Cannes at Home: Champions of the Neon God

by Cláudio Alves

Let's hope Neon gives Panahi's Palme winner a proper release. No LA CHIMERA nonsense, please.

Neon is on a hot streak. Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident marks the sixth Palme d'Or winner in a row that the distributor will handle for its US release. Then again, they achieved this by leaving nothing to chance, going on a shopping spree of perceived frontrunners. To the point where they have American distribution rights for four of the eight prizewinning films. The other heavy-hitter was Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value, which took the Grand Prix, tantamount to second-place honors. But, of course, we shouldn't forget about the films that got no trophy. In between the two big champions, Mario Martone presented Fuori, and Carla Simón moved audiences with her Romería. If Oliver Hermanus' The History of Sound wasn't as acclaimed as one would hope, remember that much can change as far as critical consensus is concerned once more people see these Cannes titles. 

For the penultimate Cannes at Home special, let's examine some of these auteur's earlier efforts, all character studies in their own way. There's Panahi's The White Balloon, Martone's Nostalgia, Simón's Summer 1993, Hermanus' Moffie, and Trier's Reprise…

THE WHITE BALLOON (1995) Jafar Panahi

It feels wrong to discuss Jafar Panahi's feature film debut without acknowledging the director's journey there. Growing up in poverty, the future filmmaker picked up his first camera at ten, wanted to participate in whatever shoot he could find, and would scrounge up money from his work as a child laborer so he could go to the movies. Later, when conscripted into the Iranian army during the First Gulf War, his love for the moving image would translate into work as a military cinematographer. That experience would lead him to a career first focused on non-fiction projects. All this during one of the most vital moments in the country's film history – the birth of the Iranian New Wave. 

Indeed, Panahi's artistic journey is intertwined with that of Abbas Kiarostami, the movement's most internationally recognized name and a mentor figure who the young cineaste assisted during the making of his 1994 masterpiece Through the Olive Trees. Unsurprisingly, the younger artist's first foray into fiction storytelling would involve a direct homage to the older filmmaker's work in approach and theme, the use of non-professional performers and an emphasis on children's lives as an anti-censorship strategy, realism born out of documentary technique. His feature debut was much the same, even having a script written by Kiarostami from a story Panahi had devised with fellow filmmaker Parviz Shahbazi. 

The White Balloon is almost shockingly simple in premise, following a little girl as she tries to buy some goldfish for the New Year celebrations. And yet, from this idea, Panahi unravels something that's not quite a city symphony of Tehran but feels damn close, depicting the Iranian capital's socioeconomic landscape from the purview of a stubborn kid. That said, the camera, and therefore the audience, recognizes more than she might - exploitation everywhere, folks willing to take advantage of others to get what they need. None of this is depicted with moralistic judgment, mind you, for the projected image exudes generosity from minute one. Or is it curiosity? Maybe they're one and the same in the celluloid dreams of young Jafar Panahi.

No, not dreams. The White Balloon's realism won't allow for such fantasies as those that take over in our slumber. Instead, it remains down to earth, stuck on a clockwork structure that weaponizes repetition and makes it the project's central strategy. Calling it Sisyphean isn't accurate either, especially since the young protagonist has a happy ending of sorts. Still, there's some of that cosmic-sized despair in the many failures, pauses, restarts, and fake starts. So, the tale hits with the intensity of a grand odyssey, mayhap even an ancient myth, despite never transcending the limits of a girl's perspective. Not until the last beat, when another child takes center stage and Panahi's view both broadens and contracts. What's left is one of Iranian cinema's greatest endings.

In 1995, Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon earned him the Camera d'Or for Best First Feature at Cannes. Thirty years later, after taking the Golden Lion for The Circle and the Berlin Bear for Taxi, a career forced to shapeshift under persecution and, eventually, exile, art taken to its limits and beyond, he has also won the Palme d'Or. He is the first filmmaker to achieve the European film festival triple crown since Altman and joins only Antonioni in doing it without ties or repeated films across fests. Panahi is also the only person to ever take the Camera d'Or and then the Palme, bookends of a journey that's still not over. But if you asked the director, I think he might consider his achievement just as grand a story as that of a little girl trying to buy a goldfish for the Iranian New Year. 

The White Balloon is streaming exclusively on the Criterion Channel.

NOSTALGIA (2022) Mario Martone

A man returns to Naples after many years away, brought back by his mother's declining health and eventual demise. Another man returns to contemporary Naples after a career that took him away from it, into the realm of historicism and Roman opera. One is the story of the fictional Felice, the human center of Nostalgia. The other is its director, Mario Martone. The parallels are hard to miss, though this is a literary adaptation, tracing its origins to an Ermanno Rea novel that inevitably strays from the path of introspection, becoming a more expected Camorra tale where the past is never as distant as one might suppose or desire. These shifting priorities cleave the film in two halves while inviting comparisons between them. 

As far as I'm concerned, Nostalgia puts its best foot forward, starting with its strongest material. Part of it is the plotless observation with which Martone contemplates Naples as seen through the eyes of an expatriated son, all heavy atmosphere and movements dancing along with the architectural lines of the city. Part of it is surely the chemistry between Pierfrancesco Favino in one of his greatest performances and Aurora Quattrocchi giving it her all as his dying mother. In her presence, facing a living embodiment of Italian film history, Nostalgia reaches for the heavens and mostly gets there. Sadly, such glory is unsustainable. Don't get me wrong, Favino remains sublime throughout and Paolo Carnera's lensing is as elegant as before. But that's not nearly enough when the homecoming sours into a crime story. Oh well, we'll always have those first passages, the love of a mother and son in the twilight of her days.

Nostalgia is streaming on Fawesome, Kanopy, the Roku Channel, and Fandango at Home. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video and Apple TV.

SUMMER 1993 (2017) Carla Simón 

Before she won the Berlin Golden Bear with Alcarràs, Catalan director Carla Simón made her debut with a project of equal intimacy on a much smaller canvas. Rather than painting the mural of a whole extended family, Summer 1993 zeroes in on its pint-sized protagonist, six-year-old Frida whose mother has just died from AIDS complications. Sent to live with her uncle and welcomed into his pastoral idyll, she finds solace in a time of grief whose impact is magnified by her own innocence. In fact, working from her original screenplay, Simón does little to contextualize Frida's situation to us, avoiding blatant exposition and preferring to insinuate, let information flow organically.

Patient observation unfurls behavioral details and revelations that a blunter approach would either miss or squash down into nothingness. Hers is a delicate directorial hand that uses the audiovisual tenets of European realist cinema to tap into Frida's subjectivity. Without calling attention to itself, the craft on display is exquisite, every composition pondered within the hand-held camerawork that can mask precision as loose improvisation. Similarly, Santiago Racaj's lighting negotiates the summer warmth and a chiller sentimental beat, avoiding nostalgic reductivism while pursuing other kinds of comfort. The cutting is a marvel of tonal plasticity, sound work plays with the levels of understanding of a child's POV, and the structure does much the same.

Unassuming to the bittersweet end, Summer 1993 looks, for all to see, like a commonplace coming-of-age drama. But you just need to give yourself to its spell and you'll surely see what has made Simón into one of her country's most vital new filmmakers. Appreciate the gentleness on display and consider just how difficult this particular milieu truly is. That the entire thing doesn't devolve into polemic once the matter of uneducated prejudice enters the scene is testament to the director's skill. And that's even before one takes into account Laia Artigas' magnificent performance, like the second coming of Ponette with a Spanish twist.

Summer 1993 is streaming on Plex and Fawesome. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.

MOFFIE (2019) Oliver Hermanus 

Without having seen his latest, I still feel fairly confident in saying that Oliver Hermanus' main strength as an artist is his particular affinity for dramatizing repression. This can manifest in something as gentle as Living, or the violent nightmare of Skoonheid, where queer desire rots away behind closed doors, festering into something monstrous. You can draw a clear line from that 2011 breakthrough to Moffie, the director's first foray into period film and what's likely to remain his most beautiful creation. And even without going into my rants about the image as cinema's essence, the matter of beauty is critical to this tale of a young queer man in early 1980s South Africa.

Played by Kai Luke Brummer, Nicholas is himself a thing of beauty, the Aryan ideal of a white supremacist world order in shades of flushed pink skin, blue eyes and blond hair. Built like a classical statue, one would expect the camera to lose itself in adoration for him. And though there's a lot of that in Hermanus' mise-en-scène, he's most concerned with the camera's ability to communicate his protagonist's complicated gaze. Not necessarily through first-person shots, but by embodying a tentative relationship to male beauty, be it manifest as self-regard or erotic longing for other bodies. To recognize such splendor is to suffer, for to gaze upon it is a need from within but also forbidden, denied, and made an ignobility. 

Nicholas' queerness thus invokes an implied deconstruction of masculinity, especially white masculinity within the apartheid state. So, it's no surprise when violence erupts, for the ability to enact violence in defense of racial hierarchies and perceived tradition is so tantamount to the idea of "man." Rather than a disruption of normalcy, this brutality is depicted as its very foundation. Hermanus' staging still goes for the jugular, indulging in the shock value, all while contextualizing them within a political milieu that's as unavoidable as Nicholas' angst. Though the text avoids a more emphatic explanation of the intersecting matters of queerness, whiteness, colonialism and the oppression of Black South Africans, it's all in the form, meant to be intuited, experienced in visceral terms.

Moffie is streaming on AMC+, IFC Films Unlimited, Kanopy, and Philo. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.

REPRISE (2006) Joachim Trier 

Dogmatic rules about what belongs or doesn't in good cinema are something I tend to avoid. Or, at the very least, a way of thinking I strive to excise from my critical assessments. That doesn't mean a pet peeve or two doesn't rear its ugly head occasionally – my aversion to narration, for example. In general, I feel it's mostly a crutch if not a violation of the medium's fundaments, extraneous when not downright detrimental. So, when a filmmaker proves me wrong on this matter, I tend to reserve a special place in my heart for them. Mike Mills is a good example and Joachim Trier is another. Consider how he uses narration in his literary-minded feature film debut, Reprise. 

Starring Anders Danielsen Lie and Espen Klouman Høiner as two friends with similar ambitions, the film starts in what feels like a blast from the past, serving 90s Fincher and Boyle leftovers realness. As the aspiring writers send their manuscripts to prospective publishers, we're presented with a frenetic montage to the sound of the aforementioned narration, detailing the lives they want, complete with dramatic upheaval among the success and acclaim. Even before the title card drops, Reprise already shows itself as a film about writers that insists upon the narrativization of life and the self. It's also full of jokes, almost unrelenting in how it keeps throwing dark humor at the viewer. 

Early on, you'd be forgiven for finding little of what constitutes Joachim Trier's present style, or the popular conception of it, in Reprise. Apart from some of The Worst Person in the World's more outlandish choices, there's not much to compare it to, not in tone or overt technique. Stay with it, be patient, and you'll discover how this debut's opening wildness conceals the deep melancholy that's the director's calling card. Seeing these qualities emerge from youthful folly is a treat, like witnessing a filmmaker come into himself in the course of one project. In that regard, Reprise is a perfect prototypical first feature, just like Trier's Pieta is the Platonic ideal of an ambitious first short, full of promise yet still working through some stuff.

It's a diamond in the rough, brilliant as it often can be. Funnily enough, in this and other ways, Reprise reminds me of Xavier Dolan's early work, where forceful directorial choices and affectations helped make it more honest. The film, as we find it, feels like cinematic embodiment of its characters, their way of thinking, of looking at the world and themselves, for better and for worse. Because, so busy imagining what their story could be, fictionalizing existence, these men end up untethered from their own lives, from whatever chance at happiness they could once grasp. This is most apparent in a Parisian sequence that could work in isolation as a short, but it's ever-present, particularly in the lead performances.

Lie has the more apparent implosion of two, delicate but devastating like all his best turns. Høiner, on the other hand, is a diversion personified, all disarming smiles that can't quite hide their hollowness. Sometimes, it feels as if the two turns are Rosetta Stones for the film's ultimate meaning. Between the dark jokes and dark fates, Reprise is a film about failure and disappointment told from a very specific perspective of twenty-something ennui. For all its stylish and stylistic affectation, it's also brutally sincere, ending on a dream of a future that will not be. There's no cut back to reality, no need to ascertain the fantasist's delusion. So, instead, Reprise concludes still stuck in this fiction inside the fiction, running away from itself because the alternative is too unbearable.

Reprise is available to rent and/or purchase from Amazon Video.

What are your favorite titles from these director's filmographies? Are you smitten by Panahi, Simón and Trier's debuts, dazzled by old-school Martone? Or maybe you're fascinated by Hermanus' meditations on queer desire?