars: Riccardo Scamarcio, Margherita Buy, Alba Rohrwacher. My guess is it suffers from the ill of much of Italian cinema today: terminal blandness. At 1.5 it's the third from the bottom on the GRID.

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All the above is pretty hasty, but sorry -- I just can't cover the whole of Cannes in two days! I have also not yet found any reports on other Cannes departments - Un Certain Regard and Directors Fortnight, especially. More details will follow the next few days in the leadup to the festival's conclusion at the weekend.

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PETROV'S FLU got two out of five stars from Peter Bradshaw in the GUARDIAN who however gives it a typically patient and informative review. Bradshaw's continuing tireless big-festival overage continues to impress me. Plot description: "A day in the life of a comic book artist and his family in post-Soviet Russia. While suffering from the flu, Petrov is carried by his friend Igor on a long walk, drifting in and out of fantasy and reality." [Serebrennikov is a big theater person in Russia who also is a stalwart dissident, which is why he consistently can't come to Cannes from Russia because he might get thrown in jail when he comes back. I reviewed his LETO in 2019. PETROV'S FLU got the same score as THE FRENCH DESPATCH on the GRID, 2.3 - a realm of very respectable losers who may be higher ranking at Cannes than appears on any GRID.

[Chris Knipp]

CRITICS WEEK, EGYPTIAN FILM WINS.

Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy’s FEATHERS, a surreal tragicomedy, has scooped up the €15,000 Nespresso grand prize at the 60th edition of Cannes’ Critics’ Week. "Omar El Zohairy’s comedic drama about a woman forced to deal with the aftermath of a magic trick gone awry — it turns her good-for-nothing husband into a chicken — uses the surreal to peck away at deeper truths." (ALEX RITMAN, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER.

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES FILMS.

JULY 15 Competition films. SCREEN DAILY reports: "The latest film from Jacques Audiard – a Palme d’Or winner in 2015 with Dheepan – came out on top of the new arrivals with a score of 2.5, placing it fifth on the grid - just behind Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero. Helping the average were scores of four (excellent) from Positif’s Michel Ciment and The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin and Tim Robey."

"Only five titles are left to take their place on the grid, with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEMORIA, Bruno Dumont’s FRANCE, and Nabil Ayouch’s CASABLANCA Beats up next."


Today's jury GRID below.