I don't know about you, but I can't contain my excitement for SIRÂT.
After Schilinski and Loznitsa had the honor of opening this year's Official Competition at Cannes, the next few days at the fest have seen many another auteur take their bow. Reviews vary wildly, but it seems that Oliver Laxe's Sirât is a winner, while Dominik Moll's Dossier 137 has inspired some of the least enthusiastic reviews coming out of the Croisette. Hafsia Herzi's The Little Sister didn't make much of a splash either, though critics have been kinder to the second French production vying for the Palme d'Or. Finally, nobody's indifferent to Ari Aster's Eddington, a polarizing Cannes premiere if there ever was one. But that's business as usual for the American director, whose works have caused extreme reactions of adoration and revilement ever since Hereditary hit theaters in 2018.
For Cannes at Home, I invite you to revisit Moll's The Night of the 12th, Laxe's Fire Will Come, Herzi's You Deserve a Lover, and Aster's Beau Is Afraid…
THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH (2022) Dominik Moll
A César Awards juggernaut that scored six trophies, including Best Film, The Night of the 12th is probably Dominik Moll's most successful film. The crime drama, inspired by a non-fiction book on the affairs of France's National Police, details the investigation surrounding a teen girl's murder in the Alps. Comparisons to Fincher, Chabrol, Bong, and Lynch's Twin Peaks abound, especially when one considers the decision to leave the mystery open-ended, a haunting unknown that persists, lingers on the audience just as it lingers on the detective characters, consuming them from the inside out. A sense of melancholy prevails, the sorrow of innocence lost and conclusions denied, justice as a dream that's always out of reach. You wake up cold, in the knowledge that the fantasy of a sleeping consciousness will never be fulfilled.
The style is polished and the mood evocative, beautifully realized even if slightly prosaic. Moreover, Moll's stabs at exploring violence against women as a societal sickness that runs deep are often in danger of falling into clichéd narrative beats and unconvincing types. By focusing almost exclusively on the investigators rather than the community around the victim, the film sets tight boundaries that limit how far it can go. Psychologies are left nebulous, even though the ensemble cast does a good job at fleshing out the scripted sketches they've been assigned. Bouli Lanners deserves special praise for his gruff characterization, a shot of piss and vinegar laced with bitter cynicism. Behind the cameras, Olivier Marguerit's music is a sonic treasure, a feature-length lament whose inchoate feeling does more for Moll's tonal gambit than anything in the text itself.
The Night of the 12th is streaming on Hoopla, Kanopy, Film Movement, and the BFI Player. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, Plex, and Fandango at Home.
FIRE WILL COME (2019) Oliver Laxe
For some, summer means joy and holidays, sweaty bodies flushed with desire, and bronzed skin. For others, it means fire and brimstone, hell on earth. In the Iberian Peninsula, these opposite meanings coexist, but it's hard not to fixate on the latter when you look up to see the sky yellowed by smoke and taste ash in the air. Wildfires abound in the warmer months, every year more violent, every year more destructive. It's gotten so bad that the vision of a future desert, scorched earth as far as the eye can see, looms on the horizon, feeling like an inevitability. These collective anxieties and contradictions, euphoria holding hands with apocalyptic fright, have seldom been more beautifully expressed in cinema than in the work of Galician filmmaker Oliver Laxe.
The director's sophomore feature, Fire Will Come, starts in the pitch-black darkness of night, when an ethereal light perturbs the void. The phantasmagoric brightness delineates a forest full of sinuous trees, standing still in a deep quiet that could feel sepulchral but still seems peaceful. That peace is short-lived, as some primordial roar echoes through the land, a mechanical monster coming to fell the wooden giants. Deforestation is crystallized in lyrical cinema, almost on the verge of abstraction, before it screams an environmentalist outrage. If Fire Will Come were just composed of these sequences, it'd already be an essential watch, but Laxe goes further. Skirting the line between drama and documentary, he introduces characters and a story of sorts, invoking old guilts to ravage souls just as the industry and the fire ravage the forest.
His approach is near-Bressonian in its ascetic simplicity, a step away from psychological storytelling to tap into something more gestural. The observational register marries well to the non-fiction footage, which grows in spectacle as the film unfolds. It starts bucolic after the nocturnal prelude, an appreciation of natural and human cycles in the rural north of Spain. It's a love letter to the landscape and its people. It's also an elegy, for destruction is on the way. By the time Laxe's cameras find themselves in the middle of an actual wildfire, eucalyptus ablaze and total chaos, the director has found a gateway to Hades and is presenting his findings on screen. Sensorial cinema in extremis, Fire Will Come immerses you and pulls you down, straight into hell. At a certain point, you'll be excused for hallucinating the smell of burning emanating from the screen.
Fire Will Come is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Fandor, Hoopla, and OVID. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video.
YOU DESERVE A LOVER (2019) Hafsia Herzi
Hafsia Herzi's directorial debut opens on a breakup row, right in the middle of the Parisian street. A mobile camera flits about, oriented around a trio of naturalistic performers enacting a melodramatic premise without succumbing to melodrama per se. As Lila, Herzi holds our attention without much effort, her raven hair enough to make her the most visually striking element on screen. But it's her expression that serves as anchor for You Deserve a Lover, an air of deep ennui and dissatisfaction that shadows her gaze. In other words, the actress-writer-director has the saddest eyes you ever did see, with an arresting glance being enough to upturn the tonal balance of any given scene. This is important since not much happens in this drama of restless youth.
While her cheating boyfriend spends a couple of weeks abroad, Lila considers her life and desires, floating through a series of encounters where sex is often suggested but not always manifest. Frank about bodies and carnal needs, about wants that are hard to decipher even for those who feel them, You Deserve a Lover strikes a disarming note of honesty. Candid to the bone, though not explicit whatsoever, it's unapologetic regarding its cast of characters even as they lose themselves in dubious decisions. Behind and in front of the camera, you can almost feel Herzi's beckoning for something between understanding and recognition, never pity nor uncomplicated sympathies. While shapeless and meandering, the film isn't without purpose.
This design becomes most apparent in the chaste connection between Lila and a photographer dazed by her beauty. Everyone deserves a lover. Everyone deserves to feel desired, deserves to have the shadows of insecurity and doubt exorcized for one brief moment of adoration and carnal ecstasy. Intimacy isn't guaranteed, but can be a gift we give ourselves through others and to others. Beyond such ideas, the photographer scenes also problematize Herzi's exercise as both master and subject of her own camera. If these explorations never become formalistically engaging, it's still important to commend the cineaste's public self-reflection, her ability with actors, and humanistic touch. While I wouldn't classify Herzi as an exciting image-maker, I'm fascinated to see how her cinematic voice may evolve.
You Deserve a Lover is currently unavailable to stream, digitally rent, or purchase. Indeed, none of Hafsia Herzi's directorial efforts are readily available for people in the US.
BEAU IS AFRAID (2023) Ari Aster
When I first watched Hereditary, it hit me like a sledgehammer to the solar plexus. Almost choking to death the night before and later having nightmares where the Milly Shapiro's ant-infested remains were replaced by my baby sister helped solidify its place in this horror fiend's heart. A year later, when I caught Midsommar in theaters, I was trapped in an abusive relationship, living in a foreign country away from my family and friends, more isolated than ever. So, it'll come as no surprise that the Scandinavian scary story reverberated in its own perverse manner, deeply personal in ways I wasn't ready to admit to myself back then. For some reason, Ari Aster's cinema tends to find me at my most vulnerable, forging a connection that's hard to shake off.
Nevertheless, I don't feel especially protective of this much-hated auteur. After all, he's a provocateur whose works burst at the seams with transgressive ideas, often in bad taste. It's only to be expected that a good portion of the film-loving crowd would find nothing but contempt toward the man's opus. Faults and failures are especially plain to see in something like Beau Is Afraid, but so is the ambition underpinning it all. And beneath ambition, there's a revealing grotesquerie, the ugliness within unleashed in all its ignominy, unrestrained by scarce resources, stylistic restraint, or self-discipline. The result is a mess, alright, but a fascinating one. And, like Marie Kondo, I love mess.
That said, Beau is Afraid isn't a film eager to be loved. If anything, it seems keener on being hated, regarded with all the disdain in the world like a self-loathing masochist whose humiliation kink has gone too far. There's an evil to its portrait of pathetic masculinity, juvenile impulses laid bare along with a mountain of mommy issues that would have given Freud a run for his money. Maximalist and monstrous, an odyssey of mean-spirited gags and misanthropic hatefulness that never quite cohere but give way to some incredible set pieces. Emphasis on the set, because Fiona Crombie's production design is the MVP, even if Parker Posey poses a threat in her one show-stopping sequence.
Look, I get that Beau Is Afraid is an excruciating watch, but I'm still glad I watched it and am even more thankful that such a deranged project saw the light of day. Also, who can say they don't empathize with Aster or Joaquin Phoenix's feckless loser? Wouldn't you be mortally terrified by the prospect of disappointing Patti LuPone?
Beau is Afraid is streaming on Fubo, Max, and Paramount Plus. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, Plex, the Microsoft Store, Spectrum On Demand, and Fandango at Home.
Can you stomach Aster? Are you excited for the new Moll despite middling reviews? Does Herzi strike you as a promising filmmaker? And what about Laxe? Are you as besotted by his work as I am? Sound off in the comments.