Cannes 2021 selections; notes

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES FILMS.


TILDA SWINTON IN WEERESETHAKUL'S MEMORIA

More competition films have been shown: FRANCE by Bruno Dumont and MEMORIA by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Apichatpong Weeresethakul's MEMORIA is a metaphysical meditation staged in Colombia, his first film outside Thailand and first in English. In i ta Scottish woman (Tilda Swinton), while traveling, becomes obsessed with tracing a sound that invades her sleep, than comes to her when awake. David Rooney in his HOLLYWOOD REPORTER review finds the film partly entrancing, partly inscrutable, and true to form for the director. Peter Bradahaw finds Tilda and "Joe" a "dream team" and gives the film five out of five stars. It made him feel like he was 17 again.

Dumont's FRANCE is a dry indictment of public media focused on France de Moeurs, a TV celebrity journalist (Léa SEydoux), who manipulates the truth in everything she does, then has her life upended when she hots a poor person while driving her car. BFI's SIGHT AND SOUND (Giovanni Marchini Camia) calls this film "a satire of the blackest kind" and says "In FRANCE, he doesn’t go for laughs; his withering and implicating critique of our hyper-mediated present exaggerates its absurdities but denies us the catharsis of laughter." SCREEN DAILY: Jonathan Romney says this is a new turn for Dumont indeed, "flamboyantly lavish visually, and dramatically pitched on an epic scale," but that it makes its point "quickly and forcefullly" and then goes on to make it over and over, "with different modulations, for over two hours."



LÉA SEYDOUX IN DUMONT'S FRANCE