Cannes at Home: Let's Wrap This Up!
Monday, May 26, 2025 at 4:30PM 
The heart yearns for Bi Gan's RESURRECTION.
So, while there may still be some Cannes-related articles to come at The Film Experience, it's time to say a belated goodbye to another edition of Cannes at Home. I hope you've enjoyed this look into past works from the batch of directors who just vied for the Palme. This year, Saeed Roustaee was one of the last auteurs to take their bow at the Croisette, presenting his Woman and Child to mixed reviews that still made sure to highlight the film's cast. Bi Gan brought experimental verve to the competition with Resurrection, which took home a Special Jury prize. I won't lie, despite Panahi's Palme, this genre-hopping Chinese epic about the senses of cinema is my most anticipated title from the fest. Then came the Dardennes' Young Mothers, winner of this year's Best Screenplay award. And as the last competition title, Thierry Fremaux programmed Kelly Reichardt's 70s-set heist drama The Mastermind, with Josh O'Connor in the lead.
For our homebound festival, let's revisit Roustaee's Life and a Day, Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night, the Dardennes' Tori and Lokita, and Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff…
LIFE AND A DAY (2016) Saeed Roustaee
In 2022, Leila's Brothers represented Saeed Roustaee's entrance into the film festival big leagues, bringing the cineaste to Cannes for the first time. It won the FIPRESCI Prize and ignited the ire of Iranian authorities, so it's no wonder that, along with his Law of Tehran breakthrough, the drama tends to dominate people's idea of who Roustaee is as a filmmaker. Sadly, this comes at the expense of his feature debut, which, in many ways, feels like an early sketch of the film that would eclipse it. I'd go so far as saying that, though much less ambitious, Life and a Day outclasses Leila's Brothers in almost every department. Maybe the sound mix isn't as polished, but that's about it.
Perhaps it's unfair to compare the two, but the similarities are glaring, even beyond the cast repeats between them – as expected, Payman Maadi and Navid Mohammadzadeh have central roles and deliver incredible work, as they do in almost all of the director's projects. For one, they're family melodramas about an impoverished Tehran household where various adult siblings orbit around a widowed, physically debilitated parent. As much as they try, the clan seems unable to escape their precarious situation, often landing themselves in trouble with the law and at the mercy of external forces. The self-sabotaging antics of some siblings are hard to stomach, especially for the eldest daughter, who Roustaee's camera holds on to like an anchor, a lifeline, one last hope.
And it's not just the camera. These families would fall like a house of cards were their prodigal daughters to leave or give up on them. Only, unlike Leila's brothers, Somayeh's siblings are well aware of her value. Quite literally, in some cases. These feelings are exacerbated by her upcoming nuptials to an Afghan she barely knows, the scion of a wealthier family intent on sweeping her away from Iran and all those who depend on her. Ultimately, Somayeh's dilemma reveals itself as Life and a Day's main conflict, but there's much to consider before this becomes apparent. Amid fire and fury, the quiet center of this storm takes a while to assert herself, her reliability functioning as a mask to conceal the tensions within.
This is no dig against the character, Parinaz Izadyar's performance, or Roustaee's direction. If anything, it's remarkable how fast their work immerses the viewer into the film's milieu and establishes the dynamics at hand, dropping us off in media to observe a domestic pandemonium. While the audiovisual strategy is one of unassuming realism, the staging is often exquisite. Most of all, it emphasizes the familiarity between the actors and their space, a relationship superbly communicated to the point that, in less than ten minutes, you feel as if you intimately understand the people on screen. The tonal plasticity is also remarkable, flirting with dark humor and farce-like antics, a tragicomic whirlwind that doesn't let up until a conclusion that could have felt contrived if not for the cast's skill and the director's last-minute restraint.
Life and a Day is available to rent and/or purchase from Amazon Video.
LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (2018) Bi Gan
Cinema is a dream at 24 frames per second, yet it seldom feels like one. Maybe it's because it's so caught up in mimetic dogmas and convention, expectations of credulity, of narrative, of a clarity that dispels mystery and guides one away from the deep unknown. Even before films I love, it's rare to feel wholly transported, whether into the oneiric realm or some other kind of ecstasy. Surprise or its absence is part of it, surely. So much of what first pulled me into this art form was experiencing sights and sounds and ideas I couldn't have thought up myself, being pushed past the limits of my own imagination into a transcendental state of discovery. After a while, surprises are rare and far between.
Apologies for the solipsism, but I'm trying to be sincere. I'm also trying to explain why the cinema of Bi Gan means so much to me. Nearly a decade ago, I first encountered his Kaili Blues at a local film festival, knowing next to nothing about it besides its place on the fest's competition slate. What I found was an exploration of time and cinematic boundaries that was nothing short of revelatory. When his next feature came around, I made sure to catch it in theaters, chasing the high of that first brush with the Chinese visionary's cinema. If possible, Long Day's Journey Into Night was more extraordinary still, pulling me into an out-of-body-like state that's hard to put into words.
One thing's for sure – I was besotted. Indeed, I was in love with a film many found inscrutable or badgering in its formalist excess, spectacular but unwelcoming, ambitious though a tad empty. Chinese audiences felt duped into watching an experimental enigma, and a number of critics I respect could have hardly been more skeptical of Bi Gan's project. But my passion persists, strong as ever even a decade later, its images and movements seared into the psyche, probably bound to haunt me until the day I die. And what a lovely haunting it is, a neo-noir in shades of neon and limescale about the memory of a woman who, one day, disappeared.
Tang Wei plays this femme fatale, or the impression of her, a Marienbad-esque echo that persists across time and shapeshifts in tandem with the film. Bi Gan's foray into a free-floating 3D one-hour-long take at the end of Long Day's Journey Into Night is rightfully famous, but it's far from the only transfiguration in the director's design. Long before that final folly, the film has already presented what should amount to a commonplace crime drama but reads like a semi-lucid hallucination. Nocturnal vagrancies seem to go in and out of present tense, often in the same movement and shot, while the urban space both invokes a sense of tactile specificity and an impossible immateriality.
We're caught in a dance with time itself, swirling into dark corners, into shadow, into the void, stretching our consciousness and the limits of what cinema can do. We're also in a trance, beckoned into a sensorial surrender where the audiovisual stimulus and its emotional resonance come before any and all attempts at explaining the meaning of what we're seeing. Not since first contemplating Jane Campion's body of work have I felt this close to a cinematic embodiment of Keat's theories on Negative Capability. And if you allow me another literary reference, let me say that though the big screen isn't necessarily a looking glass, by the end of this journey, one can't help but feel like Alice. Oh, I want to go back so bad – Resurrection can't come soon enough.
Long Day's Journey Into Night is streaming on Kanopy. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
TORI AND LOKITA (2022) Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
Ever since the start of their filmmaking career, Jean-Pierre and Luc e Dardenne have set their cameras on the dispossessed and disenfranchised, portraying contemporary Belgium through the prism of their socially conscious left-leaning ideals. With works like La Promesse and Rosetta, they reinvented the tenets of European social realism on the big screen, their influence impossible to overstate. And, throughout it all, a dilemma has lived at the heart of the brother's cinema – how does one dramatize exploitation without participating in it? I won't pretend I have the answer, and neither do the Dardennes. At least, their works still feel as if they're still grappling with the right way to approach this problem, no matter how monolithic they might seem at first glance.
Consider their last decade. After the critical and international success of Two Days, One Night, the brothers seemed intent on exploring the plight of immigrant communities and ethnic minorities. The Unknown Girl uses the murder of an African woman as the fuel for its plot, somewhat reducing her tragedy to a cog in the narrative mechanism of a white lead played by Adèle Haenel. Then came Young Ahmed, perchance the Dardennes' worst film, a disappointing misstep in their character studies. The story of a radicalized Muslim teen who tries to kill his teacher, it exposed the limits of the filmmakers' perspective and just how dependent their work is on the performances that provide it shape and foundation.
In other words, those stories of exploitation felt exploitative themselves, contradicting the intent behind their making. I bring this up because their follow-up to Young Ahmed is one hell of a redemption, even as it shares many of the same superficial elements. The tale of two Cameroonian children seeking refugee status in Europe, Tori and Lokita risks being categorized as misery porn, so relentless are the horrors that befall its characters. Because of it, many have dismissed its qualities or described it as the Dardennes' angriest film, rightfully decrying the abhorrent circumstances European bureaucracy and anti-immigration policies inflict on some of society's most vulnerable.
And while there's truth to that last point, I'd argue it's also one of their gentlest exercises, always eager to find solace in the relationship between the characters, brother and sister by love rather than blood. That gentility extends to the camera's gaze, which is merciful in contrast with a world that has lost its humanity. Lokita's greatest indignities are implied but never shown, lost in elliptical cuts or communicated through sounds from off-screen sources. In that, the film represents the closest the brothers ever came to overtly Bressonian technique, structuring the tragedy around principles of negative space and storytelling economy, lingering on grace, never indignity.
Miraculously, there's space for beauty in Tori and Lokita, with cinematographer Benoît Dervaux delivering the best-looking Dardenne's project since their shift to digital. Camerawork is character work, finding harmony in the communion of Tori and Lokita while their experience apart tends to lean hard on restlessness and uncomfortable stillness respectively. Color is also crucial, primarily manifest in costume design and the use of artificial light to paint bright hues over the actors' faces. Pablo Schils' Tori is a blue flame, flying through the screen, while Mbundu Joely's Lokita is partial to reds and pinks, the warmth and vulnerability of an open wound. And just like a laceration, Tori and Lokita is painful to the touch. But trust, there's purpose to this pain.
Tori and Lokita is streaming on Kanopy and the Criterion Channel. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
MEEK'S CUTOFF (2011) Kelly Reichardt
Few critical clichés mean less to me or are more annoying than complaints about plotlessness. Not every filmmaker wants to tell a story, so why should they? Sometimes, cinema can be about movement and playing with the senses. It can be about abstract ideas given audiovisual expression, about gazing at the unknown, or time and place in their most essential forms. It can be so many things that the mind reels at its possibilities and the shackles so many film lovers lock themselves into. Free yourself from the tyranny of narrative, I say. Accept the forsaking of dramatic principles as a valid artistic choice and you'll discover so much more to love about cinema. Expand your horizons, people!
All this to say that, when I describe Meek's Cutoff as a picture where, ostensibly, nothing much happens, I'm not lambasting Kelly Reichardt's first go at period filmmaking. Quite the contrary. Because, to some extent, the absence of narrative progression or narrativity altogether is the point. Being lost is the point, as that's the fate befalling a group of settlers traversing the Oregon Trail in 1845, led by an untrustworthy guide in what seems to be a meandering road to nowhere. Questions of rightful authority come about, as does a keen study on the values and way of thinking that prevailed among such people at this particular juncture of American history. All this should seem familiar, but Reichardt's haptic approach and further denial of anachronism produce an alienating watch. It feels wrong.
Whatever nostalgia one might expect is culled from the first Academy Ratio frame, an immediate contradiction of cinematic comforts. After all, since Hollywood abandoned the 4:3 format, few genres have been more defined by widescreen composition than the Western. There are grand vistas in Meek's Cutoff, but they're not meant to be looked upon in awe or inspire wonder at the land. The lensing invites something closer to existential terror, emphasizing the sky above and the barren earth below, entrapping the human figures in the boundless outdoors. Coupled with a soundscape that smothers with ambient noise, you get an oppressive feel that slips under the skin, into bone and marrow. The disquiet is absolute, and there's no way to escape it.
Not even the film's ending, since Reichardt's got a nasty bit of inconclusion on hand to rattle her audience one last time before the credits roll. Hard to pin down and deliberately frustrating, this slippery marvel of Meek's Cutoff is near immaculate in construction and very close to the top of its director's filmography. And when the cineaste in question is one of the most vital artists working in contemporary American cinema, that's saying a lot. My only note, the only thing keeping me from calling this a stone-cold five-star masterpiece, is the modernity Reichardt lets slip into some of her players' performances. It works to great effect in Bruce Greenwood's case but strikes me as a minor misstep when applied to the other actors. Oh well, even the masters among us are only human.
Meek's Cutoff is streaming on Fandor, Fawesome, Hoopla, Kanopy, MUBI, Peacock, and Pluto TV. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, the Microsoft Store, and Fandango at Home.
So, it's pretty obvious that Bi Gan's Resurrection is my most anticipated film out of Cannes. But what about you, dear reader? Share your answer in the comments.
Reader Comments (2)
I'm so uncivilised I haven't seen any of these but have seen Final Destination 1 - 5.
Mr Ripley79 -- There's space for all sorts of cinema. I did a FINAL DESTINATION marathon before seeing the latest one a couple of weeks ago and had a whole lot of fun. Really love the second movie.