Cannes 2021 selections; notes

[Chris Knipp]

Festival de Cannes 2021 (édition n°74) du 06 juillet 2021 au 17 juillet 2021
Cannes 2021 lists of films


WES ANDERSON'S THE FRENCH DISPATCH GOT A STANDING OVATION From left, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Wes Anderson, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray and Benicio Del Toro at the premiere of The French Dispatch.Credit...Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images [NYTIMES]

Cannes 2021 Competition Films

Ahed's Knee/הַבֶּרֶךְ‎‎ (Habereḵ) (Nadav Lapid) Israel, France
Annette (opening film) (Leos Carax) France, Germany, Belgium
Benedetta (QP)/Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven) France, Netherlands
Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve) Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico
Casablanca Beats/Haut et fort (Nabil Ayouch) Morocco, France
Compartment No. 6 (QP)/Hytti nro 6 (Juho Kuosmanen) Russia, Finland
The Divide (QP)/La Fracture (Catherine Corsini) France
Drive My Car/ドライブ・マイ・カー (Doraibu mai kā) (Ryusuke Hamaguchi) Japan
Everything Went Fine/Tout s'est bien passé (François Ozon) France
Flag Day (Sean Penn) United States
France Par un demi clair matin (Bruno Dumont) France, Italy, Germany, Belgium
The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson) United States
A Hero/قهرمان (Ghahreman) (Asghar Farhadi) Iran
Lingui (Mahamat Saleh Haroun) Belgium, Chad, France, Germany
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Colombia, France, Germany, Mexico, Thailand, United Kingdom
Nitram (Justin Kurzel) Australia, United Kingdom
Paris, 13th District/Les Olympiades (Jacques Audiard) France
Petrov's Flu/Петровы в гриппе (Petrоvy v grippe) (Kirill Serebrennikov) France, Germany, Russia, Switzerland
Red Rocket (Sean Baker) United States
The Restless/Les Intranquilles (Joachim Lafosse) Belgium, France
The Story of My Wife/A feleségem története (Ildikó Enyedi) Hungary, France, Germany, Italy
Three Floors/Tre piani (Nanni Moretti) Italy, France
Titane (QP) (Julia Ducournau) Belgium, France
The Worst Person in the World/Verdens verste menneske (Joachim Trier) Norway, Sweden, France
________________
(QP) indicates film in competition for the Queer Palm.


Un Certain Regard

After Yang (Kogonada) United States
Blue Bayou (Justin Chon) United States
Bonne mère (Hafsia Herzi) France
Commitment Hasan/Bağlılık Hasan (Semih Kaplanoğlu) Turkey
Freda (CdO) (Gessica Généus) Haiti
Gaey Wa'r (CdO) (Jiazuo Na) China
Great Freedom (QP)/Große Freiheit (Sebastian Meise) Austria
House Arrest/Дело (Delo) (Aleksey German, Jr.) Russia
The Innocents/De uskyldige (Eskil Vogt) Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, United States
La Civil (CdO) (Teodora Mihai) Belgium, Mexico, Romania
Lamb (CdO)/Dýrið (Valdimar Jóhannsson) Iceland, Poland, Sweden
Let There Be Morning/תן לזה להיות בוקר (Eran Kolirin) Israel
Moneyboys (CdO, QP) (C.B. Yi) Austria, Belgium, France, Taiwan
My Brothers and I (CdO)/Mes frères et moi (Yohan Manca) France
Onoda, 10 000 Nights in the Jungle (opening film)/Onoda, 10 000 nuits dans la jungle (Arthur Harari) France, Germany, Belgium, Italy
Prayers for the Stolen/Noche de fuego (Tatiana Huezo) Mexico
Rehana Maryam Noor/রেহানা মরিয়ম নূর (Abdullah Mohammad Saad) Bangladesh
Playground (CdO)/Un monde (Laura Wandel) Belgium
Unclenching the Fists/Разжимая кулаки (Razzhimaja kulaki)(dir. Kira Kovalenko) Russia
Women Do Cry (QP)/Жените плачат (Zhenite plachat) (dir. Vesela Kazakova, Mina Mileva) Bulgaria, France
__________
(CdO) indicates film eligible for the Caméra d'Or as a feature directorial debut.
(QP) indicates film in competition for the Queer Palm.


Out of Competition

Aline, the Voice of Love/Aline (Valérie Lemercier) Canada, France
BAC Nord (Cédric Jimenez) France
Emergency Declaration/비상선언 (Bisangseongeon) Han Jae-rim South Korea
In His Lifetime/De son vivant Emmanuelle Bercot France
OSS 117: From Africa with Love (closing film)/OSS 117 : Alerte rouge en Afrique noire (Nicolas Bedos) France
Stillwater (Tom McCarthy) United States
The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes) United States
Where Is Anne Frank (Ari Folman) Israel


Midnight screenings

Bloody Oranges/Oranges sanguines (Jean-Christophe Meurisse) France
Suprêmes (Audrey Estrougo) France
Tralala (Arnaud Larrieu, Jean-Marie Larrieu) France

Cannes Premiere section

Belle/Belle: Ryū to Sobakasu no Hime (竜とそばかすの姫) (Mamoru Hosoda) Japan
Cow (Andrea Arnold) United Kingdom)
Deception/Tromperie (Arnaud Desplechin France
Evolution/Evolúció (Kornél Mundruczó) Hungary
Hold Me Tight/Serre-moi fort (Mathieu Amalric) France
In Front of Your Face/당신의 얼굴 앞에서 (Hong Sang-soo) South Korea
Jane by Charlotte (CdO)/Jane par Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) France
JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (Oliver Stone) United States
Love Songs for Tough Guys/Cette musique ne joue pour personne (Samuel Benchetrit) France
Marx Can Wait/Marx può aspettare (Marco Bellocchio) Italy
Mothering Sunday (Eva Husson) United Kingdom
Val (Ting Poo, Leo Scott) United States
Vortex (Gaspar Noé) Argentina, Italy

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES 2021 REMOTE NOTES.


LÉA SEYDOUX APPEARS IN FOUR FILMS FEATURED AT CANNES 2021

Not promising to 'cover' Cannes remotely (it's already half over anyway), but the previews are appealing. Jonathan Romney calls this the Cannes "that had critics salivating." Excerpts from Romney's "blog" intro to Cannes from Film Comment:

Opening film: Annette, by Leos Carax "Carax was presumably aiming for than a simple rock opera (to use an archaic term), and one with marginally less narrative complexity than Ken Russell’s Tommy (1975). It didn’t bring out the best in either Marion Cotillard or a morose, stormy-browed Adam Driver—although the overture number 'So May We Start' was a buoyant saving grace." -Romney, Film Comment

Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film: A New Generation, an update of his encyclopedic TV series. His new chapters simply propose that this century, cinema has seen as many artists expanding or breaking rules as it ever has: beginning with the odd juxtaposition of Joker and Frozen, via Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Claire Denis, Tsai Ming-Liang’s VR, the Spider-Verse, and all points beyond. "a free-associative expression of faith in the continuing validity of the very thing that brought us to Cannes."

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II, "continuing her 2019 semi-autobiographical drama about pain, passion, and the problems of becoming a filmmaker when you’re posh and a young woman" - as well as coping with the death of the difficult addict boyfriend who dominated Part I. Has a fantasy ending unique to this director that's a fitting end to this "superb diptych."

Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds, with Juliette Binoche launching a very Loachian investigation into unemployment in Northern France.

François Ozon’s Everything Went Fine, "based on Emmanuèle Bernheim’s book about her father’s choice of assisted suicide. It dealt subtly and intelligently with questions of life, death, and ethics, and while lead Sophie Marceau didn’t quite have the range of nuance that the Bernheim role called for, veteran great André Dussollier was masterly as a man exerting his will despite a debilitating stroke. But the film felt slightly… if not academic, then well-behaved, even studious, which is not Ozon’s natural mode." [But Ozon was certainly plenty serious in his 2018 By the Grace of God, about pedophile priests. This sounds like another film in that new vein.]

Arthur Harari’s Onoda. New French director's 2n d feature "was a drama in Japanese about Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who famously held out after the end of World War II, refusing to believe that the conflict was over, and hiding out on an island in the Philippines..." "magnificent and crazy... captures war as derangement, and heroism as delusion, to troubling and even moving effect. . . extraordinary, Herzogian...but it's somewhat excessive 166-minute length kept Romney, he says, from seeing it all the way through.

-----------------
LÉA RULES

Not mentioned by Jonathan Romney (Yet) but Deadline has a piece, "With Four Films In Cannes, Léa Seydoux Will Rule The Croisette – Interview." Léa comes with almost suspiciously "royal" movie lieange, being directly descended on both sides from the two most powerful film producing families in France (her grandfather is the chairman of Pathé, her granduncle is the chairman of Gaumont). But since she came on the scene and started working prolifically 15 or 16 years ago, she has over and over shown that she can carry her own weight as a hard-working, versatile, and yes, glamorous actress. She's most known for Kéchiche's sexually bold lesbian love affair film La Vie d'Adèle aka Blue Is the Warmest Color, but she is associated with many other as good or better titles.

She has been in Bond movies, in Robin Hood (Ridley Scott) and Mission Impossible (J.J.Abrams). But like Robert Pattinson she is a glamorous star who seeks to work with the most interesting directors - sometimes in very small roles. (She may be ahead of Pattinson in that.) She has worked with, besides Kéchiche, among others, Raoul Ruiz, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Yorgos Lanthimos, Catherine Breillat, Wes Anderson (twice), Bertrand Bonello, Benoît Jacquot (twice), Christophe Honoré, Ursula Meier, Xavier Dolan, and Arnaud Desplechin (now twice) and Bruno Dumont (now for the first time). She has wrapped or is completing films with David Cronenberg, Arnaud des Pallières, Mia Hansen-Løve, and her second performance as Dr. Madeleine Swann in a Bond film, this time with Cary Fukunaga; the first time was with Sam Mendes.

In this Cannes Léa Seydoux "will be reunited with directors Wes Anderson and Arnaud Desplechin, with whom she’s worked before, for The French Dispatch and Deception, respectively. France marks her first collaboration with Bruno Dumont, while Hungarian woman director Ildikó Enyedi directs Seydoux in The Story of My Wife."

"It’s crazy," Seydoux says of the flurry of activity. And she’s excited about what the work represents. "I’ve done one American film, a European film and two French films, and they are all so different. It’s exciting they’ve all been chosen by Cannes."

She has had to skip the Cannes premieres because she has tested positive for COVID-19 and she is isolating at home in Paris.

[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.

[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.

_______________________

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.

_______________
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.