CANNES 2023 - remote notes

[Chris Knipp]

Cannes...


OCCUPIED CITY (STEVE MCQUEEN)

JEANNE DU BARRY (Maïwenn).
In his review for the GUARDIAN lead critic Peter Bradshaw gives it a 3/5. He calls it "a preposterous confection of a movie, like one of the rich sweetmeats being languidly nibbled at court. . ." but adds that it's :handsomely furnished: and "costumed with blue-chip character actors in the supporting roles" and features "wonderful locations" and "interiors at the Palace of Versailles itself." Not coming here anytime soon, though.

OCCUPIED CITY (Steve McQueen)
This "moving meditation on wartime Amsterdam" gets five stars from Bradshaw. It's a monumental, patient depiction of day-to-day life under Nazi rule based on McQueen's wife Bianca Stigter’s Dutch-language book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945. The four-hour film shows contemporary images of places in the city while narrating what happened in them under Nazi occupation. The effect is to "ask hard questions of what we think about the gulf between past and present," show us the past ain't so far away after all.

TIGER STRIPES (Amanda Nell Eu)
This is Bradshaw's 3rd Cannes 2023 review, a film by a Malasian filmmaker that depicts a repressive girls school and focuses on a natural rebel and is a "supernatural-realist drama and coming-of-age chiller" about the female body and sexuality, "with hints of Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg and Apichatpong Weerasethakul." It's "a bit derivitive" and "sometimes seems to be treading water in narrative terms" but nonetheless provides a "very woozy and hallucinatory experience."


TIGER STRIPES (AMANDA NELL EU)