Cannes: "Fjord" brings Cristian Mungiu back to the moral gray zone

by Elisa Giudici

FJORD from Cristian Mungiu

Cristian Mungiu has built an entire career around moral instability, yet Fjord feels particularly thorny. The Romanian filmmaker’s latest Cannes Competition entry begins as a family drama rooted in a real-life custody case before gradually revealing itself as something much larger and far more uncomfortable: a film about the impossibility of reconciling competing moral systems inside supposedly enlightened societies. The Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker has turned  a real-life custody case into a sprawling and deeply unsettling drama about multiculturalism, religion, and the limits of liberal tolerance.

Fjord reunites A Different Man stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a  Romanian father and his Norwegian wife (a deeply religious Catholic missionary)...

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Cannes at Home: Masturbation, Motherhood and Melodrama

by Cláudio Alves

Long before he was selected for the Cannes Main Competition, Rodrigo Sorogoyen became an Oscar nominee with his MOTHER short film.

The race for the Palme is heating up… is what you’d assume we’d be saying by the time half the Main Competition had screened. However, this year isn’t like most years at Cannes. Or maybe, it’s an edition where issues that have prevailed for years are finally becoming too noticeable to politely ignore. Thierry Frémaux’s favorite auteurs aren’t bringing it, and most of the biggest critical darlings are showing in parallel sections – think La Gradiva, Kurosawa’s first jidaigeki, Clarissa’s transposition of Mrs. Dalloway to Nigeria and various others. Indeed, Hirokazu Koreeda is receiving the worst reviews of his illustrious career for Sheep in the Box, while Rodrigo Sorogoyen can’t stop drawing depreciative Sentimental Value comparisons because of his The Beloved. Finally, James Gray’s Paper Tiger is proving divisive, which is business as usual for the American auteur.

With those cineastes in mind, let’s revisit Koreeda’s Air Doll about a sex doll magically come to life, Sorogoyen’s agonizing Mother, and one of Gray’s best films, the fraternal melodrama We Own the Night…

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Cannes at Home: Big Names Before Their Big Break

by Cláudio Alves

Did the film student who directed PASSION dream he'd one day be a Palme d'Or frontrunner?

The 79th Cannes Film Festival continues to unfold on the French Riviera, and things aren’t looking great for Fremaux and his team of programmers. Some of the most acclaimed titles are premiering in parallel sections, while the Main Competition keeps delivering mixed stuff or provoking outright negative reactions. Asghar Farhadi has probably never received worse notices than the ones he’s getting for Parallel Tales, and even something like Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, which looked like a slam-dunk triumph going by pre-fest expectations, is struggling to gather the sort of universal critical praise most had predicted for it. Our own Elisa Giudicci loves it, but the consensus isn’t there yet. And let’s not even discuss Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster, whose every element seems to be open for savage criticism apart from Léa Seydoux’s performance. Well, at least, we have Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose All of a Sudden has inspired a fair amount of “masterpiece,” even though a few naysayers also have showered it with such epitaphs as “long, slow, boring.”

With that in mind, let’s look away from lackluster new works and consider these directors’ pasts, before their big breaks. Think Pawlikowski before Ida and his drift away from British cinema, Farhadi before A Separation and his European misadventures, Hamaguchi before Happy Hour and Drive My Car and the Oscar, Kreutzer before Corsage…

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Cannes: "Hope" is Korea's Biggest Swing Yet Toward the Box Office Canon

by Elisa Giudici

There’s something genuinely startling about seeing the sprawling sci-fi epic Hope in Competition at Cannes. Not because genre films are unwelcome on the Croisette anymore; that battle has largely been wo. The surprise is that Na Hong-jin’s film embraces blockbuster language so wholeheartedly. This is not elevated horror masquerading as arthouse cinema, nor a restrained science-fiction allegory carefully calibrated for festival audiences. Hope is loud, enormous, messy, violent, and frequently exhilarating entertainment. It's a film with giant creatures, extended chase sequences, exploding buildings, machine guns, and a level of visual maximalism that feels almost aggressively unconcerned with prestige filmmaking etiquette...

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Cannes: Paweł Pawlikowski is Palmę-ready with "Fatherland"

by Elisa Giudici

Pawel Pawlikowski has always been a filmmaker of absence. Empty space, withheld emotion, silence so heavy it seems architectural: his cinema has long depended less on what characters say than on what lingers unresolved between them. Fatherland may be the purest expression of that sensibility, a film reduced to such an essential form that it almost appears to vanish while unfolding, only to return afterward with quiet, devastating force.

At first, it can seem unexpectedly modest by the standards of, say, Cold War. Fatherland is less sweeping, less immediately transporting. But the images begin resurfacing hours later. A corridor swallowed by shadow, a pause stretched slightly too long. A father and daughter speaking with perfect intelligence while emotionally disintegrating in front of one another. Pawlikowski has refined his cinema here into something severe and distilled, and the result is extraordinary...

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