CANNES 2023 - remote notes

[Chris Knipp]

Cannes...



THE BREAKING ICE (Anthony Chen]
The Singaporean director, here filming a kind of three-way romance on China's icy border with North Korea, exhibits "an arresting fluency and openness" and a style that owes something o the French New Wave, says Peter Bradshaw of the GUARDIAN, who gives it three stars. Both BANDE À PART and JULES ET JIM have been mentioned. Some plot points are dropped or devices make no sense but "All three performances, however, are tremendous," and Chen's filmmaking "has an arresting fluency and openness." Jeffrey Zhang in PLAYLIST says the film is "a humanist triumph." Un Certain Regard section. There is a terrific TRAILER. Magical!

In Competition:

ANATOMY OF A FALL/ANATOMIE D'UNE CHUTE (Justine Triet).
"There’s a bracing and chilly high-mindedness about Justine Triet’s psychothriller, about a suspicious death whose only reliable witness happens to be blind", says Peter Bradshaw, who gives it four stars in the GUARDIAN. That blind person is the dead man's devastated eleven-year-old son. Triet's previous films were THE AGE OF PANIC (2013), IN BED WITH VICTORIA (2016), AND SYBIL (2019). Critics admire the lead performance by Sandra Hüller as the German writer put on trial for murder when her less successful French writer husband falls to his death (it could well be a suicide). Joh Frosch in HOLLYWOOD REPORTER calls this a "rivetingly complex" drama. Peter Debruge elucidates that complexity further in VARIETY.

Special premiere:

EUREKA (Lisandro Alonso)
I loved Alonso's 2004 LOS MUERTOS and wrote one of my most passionate early rreviews. He has somewhat gotten away from me since. I understand he is considered a key figure of "slow cinema," and that JAUJA is his most"popular" and "accessible" film, but it lost me. Viggo Mortensen of JAUJA features also here in the first of three segments, in academy ratio, which turns out to be a segment of a B&W TV cowboy movie. The second part features the everyday dealings of an Indian reservation. The third shifts to an earlier time and South America. How the parts segue is complicated, perhaps cosmic. This is why Bradshaw, who gives the film four stars, calling it "a barmy yet rich experimental enigma," says it shows filmmakers aren't "storytellers" as current industry cant would have it.