Another round of applause, please, for Elisa Giudici for giving us such great on-the-ground Cannes coverage this year. She reviewed the entire Competition slate! Can you believe it? What follows are her last two reports, condensed into one - Editor
by Elisa Giudici
I will miss the French summer -- hot and breezy. Yes, it is time to say goodbye to the Cannes Film Festival. Already? Finally! A little bit of both. My first time here was incredible but I think I am quite close to the limit of my cinematic intake without compromising the ability to enjoy the films. After years of enviously reading reportage by friends and colleague, this was everything I thought it would be. I fear I was even spoiled. There were no infinite queues where I thought I might be shut out and (a little brag is coming, but please allow it) I was able to see the whole competition lineup despite having a yellow pass! Insanity.
It was amazing being able to write this diary every day and read the comments from such a passionate audience. I hope I was able to give you a little glimpe into the movies that are coming as well as the feeling of seeing them at this majestic Festival. It was all quite demanding (I covered the Festival for a couple of italian magazines, too) but I am incredibly happy as a completist that I never skipped a day's entry. A lot of these diary entries were written in the middle of the night or near dawn so a huge thank you to Nathaniel for the editing to make them comprehensible to you; After 2 AM my English tends to be even more convoluted than usual.
So final round. SEVEN movies! Ready?
France (Bruno Dumont)
COMPETITION FILM
In Italian there is this way of saying: "fascinating as a car crash". Car accidents are obviously a terrible thing yet many drivers passing by slow down to catch a glimpse. Why? It's a terrible thing to witness: crashed vehicles, hurt people, even dead bodies. It is the fascination of seeing what you know is repulsive, a mix of morbid impulses, curiosity, and guilt. Well, I picture myself as one of those drivers seeing this movie through to its very end, while almost half of audience left the screening after just one hour. It's a mess of a film, with no subtlety and no clear direction in the narrative, and for these reasons I really wanted to see the final collision.
France tells the story of a famous TV anchor woman and journalist named France, played by Léa Seydoux. She is beautiful, brilliant and respected, but ultimately unhappy. The movie inflicts on her a long series of misfortunes to which she has to react by slowing crying her sad tears out in close up. I wish I had counted how many times Seydoux has to do it but believe me... it's many times.
Maybe Dumont wanted to make his own version of Nightcrawler? Maybe his intention was to tell us (again) how rich and powerful people live cold lives, detached from their own feelings. Maybe it was a cautionary tale of how twisted contemporary journalism is when the correspondents manufacture the news to be at the center of it? Whatever it is trying to do, it is bad. The mix of music and lack of visual subtlety made this one almost unbearable. In the movie there is a car crash scene that lasts nearly 5 minutes, in which Dumont show us (in slow motion) all phases of the crash, even the scared faces of people inside the vehicle while the car is upside down. I should have sped to the exit sooner, along with that other luckier half of the audience.
Belle (Mamoru Hosoda)
SPECIAL SCREENING
The Japanese director of Oscar-nominated Mirai was cheered like a star in the only screening of his new work (thank you movie gods for granting me a ticket!), an animated movie that rewrites the Beauty and the Beast story in an alternative reality similar to the one in Ready Player One. Visually this is a stunner. As with previous Osoda's features, I was more intrigued by the possibilities of the premise than their execution.
The protagonist of the movie is a young middle grade student who is coping with a really traumatic childhood event, resulting in an inability to sing in public. For her "U" - the app that grant everyone an avatar based on biometric datas and a new virtual identity to develop - is a way to reconnect with the music she is unable to perform in the real world. Singing her song in the U makes her very famous, attracting love and hate from other users. She is barely a teenager, but attracting a lot of attention. U is a virtual reality, but it can easily catch up with you in the the real world. Belle was entertaining and moving, but also a delusion as the whole theme of social media's alternative identities was developed in a superficial way. I appreciated how some really delicate themes were handled but I found the movies take on the character's decisions and the especially the ending shockingly simple and "easy".
Casablanca Beats (Nabil Ayouch)
COMPETITION FILM
Think Laurent Cantet's The Class, but set in Casablanca, in a music course revolving around the social and political meaning of rap and hip-hop in North Africa. It is very well acted yet very traditional take on the 'arts giving young students without much hope something to fight for' genre. The main protagonist is an uncompromising teacher who tries to explain to his students from a poor neighborhood how they can create authentic, powerful rap. He is not a reassuring teacher who loves to encourage -- in fact, he gives off Whiplash vibes. As a teenager, I would have probably cried in front of the class as some of his students do during the movie.
I was not fully seduced by the film but it's good and there's a lot of energy and fascinating Moroccan rap.
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
COMPETITION FILM
I am so pissed off about this one because I spoiled it for myself by reading reactions on Twitter. Technically Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movies are not "spoilable" but anyway, why describe a scene from the very final act of the film to someone who won't see the movie for maybe another year from now? We are so lucky to experience these movies with all the shocks and surprising bits unspoiled, so I don't understand why some critics take that way from readers? I find it maddening. There will be time to do in-depth analysis in the future.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's cinema is evocative and mysterious so the emotional connection is essential to liking it. Unluckily, in the past his movies have evoked very little for me. With that caveat in mind, know that I found Memoria quite enjoyable and I think the main reason is the masterful work by Tilda Swinton. She lends concreteness to the eery allure, anchoring the echoes from other times and other humans into a sort of palpable reality.
She plays a woman who starts to hear very strange sounds. She is the only one able to perceive them. It was screened in IMAX here in Cannes and the effect was mesmerizing because the sound system was really powerful. She spends the rest of the movie trying to figure out what the sounds could be. I'll stop here because I don't want to spoil Apichatpong Weerasethakul's vague yet fascinating answers to that question.
The Restless (Joaquim Lafosse)
COMPETITION FILM
How restless can life spent by the side of a husband affected by a bipolar disorder be? Very, as Lafosse describes in detail. His new film follows the life of a husband, wife, and their son. The father is a painter who faces a crisis during which he is unable to sleep for 48 hours or more. I cannot say that it's a bad movie (and critics seem to love it) but the whole viewing experience is exhausting. The second half in particular, involving a relapse for the protagonist after an almost vegetative condition, is very repetitive. The exhaustion and the repetition may well be the point, but they weren't giving me a lot. Or perhaps I was simply too tired at this point so late in the festival?
Nitram (Justin Kurzel)
COMPETITION FILM
While the international press is in love with it I was not all that impressed. Nitram follows a troubled young man with clear psychological problems who is clearly in a downward spiral. It's based on the true story of 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, so it's closer to Van Sant's Elephant than Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31st. What leads this young man to plan a massacre? Caleb Landry Jones gives a strong performance and the direction is very precise and sober. There are no easy solutions offered which is both a good thing since there is no finger pointing or simplifying and a not-so good thing since it feels too similar to previous movies on the same subject of tragic inexpicable violence. In the end I'm not sure it adds much to the conversation.
Vortex (Gaspar Noé)
OUT OF COMPETITION
Vortex features the Italian director Dario Argento himself as the protagonist and it's directed by Gasper Noé at his most sober and toned-down. Yes: Gaspar Noé and "toned down" in the same sentence, folks. I'm not sure what to make of that but in a festival in which almost every film tries to shock with sex, nudity, and iconoclastic scenes, Noé found a way to be unique and to surprise us again, by not doing so.
In total fairness I found this one a bit difficult to focus on as it was my last film, very late in the schedule, and two hours and twenty minutes long. Plus Tilda Swinton was in the audience with us, after a day full of press activities, wearing an amazing golden kimono dress.
Au revoir, Cannes!
Elisa Giudici, reporting from Cannes, is originally from Somewhere in Northern Italy since 1987. Cinemagoer, everyday reviewer, SFF & book lover. [Official Site (Italian) | Letterboxd | Twitter]
Previously
Diary Entry #1 Annette
Diary Entry #2 Everything Went Fine, Onada, Yasha-ga-ike
Diary Entry #3 Worst Person in the World, Velvet Underground, Lingui, etc
Diary Entry #4 Benedetta, La Fracture, Mothering Sunday
Diary Entry #5 Flag Day, Compartment No 6, Mariner of the Mountains
Diary Entry #6 The Innocents, Drive My Car
Diary Entry #7 The French Dispatch, Three Floors, Petrov's Flu, Bergman Island
Diary Entry #8 Titane, Lamb, Moneyboy
Diary Entry #9 A Hero, Red Rocket, The Story of My Wife, etc...