Sean Baker's ANORA looks like a top contender for the Palme d'Or.
After much divisiveness in the Main Competition, the Cannes critics finally have something to fawn over in collective uproar. Sean Baker's Anora was a hit with press and audiences alike, standing out in a selection of otherwise derided titles. Indeed, Christophe Honoré's Marcello Mio met critical rejection on the same day of Grand Tour's world premiere, while Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope inspired another wave of dissenting opinions. Some love it, while many others decry the Neapolitan director's obsession with objectified female bodies, beauty above everything else, even cinematic meaning. Considering his last few projects, this shouldn't come as a surprise.
That shall be the theme of this Cannes at Home program—the beautiful people. Let's explore the siren calls of Baker's Tangerine, Honoré's The Beautiful Person, and Sorrentino's Oscar-winning The Great Beauty…
TANGERINE (2015) Sean Baker
At the time of its release, the biggest talking point on Sean Baker's Tangerine was its odd shooting technique. Rather than use professional materials to film his tale of two trans prostitutes during a turbulent Los Angeles Christmas, the director opted for an iPhone as his principal recording device. It wasn't necessarily a gesture of democratized cinema, as some might suppose. In retrospect, little in it suggests a motto of "anyone can make cinema." After all, everything else about the production reflects professional standards and many more resources than the amateur filmmaker could tap into.
Moreover, extensive color grading work unifies the raw footage, detracting from its roughness for a cogent color story whose expressivity goes beyond direct observation. It's too bright to be a reproduction of the real world. That's not a dig, mind you, since, like Blanche DuBois, I want magic above realism. Who wouldn't? Especially when the result is this a gaggle of images that look as scorched by the sun as the asphalt in the LA roads the characters traverse, Technicolor as reinvented by Instagram filters. Only one quality sprouts straight from the unique technique – the sense of immediacy the shots possess.
It's a vital sensation for a picture that, in its last acts, resembles a 2010s take on the Old Hollywood screwball crescendo. All this is to say that when you consider the totality of Tangerine, the iPhone factor is a minor element. Much more important is the dramaturgy attuned to absurdity while working within a milieu of earnestness. Then there's the editing, a propulsive blast of energy that varies its pace from character to character. With Kitana Kiki Rodriguez's jilted woman, it feels the full flush of rage, breaking lines of sight and continuity for the surge of adrenaline. With Mya Taylor's would-be singer, it's more sedate, pensive.
With her, the film is weighted down by concurrent disappointments and focused on the subtleties of an Oscar-worthy characterization. Though inaccurately categorized as supporting, her efforts deserved the acclaim received in the 2015 awards season. Finally, there's Razmik, an Armenian cab driver played by Karren Karagulian. His chaser ways impose disruptive domestic scenes into Tangerine's zany plotting, negotiating local color and broad humor with a touch of melodrama I'm not convinced Baker commands. It's the picture's most fragile facet, a qualm against it that, nevertheless, can't dim the light of Rodriguez and Taylor's double act. It's all worth it for the pair's last scene together.
Tangerine is streaming on Hoopla, Kanopy, Paramount Plus, RedBox, Tubi, Fubo and Pluto TV. You can also rent and purchase it on most of the major platforms.
THE BEAUTIFUL PERSON (2008) Christophe Honoré
Somewhere in France, a high school sees erotic longing waft through the air like a virus bound to infect every living soul inside. The camera roams through classrooms in besotted ecstasy, soaking up the youthful beauty of the student body with such shamelessness one almost balks at it. Christophe Honoré is no stranger to transcended taboo, and there's no social rule he won't challenge if cinematic sex is on the table. And just as the camera lusts for the adolescents, so do their teachers, creating a web of desire so dense it practically creates a membrane between the action and the audience. Reach out, and you'll feel it, tactile and libidinous. It throbs in your hand.
Indeed, The Beautiful Person is almost too French to function. Everywhere you look, there's temptation and a number of people eager to risk it all for a moment of erotic bliss, infidelity and transgression are commonplace. Yet, not everyone shares that dazed perception. At a local bar, the hunky Italian teacher played by Louis Garrel will be told that, at the tender age of their students, people are fragile as glass. He may dismiss such notions as jealousy from those who can't partake in the teacher-student dangerous liaisons, but the seed of doubt has been planted. In this lost Eden, perversity abounds, and everyone munches on forbidden apples, always under the illusion that their actions have no consequence. But desire is never so simple.
In comes Junie, a sixteen-year-old beauty who arrives at the school in the aftermath of loss. The young woman's mother has recently passed away, so she has moved and transferred to the same place where her cousin studies. Played by a morose Léa Seydoux, Junie cuts across the libidinous excess like a hot knife through butter. She's a beacon of sorrow, inward bound and startling in how much she dissents from the surrounding mood. Among curly-haired pedants and horny fuckers, Honoré's heroine stands out, inspiring the obsession of all those she passes by, boys falling over themselves in lust and pedagogues forgetting their duties under the spell of her sad gaze. Yet, Junie does little to encourage them.
The Beautiful Person is loosely adapted from Madame de La Fayette's Princess of Cleves, a 17th-century work that many scholars consider as the genesis of the psychological novel. With such an origin, it's interesting how impermeable most characters are within the cosmos of Honoré's film, their genuine interiority lost behind a smokescreen of insincere candor. Still, he suggests plenty through cutting and camerawork, sometimes approaching Bressonian grace. Consider the scene where a note is passed in secrecy through the classroom, hands dancing like in Pickpocket. He also creates a soundscape eager to spell out people's psyches, be it with modern music or an old opera whose sung sentiments echo what's inside each listener. In this paradigm, the truth of art depends on the audience, not the author.
The Beautiful Person is streaming on AMC+. You can also rent and purchase it on Apple TV.
THE GREAT BEAUTY (2013) Paolo Sorrentino
I was in college when I first encountered Sorrentino's The Great Beauty. At the time, I described it as a film ultimately about nothing, and all the better for it. Was I wrong? In his most shameless Fellini homage, the Neapolitan maverick re-thinks La Dolce Vita for a modern Rome corrupted by vices old and new alike. It's a feast for the senses that emphasizes surface-level pleasures. So much so that there's little space for anything else to manifest. Like Emperor Tiberius, Sorrentino forces libations of wine down our throats, inflating us to the point of bursting. Can you feel your insides congealing and contracting in their alcoholic surge? Oh, what sweet torture and what heinous death.
Revisiting the picture more than a decade later, all those qualities are still there, along with the faults that walk half a step behind them. However, new readings suggest themselves, aided by age, the encroachment of passing time on flesh and mind. So much of The Great Beauty is about the anesthetizing quality of pleasure, a breath of absinthe to dull the sense and make the pain go away. Meaninglessness is a curse and self-administered medication, a survival tactic in all but name. Contrastingly, the search for meaning is a gesture of self-destruction, a brave but foolish odyssey into the unknown and one's inevitable despair.
Beneath the glamor, that's the arc The Great Beauty paints across its Roman canvas. It's the journey of one Jep Gambardella, a hedonist writer played by Toni Servillo who, after a life of emptiness, decides to look for meaning, the titular great beauty that eludes us all. On re-watch, the film is as eager to tap into his melancholy as it is in the Bacchanalia of the jet set, anchored by a performance defined by yearning for something beyond the screen spectacle on display. The Great Beauty also considers Italian politics and matters of generational divide, the makers of a particular cosmos looking at their creation and realizing they've trapped themselves in it.
And now, there's no way to escape. Neither the characters nor the filmmakers can do it. On a certain level, the spectator is there with them, pushing against the cage until skin bleeds from the struggle. Is it bloated? Yes, inexorably, but that grand guignol excess is part of Sorrentino's design. One needs the stylistic fervor to appreciate what it conceals and obfuscates. One needs nothingness to appreciate the absent meaning. So, was I right or wrong back in 2013? A bit of both, I guess. It's a film about nothing, but only on the uppermost level of its imagining. It's also a film about running away from nothing, perchance unable to escape it. Whatever the case, The Great Beauty proved more moving now than then.
The Great Beauty is streaming on Max and the Criterion Channel. You can also rent and purchase it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube.
Were you enchanted by any of these directors' great beauties? Also, does Sean Baker have the Palme in the bag?