Cannes 2021 selections; notes

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES FILMS.


VICKY KRIEPS, TIM ROTH IN BERGMAN ISLAND

Mia Hansen-Løve: BERGMAN ISLAND. In Competition. The French filmmaker's 7th film explores a couple, both filmmakers, as they spend time on Faro, the island where Ingmar Bergman lived, writing screenplays. Variety;s headline is "Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth Look for Love, and the Ghost of Ingmar, in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Beguiling Cinephile Shell Game." Telegraph gives it 5 out of 5 stars. If you like Hansen-Løve, and I definitely do, and you like Bergman, and what cinephile can discount him? - this flick's for you - though it not be for every everyday moviegoer. Also with Mia Wasikowska. Obviously partly related to Hansen-Løve's relationship from 2002 to 2017 with French director Olivier Assayas. (Opened in French cinemas today; it will coming to the US via IFC.)


CAST & DIRECTOR (2ND FROM RT.) AT CANNES OPENING

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES FILM.


PODALYDÈS AND SEYDOUX IN DECEPTION

Arnaud Desplechin's TROMPERIE/DECEPTION. It features Denis Podalydès, Léa Seydoux, Anouk Grinberg, Emmanuelle Devos, Rebecca Marder, Madalina Constantin. I fear Deadline's Anna Smith says it's "a self-indulgent Philip Roth adaptation that’s only marginally better than 2017’s derided Ismael’s Ghosts. " And I hated Ismael's Ghosts (NYFF 2017). Nonetheless it stars Léa Seydoux, featured above for being in no less than four Cannes films this season. Tellingly the film isn't in Competition but in the Cannes Premieres section. It appears a rather glum version of Léa. I don't blame her with Podalydès as her lover. There are many film adaptations of Philip Roth's many novels; they never quite succeed. I always like watching Emmanuelle Devos, though. And I'd like to see wha Léa does with this lead.

[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.