Dir: Miguel Gomes | Cast: Crista Alfaiate, Gonçalo Waddington, Cláudio da Silva, Lang Khê Tran | Fantasy drama 129′

Sashaying between past and future, documentary and drama this tender tension-tinged travelogue captures the glory days of Colonial times and the delicate exotic mystique of the Orient, at a time when it was still full of grace. 

Grand Tour is unique, a plot-free tale of doomed love and betrayal blends seamlessly with a beguiling black and white kaleidoscope of swirling images reminiscing on the past. Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes, in his first time Palme d’Or entry, gives life to his own brand of cinema: dreamlike, quirky and romantically absurd, in similar vein to his 2012 feature Tabu . 

Surrender yourself to this timeless reverie set in Southeast Asia around 1918, where Goncalo Waddington’s English civil servant Edward has caddishly fled Rangoon on his wedding day. His dogged fiancée of seven years Molly (Crista Alfaiate) pursues him peripatetically despite his feet of clay.

Laughing childishly whenever his name comes up in conversation Molly is clearly in de-Nile on the Yangtze river as they glide effortlessly through ‘Burma’, Singapore, Tibet, Bangkok, Vietnam, Shanghai and Chengdu in a parallel continental odyssey all crafted in grainy black and white. 

Niche in the extreme this is a diaphanous patchwork of a film may not appeal to everyone as it floats in filigree on the silver screen. It tells of an era of heady romance and adventure for Colonial types when the world was still an enticing oyster to discover. Now and then, the recent past surfaces through a crevice in the old world with modern music – a crooner sings in a crowded bar in Manila as modern motorbikes circle incessantly in the centre of ‘Saigon’.

At one point Molly is courted by a wealthy landowner (Cláudio da Silva) who offers her sanctuary when she falls ill. Here in this idyll, deep in the tropical jungle, she bonds with his servant Ngoc (Lang Khê Tran) and they decide to embark on an ill-advised journey North. Discover Grand Tour and immerse yourself in the mind-bending potential of the Orient. A fabulous film quite unlike any other. Quintessential Gomes. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | Winner BEST DIRECTOR

Doc, Romania 103’

Anyone who remembers Ilie Nastase, the talented Romanian tennis player who entertained us in the 1970s with his Wimbledon antics, will enjoy this new documentary directed by his fellow countrymen Tudor Giurgiu, Cristian Pascariu and Tudor D. Popescu. premiering at this year’s Special Screenings section of Cannes the feature should have widespread interest for sports lovers everywhere so garnering a younger audience.

Nastase was a polarising figure, to say the least, and we see him winning his first US Open, qualifying for both Wimbledon and the Davis Cup finals, and generally blazing an eventful trail to the top of his game and so gaining a place in the annals of tennis history.

Ranked world number one player in 1973 ‘Nasty’ cut a colourful figure in every match he played but his provocative pathway was fraught with trials and tribulations. So he certainly broke the mould with his fractious behaviour and mercurial temperament laced with a dash of cheekiness. The Romanian player’s endearing charisma and dusky good looks went on to capture the public’s hearts and minds.

This is an enjoyable film chockfull of memorable footage from the archives and incisive commentary from tennis stars: John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Billie Jean King, Björn Borg, Stan Smith, and more recent players such as Boris Becker and Rafael Nadal. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 

Director: Michel Hazanavicius Cast: Dominique Blanc, Gregory Gadebois, Denis Podalydes, Jean-Louis Trintignant | Animation, 71′ hour 21 minutes

To be considered ‘de nos jours’ every film festival must now include a film about trans people, sex workers, immigration, racism and the Holocaust – so The Most Precious of Cargoes was this year’s Palme d’Or hopeful on that theme

French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, of Lithuanian heritage, rose to the international stage with his Oscar-winning film The Artist (2011) and thence to Redoubtable (2017) and this year’s Cannes Film Festival with this painterly wartime animation. Adapted from the book by Jean-Claude Grumberg The Most Precious of Cargoes tells the story of a Jewish baby who survives against the odds.

Narrated by the late French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and voiced by a sterling French cast this appealing fable turns on a miracle with universal appeal: a father throws his baby daughter from the window of their slow-moving Auschwitz-bound train in the hope of a better future, the deep snow cushioning her landing.

In so many ways a holocaust of sorts is still unfolding on all over the world today. And the film once again touches on the ongoing debate about the extent we are all prepared to go to protect and further our own lives and interests for the benefit (as in this case) or at the expense of others.

Fortune shines on this little girl who becomes the pride and joy of a poor childless woodcutter and her burly husband deep in a snowbound forrest somewhere in East Europe during the 1940s. The film works on two levels: a simple story that ripples out into deeper territory, much in common with the Ghibli tradition which this year’s 77th Cannes Film Festival tributes. A cartoon format and childlike appeal has nevertheless fast-reaching implications, not least making kids aware of the horrors of displacement and the dangers that lie on their path ahead. This child is given a chance in life, and the woodcutter also gets an opportunity to fulfil her own motherly wishes and at the same time protect her living bundle from the authorities out to exterminate Jews. Meanwhile the girl’s family fades away into the background, supposedly dying in the gas chambers, with only the father reappearing, in the final act, as a ghost of his former self. The ending is enigmatic but actually offers hope for the future in a rather lovely finale.

Aesthetically the film is beautifully realised in softly glowing water-colours, each frame flowing into an often harrowing Holocaust adventure. But The Most Precious of Cargoes also tends on the didactic often sentimental side with a narrative that starts off with promise but doesn’t follow through with the same fluidity of its visual style. Despite these narrative flaws this is certainly a film for kids as well as adults, and a welcome a valuable addition to the Holocaust sub-genre. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos | Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer | Thriller, 162′

Yorgos Lanthimos selects a quality cast and has them star as different characters in three quirky interlocking stories. The first, a bizarre film that sets of this bemusing trio on the theme of control freakery, is the most watchable.

Here Willem Dafoe gets the upper hand as Raymond, a bossman who bankrolls and therefore holds sway over Jesse Plemons’ modest guy called Robert Fletcher. He gets to live in a modernist villa with his obliging wife (Hong Chau) courtesy of Raymond’s money, and is therefore totally in thrall to this control freak. He will do anything to make Raymond happy, and that gives the first segment its scary twist in the tale.

For those who prefer the Greek ‘weird wave’ director’s early fare such as Dogtooth and The Lobster, Kinds of Kindness will appeal, and reunites him with his co-writer on those projects, Efthimis Filippou. But the triptych of weird stories becomes increasingly so, often giving the impression that Lanthimos is just trying a little bit too hard to be perverse, just for the sake of it. 

The first part certainly has you glued to the screen – not least for its visual incongruousness. Plemons sports a polyester Windolene-coloured roll-neck that contrasts with his greasy carrot-coloured hair. It’s an enigmatic tale whose pieces gradually fall into place, and this was the segment I found most engrossing. 

From then on proceedings grow more dark, violent and unsavoury, but watching Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley and Emma Stone do their stuff in varying roles is always intriguing – even though countenancing this ghastliness for nearly three hours is stretching it a little bit, and you may feel yourself coming over all queer (in the old-fashioned sense of the word).

The titles of each story are built around the initials R.M.F. (played by Yorgos Stefanakos) who doesn’t really have much a role to speak of – in fact he doesn’t get to say anything – but is merely there to serve the narrative as the car crash victim Fletcher is supposed to kill in order to please Raymond, in a final act of submission.

Margot Qualley entertains us on the electric organ with “How Deep is Your Love” the twin theme to the trilogy. She is variously Raymond’s wife Vivian (Qualley) and then a vet with life-giving powers in the final story. Meanwhile Emma Stone is Rita, a glam optician who falls for Robert in the second part of the control-themed scenario. But the standout in Kinds of Kindness is Jesse Plemons who really comes into his own in the new Hollywood firmament pulling off an impressive range of performances; his final turn as Daniel, a flesh-eating policeman is the least appealing, but in a good way. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | Best Actor Award

Dir: Jessica Palud | Cast: Anamaria Vartolomei, Matt Dillon, Giuseppe Maggio, Céleste Brunnquell, Yvan Attal, Marie Gillian

Last Tango in Paris was certainly a ground-breaking film shocking audiences to the core back in 1972. A woman directs this new biopic about the abused French actress Maria Schneider, who at age of 19, landed a role alongside Marlon Brando in the Bertolucci film that would make her a star but also destroy her life.

Berlolucci wanted to make a film about two people, Jeanne and Paul, indulging in a sexual relationship without any trappings. They would meet regularly in room and just go from there. But, crucially, without asking or her consenting, the Italian director and his 48-year-old male star sprung an unscripted rape scene on the young woman asking for real ‘rage’ and ‘humiliation’. And that’s what happened. Even though sodomy never took place the fear and loss of control is devastating. And we feel for Maria even though Brando assures her: ‘it’s only a film’. She has seen him as a mentor only to be deceived. And even now, in the light of the #MeToo era, this sequence is particularly resonant.

Maria is from an educated if broken home: her father (Attal) is the seasoned actor Daniel Gerlin who has gone on to form another family after leaving home. Her volatile mother Marie-Christine (Gillain) throws her out of the house – quite literally – for reconnecting him after the two meet and reconnect on a film set in the opening sequence. The twice rejected Maria then moves in with her uncle, but is clearly damaged by her life experience thus far.

Being Maria is directed by Jessica Palud (who has a handful of directing titles behind her: Revenir, Les Yeux Fermes), and co-written with Laurette Polmanss, freely adapting the novel ‘Tu t’appelais Maria Schneider’ by Vanessa Schneider, Maria’s cousin, It paints a convincing portrait of this young woman desperate to forge a career in acting.

Encouraged by her father in this endeavour, she contacts an agent and then finds herself in a café where she meets Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio who authentically, like the director, doesn’t role his ‘r’s). He has picked her out for the fateful role. (‘roles chose actors, not the other way round’ says her father). But after the furore of that pivotal scene, which happens early on. The film has nothing more to say thereafter and unravels as does Maria’s life. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES PREMIERE

Dir: Ali Abassi | Script: Gabriel Sherman | Cast: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Ben Sullivan, Mark Rendall, Joe Pingue, Jim Monaco, Bruce | Biopic Drama, 120′

“You’re either a killer or a loser” is the advice a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) gets from his acerbic mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) in this polarising political biopic written by journalist Gabriel Sherman and directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abassi (Border) and Holy Spider (who is now perhaps best known for his involvement in The Last Of Us). 

Cohn, the lawyer responsible for putting the Rosenbergs on the electric chair and a key figure in the McCarthy witch hunts, offers up three key bits of business advice during The Apprentice – an entertaining romp that zips briskly through its two hours running time sketching out Trump’s early career as an eager apprentice trained under the high-flying lawyer, and eventually trumping him in a tale of machiavellian morals, ethics and business acumen.

There are elements of poetic licence at play here: in other words Sherman plays slightly fast and loose with the facts in fleshing out Trump’s backstory. The result is a fairly even-handed feature that on the one hand sees the US former president as cold-eyed and devious, but on the other opines that these are the very tools of the trade for those wanting to get on in big business – or politics, for that matter. Crucially it also highlights the recent concept of the truth being a construct open to individual perception.

The focus narrows in on Trump from a broad brush opening outlining the corruption of the Nixon years and the inherent dishonesty that is now rife in all circles of power, not least in America. It contrasts the ‘losers’ (those on welfare) with the killers, the ‘unscrupulous’ hard-working income generators during the Reagan presidency that led to the phenomenon of ‘corporate greed’.

The Apprentice sees Trump starting out during the 1970s working for his property magnate father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan). Dressed in a suit Donald is tasked with doing the rounds to collect rents. One disgruntled tenant throws a pan of boiling water in his face, another swears at him. The family business comes then under fire from a civil rights action alleging discrimination against Black tenants. Cohn wins the case, as his lawyer, with Trump senior claiming: “How can I be racist when I have a Black driver?”

But Donald is determined to make it alone and sets his sights on transforming the downtrodden area around Grand Central Station where he vows to make a success in a project of urban regeneration involving the dilapidated Commodore Hotel, bringing jobs, European tourists and a facelift for Manhattan.

Family wise we also meet Donald’s kindly mother Mary Anne (Catherine McNally), and his brother Freddy (Charlie Carrick) a failed pilot with emotional problems: Fred admits to having been tough on his boys. But Donald is hellbent on success and soon bonds with Cohn after a chance meeting at a fancy Manhattan nightclub frequented by the top flight business community. Working together they soon go from strength to strength in a business alliance with Trump styling himself in the same vein as Cohn with his fast-talking intransigence. His transformation into fully fledged killer who lives by his own standards happens almost overnight and feels a little too fast even given the film’s ample running time. But Stan grasps Trump’s essence charting his character’s transformation from reasonable business man to self-seeking  hardliner.

Trump soon becomes a man who takes his own advice often rubbing Cohn up the wrong way, while at the same time chosing to turn a blind eye to his ‘strange way of life’ and hedonistic habits. Trump’s puritan background sees him gradually distancing himself from the lawyer who berates him for his lack of financial probity. Their relationship eventually sours during the AIDS crisis, although Trump offers an olive branch in the finale.

The marriage to Ivana Zelnickova, against Cohn’s advice, is handled deftly and with some humour. Trump follows Ivana to Aspen to clinch their romance then falls flat on the ice after claiming to be a good skier. The Czech model is a little two sweet and sympathetic despite her purported savvy business sense, but Trump soon tires of her, claiming to find their home life ‘more like coming home to a business partner than a wife’. A shocking episode sees him beating Ivana, but whether this has a factual basis, despite his widely reported misogyny, is uncertain. Stan’s Trump may be polarise public opining in coming across as too likeable but this is surely the essence of a maverick who can charm as well as chastise and here he gives a compelling performance.

With a killer score of hits that just reeks of the ’70s and ’80 and a scuzzy retro texture this is an compulsive portrait of toxic narcissism even more relevant now than it was back in the day.  @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | THIS REVIEW FIRST APPEARED IN FINITOWORLD.com

Dir: Emma Benestan | France, Fantasy thriller 101′

Experience the dizzying bull run at Saints-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue and you’ll understand the sheer terror pulsating through the crowd when the bulls are released from the arena to run wild through the streets, commandeered only by a group of bareback riders.

After training at La Femis in Paris, Algerian filmmaker Emma Benestan honed her craft as assistant editor on the 2013 Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Colour. And her feature debut, a neon-tinged neo western, captures the rush of adrenaline and fizzing energy of the bull run fusing it into a surreal bovine thriller that joins the sub-genre of women triumphing in a male dominated ‘world’. Conceived as a supernatural fable Animale blends classic body horror with a potent revenge piece imbued with the spirit of Palme d’Or winner Titane ,The Eagle Huntress and Zahori all rolled into one dynamic piece of filmmaking.

In a cast of newcomers and established actors, breakout talent Oulaya Amamra plays Nejma, a 22-year-old woman keen to make her mark in the macho bullfighting corrida, and to this endeavour trains fearlessly in the bullring and afterwards endures a night of heavy drinking with the boys. Waking the following morning Nejma suffers more than just a post-binge hangover. Her whole body feels strangely transformed. Then comes that news that some of the experienced guys have been found dead, and a rogue bull is on the loose.

The struggle with the bulls come to represent Nejma’s battle to be accepted as a woman, albeit a tough one. The bulls can be fierce and frightening when riled but they are also creatures capable of a certain sensitivity, and strangely seem to empathise with their female trainer. Nejma’s own feminine quality is seen in the bulls’ latent soulfulness that DoP Ruben Impens captures again and again in their frightened gaze. Animale is a novel and atmospheric feature that marks Benestan out as a talented auteur. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CRITICS WEEK 2024

Dir: Lorcan Finnegan | Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak, Rahel Romahn, Finn Little, Charlotte Maggi | Australia/Ireland, Fantasy thriller 99’

Nicolas Cage seems to be enjoying his current screen persona: a decent family man who becomes increasingly disturbed and emasculated. In Lorcan Finnegan’s latest film, a psychological buddy thriller premiering at Cannes Film Festival, Cage is a harried, ego-driven dad hellbent on revenge: Australian set-psychodramas  Long Weekend (1978) and Wake in Fright (1971) will both spring to mind in tone and intensity.

Set in beachside Australia, possibly Perth, this is a film about masculine pride and ego. But what starts as a plausible concept thriller soon drifts into much darker (more disgusting) territory and eventually grows tedious with its rather sad commentary on the male of the species.

Cage kicks off in a Lexus – hardly emblematic of success, – but that’s what it’s billed as here. His son in tow, he’s aiming to buy the house on the coast where he grew up as a killer surfer. But the locals, a pack of butch beach bums, don’t want him here. Father and son make their way down to the beach where they are confronted with the local gang of thuggish surfers, led on by Scally (Julian McMahon) who tells them to sling a hook, or a surfboard for that matter, and get the hell out of there.

Thus begins Cage’s descent into Hell. Beset by oncoming failure: his loss of face with his son, a failure to secure his dream property, and even the theft of his brogues, Cage turns his anger on the world at large – and the focus is the Bay Boys. What a pathetic sight he becomes, and in some ways we feel for him in a series of things that go impossibly awry: All these feelings of angst are reflected by the local flora and fauna: a cawing Kookaburra, a vicious scorpion, a rabid dog, the merciless sun that bakes down on the now delusional, dehydrated dad.

And his loss of self-esteem stares back at him in the negative attitudes of those around. Rather like Polanski’s character in The Tenant, he starts to doubt himself in a self-persecuting masculine meltdown. Sadly Finnegan’s finale doesn’t quite reach a satisfactory outcome, lost in mixed messages and bravado, but The Surfer is worth watching for Cage alone. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Christophe Honoré Cast: Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Fabrice Luchini, Nicole Garcia, Benjamin Biolay, Melvil Poupaud, Hugh Skinner, Stefania Sandrelli | France, Drama 120′

A girl wakes up one day feeling a bit sorry for herself and decides to dress up like her late father in this starry, soft-hearted nepo-baby flick from French director Christophe Honore.

Of course Chiara is no ordinary girl, she is the likeable daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni and her penthouse apartment overlooks Paris’ Tour Montparnasse. After turning up for a casting in a new film, the director (Nicole Garcia) asks her to play her role “more like Mastroianni than Deneuve.” And this sets Chiara contemplating the past in a film imbued with the spirit of Paris, and of French and Italian cinema.

Clearly more like her father than her mother Chiara decides to take on Marcello’s famous guise from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, chopping off her hair and donning a black tailored suit to take a trip down memory lane – speaking Italian – for her role in a film that poses everlasting questions but never really lives up to its high-concept premise instead playing out in a series of jokey vignettes, musical interludes and reveries.

Catherine Deneuve looks proudly on as Chiara is mentored by Fabrice Luchini, schmoozes ex lover Melvil Poupaud, parties with musician Benjamin Biolay and hooks up with a ginger-haired Spaniel padding through the nighttime streets of Paris where she also bumps into Hugh Skinner’s lovelorn British soldier taking time out from his NATO barracks (that’s the film’s fascinating revelation – and qualifies its entry in the Queer Palme competition). Fizzing with fun and nostalgia this is a lovely little film but Palme d’Or material?. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Guy Maddin, Evan & Galen Johnson | Canada 118′

Cult Canadian director Guy Maddin is an auteur in his own right with an eclectic stash of avant-garde films under his belt and loyal fanbase. Recently he joined forces with Evan and Galen Johnson and here joins them for a curious pulp horror outing worth seeing only for its stellar cast.

It all starts off rather straighforwardly in a lakeside gazebo in the grounds of a German castle at a G7 conference hosted by Kate Blanchett’s spritely president Helga Ortmann. She is joined by Denis Menochet (for France); Charles Dance (bizarrely for the US) a pigtailed and horny Roy Dupuis (Canada); Nikki Amuka-Bird (the UK) Italys’ Rolando Ravello and Takehiro Kira (Japan) who gather to work on a crisis paper until proceedings take a deep dive into Dr Strangelove territory.

During their arrival Ortmann has proudly showed the heads of state the recently discovered remains of a prehistoric body perfectly preserved in a nearby peat bog. And this atavistic relic gives rise to a strange turn of events that doesn’t quite live up to expectations. But never mind about that, the cast makes this a worthwhile, if overlong, watch with some witty exchanges. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS 2024

Dir/Wri: David Cronenberg | Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt | Canada 119′

In David Cronenberg’s latest sci-fi love story a grief-stricken man mourns the loss of his wife. But was he more obsessed with her body than her mind? Sexual desire is just one of the themes in this macabre but melancholy thriller. On his return to Cannes after Crimes of the Future, the Canadian director mulls over psychosomatics, freewill, life after death and the  power of Al in a filmic hotchpotch of complex and avantgarde ideas. Exciting to watch but needlessly convoluted in its plotline.

Here Vincent Cassel is France’s answer to Vincent Price: the chiselled cheek bones, haughty gaze, powerful physicality, penetrating blue eyes and shock of white hair make for a creepy cemetery entrepreneur who goes by the name of Karsh Relikh, an atheist who believes in the afterlife, but is also surprisingly vulnerable. The death of his wife Bekka has been a body blow, so much so that his teeth are actually rotting in response to the anguish (according to his dentist): he hasn’t had sex since her death four years previously, although this celibate status will be short-lived. Bekka leaves an almost identical sister Terry in the shape of Diane Kruger who deftly takes on both roles.

Weirdly it takes Karsh nearly the entire film to discover that Bekka’s body is what he misses most and he admits to experiencing a visceral desire to have been interred with her. And so he takes ‘great comfort’ in watching her corpse slowly decompose after burial in a “shroud” lined with multiple X-ray cameras. Bekka also visits him in her dreams complete with mastectomy scars. And when he finds out that their relationship was not as exclusive as he imagined, the jealousy is destructive. Meanwhile his limp brother in law Maury (Guy Pearce), is also emotionally unhinged by his divorce from Terry, and is trying to get his own back on Karsh for enigmatic reasons. Cronenberg envelopes his various themes into this simple story of sorrow and sadness.

Ultimately The Shrouds seems to serve as a cinematic valedictory to Cronenberg’s own wife who died of cancer several years ago. It has the same cold beauty as his recent works but none of the dark humour of his early films. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Leos Carax | With: Denis Lavant, Nastya Golubeva Carax, Anna-Isabel Siefken, Bianca Maddaluno, Kateryna Yuspina, Loreta Juodkaite, Peter Anevskii | Short 41′

Fans expecting a nice traditional potted portrait of the maverick Paris-born filmmaker’s life C’est Pas Moi will be disappointed.

Predictably Leos Carax steers clear of a straightforward narrative to offer an artful, multi-faceted collage of his four decade career. That all said, this self-portrait is both mesmerising and tantalising in the true style of the director himself, blending a pot pourri of the experimental, psychedelic and personal that echoes – even pays tribute to – his fellow countryman Jean-Luc Godard in films like The Image Book.

The project was intended to be shown as an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre a few years ago where the organisers has asked him to respond to the simple question: “Who are you?”. So Carax (aka Alex Christophe Dupont, 1960-) answers enigmatically but cinematically with a montage of exuberant images that channel his life and art.

Accordingly It’s Not Me, is a mixture of everything that appeals to him  – from the Hollywood firmament to his own films like Holy Motors, Annette and Les Amants de Pont Neuf; snippets from family photos (but not of his estranged mother), snaps of his one time lover Juliette Binoche, his pets, actors he has worked with, like Denis Lavant and fellow directors Jean Vigo and even David Bowie. It’s Not Me is a real visual panoply but Carax is nowhere to be seen: He remains Mr Enigma. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

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Dir: Emanuel Parvu. Romania. Drama. 104 mins.

The past and the present collide in this straightforward Romanian melodrama, a third feature for filmmaker/actor Emanuel Parvu, and his first time in the main competition at the 77th Edition of Cannes Film Festival.

17-year-old Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea) is back from Bucharest to spend the summer with his God-fearing parents in their idyllic painted wooden house on the edge of the Danube. The young man has everything going for him: looks, intelligence and a good start in life. Until he suffers a savage attack on the way to the village disco, the future looked bright.

The action unfolds in a simple chronological way with strong performances all round: you may recognise Adi’s father Bogdan Dumitrache from his brilliant performance in Spiral and A Decent Man. This is Chiujdea’s feature debut and he feels convincing as a young man determined to get on in life despite his overbearing mother (Laura Vasiliu).

Shocked at the severity of Adi’s wounds his parents decide to file a complaint with the local police. But this is a small, tightly-knit community and the culprit is soon identified as the son of another local man to whom the father owes money. What also emerges is that this is a gay-bashing. And it doesn’t there with bitter repercussions as the parents remain in denial of their son’s sexuality, blaming his life in the big city, and hoping that a spell in a monastery will ‘sort him out’.

The story has its twists and turns which often feel rather uneventful but gain resonance in Parvu and his co-writer Miruna Berescu’s clever script. Three Kilometres is also made all the more watchable by the enchanting settings and some superb limpid visuals that create a real wonderland of this rural paradise in the Danube Delta, a throwback in time. @MeredithTaylor.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir/Wri: Andrea Arnold. UK/France. Drama, 119 mins

A slice of social grit soaked in the English countryside and served up with a dash of magical realism is the best way to describe this latest feature from Andrea Arnold.

Set in her native Kent on the fringes of Gravesend on the Thames estuary Bird makes multiple visual references to its avian-themed title but also features butterflies, bees, horses, foxes and dogs along with a cast of British actors, a German, Franz Rogowski, being the standout. He plays the titular hero Bird, a charismatic wayfarer who will soon come to represent everything decent and honourable in this squalid corner of broken Britain.

Arnold’s Cow, a devastating documentary portrait of a dairy farming in the 21st century, came to Cannes Film Festival several years ago but went home empty-handed. Bird stands to gain more leverage due to its international stars Rogowski, and Barry Keoghan who plays Bug, a selfish, tattooed layabout who fathered a kid (Hunter) at fourteen, and is now set to be a granddad and an accidental father to his savvy young daughter Bailey (Nykiya Adams in a stunning debut).

Apart from the animals, Bird is a chaotically poetic film full of music, dancing and fighting (courtesy of its male contingent). Coldplay, Fontaines D.C. and Sophie Ellis-Bextor all feature in a rambling storyline that centres on twelve-year-old Bailey who lives in a dingy seaside flat with Bug and her slightly older brother Hunter (Jason Edward Buda) who is also heading for teenage fatherhood. None appear to do a day’s work or have anything approaching a job. Bug’s plan is to harness the slime of his recently purchased Colorado River toad which exudes a pricey hallucinogen he can flog on the black market.

So Bailey is forced to make her own life until she befriends Bird after falling asleep in a field full of daisies beside the M2 – and these scenes are particularly gorgeous to look at; Arnold knows how to ‘smell the roses’ cinematically-speaking and Bird is a film that takes itself slowly along the byroads, alighting on nature in all its summery beauty as well as the dregsville domestic interiors, not to mention bodily functions. Is Bird for real? – at one point Bailey gives him a Chinese burn just to check, but he’s the nearest thing to a decent bloke she’s ever come across and so begins their subtle love affair.

Arnold’s 2009 feature Fish Tank embarked on a similar scenic journey for its lost heroine but this time the English filmmaker heads in an unexpectedly new and inspired direction, and this really makes the film special although thematically we’re on traditional territory. The handheld camera may leave you in a daze but that’s all part of the slightly unreal life these drifters lead. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

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Dir: Francis Ford Coppola | US Drama 120′

This ambitious undertaking, forty years in the making, should have been called ‘Magaflopolis’. Ok it’s easy to criticise, but a veteran director such as Ford Coppola has a duty to his audience: not to confuse them, or bore them rigid for over two hours – but that’s exactly what he does in this over-inflated piece of filmmaking that masquerades as an inspired satire.

Megalopolis is pretentious and posturing and ultimately vacuous. Discombobulating images continuously flash before our eyes along with a talented cast of Hollywood’s best. But there wasn’t a scene or a performance I enjoyed as the actors all seem caught up in the grandiosity of it all in displaying the worst traits of each sex. The women were grasping and bitchy. The men arrogant and ego-driven, in fact, Jon Voight was the only one with a shred of vulnerability and a cheeky grin of playfulness as canny banker Hamilton Crassus III with Aubrey Plaza hamming it up as his lover Wow Platinum. Meanwhile Shia LaBeouf is cast as his curious and corrupt trans-looking grandson Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf).

Coppola aims high, as he should do, but the film feels like an flashback to the 1980s, all gilded, burnished and blundering like a fancy-dress school play of Shakespeare with a sci-fi makeover that somehow looks old-fashioned in the scheme of contemporary special effects: the actors poncing around and quoting their literary lines in the hope this will give some integrity to what is really a confounding mess.

Adam Driver is the main character: he plays Cesar Catilina, a Nobel prize-winning ‘starchitect’ who is still recovering from the death of his wife, who he purportedly murdered: The jury is still out on this ambiguous plot line. Apparently he has invented a substance called Megalon which makes the building process more flexible. He intends to re-design and re-build parts of the city in a utopian scheme. Also tenuous is his mysterious control over time and space (?). Aubrey Plaza is fabulously vociferous as his long-term blond lover all done up in leopard skin with roots as dark as Kunta Kinte (she’s a busy woman romantically – it seems – as she also has a clinch with Clodio not to mention Crassus). But then Cesar falls for Julia the bland daughter of Cicero (Esposito) the city’s mayor (and his arch rival) who is all about noble things like decent pay, sanitation, new schools and hospitals. Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) is all about ‘creating a home’ and these various factions come into conflict with each other: the creative, forward-thinking and the social-minded face of urban existence.

There are some inspiring elements: Driver and Emmanuel riding a sort of watch face that floats over Manhattan. I seem to have forgotten the others. But the idea that America is still great gradually fades with hollow laughter. Brazen, brash and bloated this is a step too far. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Louise Courvoisier | France, Drama 90’

A joyful, earthy coming of age film about one of the most important things in life: Good food.

Holy Cow is also a first feature for Courvoisier who makes her debut along with lead actor Clément Favreau in this year’s Un Certain Regard sidebar.

In the Limousin dairy farmer’s son Totone (Clement Favreau) lives a carefree existence until his father’s sudden death forces him to grow up quickly and take charge of a younger sister (Luna Garret).

Landing a job in a neighbouring farm making cheese has its complications. First of all the farmer’s son is his love rival and Totone gets beaten up on day one. Then the cheese-making machinery gets the better of him. Worse of all, work starts at 4am and his sister must be taken to school.

But Totone is determined. And we get a crash course in the fine art of Comte cheese-making into the bargain. And when Totone meets fellow farmer Marie Lise (Barthélémy) they make a natural team with some dramatic heft provided by a heifer. But predictably the course of true love doesn’t run smoothly.

With a lively upbeat score and some lush rural cinematography Holy Cow is a breakout bucolic hit with a range of naturalistic performances from Clement Favreau and his fellow cast in an impressive feature debut. @MeredithTaylor 

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | UN CERTAIN REGARD 2024

Dir: Magnus Von Horn | Cast: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri, Ava Knox Martin | Sweden, Drama

After training at the world famous film school in Lodz (Poland), Swedish director Magnus von Horn soon won international recognition in 2020 with his confident first feature Sweat a slick and scathing satire on social media celebrity.

The Girl with the Needle couldn’t be more different in tone or style but the theme is the same – sort of. A relentlessly grim atmosphere pervades this Palme d’Or hopeful, another tale of female empowerment turn of the century-style. This time set in 1919 Copenhagen where the macabre shadow and privations of the First World War still hang over Europe, affecting Denmark even though they were neutral.

Here a young girl called Karoline (Carmen Sonne) becomes reliant on all the help she can get after her husband Peter (Zeciri) disappears, suspected of being caught up in the hostilities. Karoline tries to apply for a widow’s pension but because Peter has not been technically declared dead she falls foul of the rules, according to Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), the owner of the garment factory where she fetches up and whose needle give the film its gruesome title. She is soon pregnant by Jorgen who has no intention of marrying her.

Enter Dagmar (Dyrholm) a benevolent shopkeeper who purportedly helps poor mothers to find foster homes for their unwanted babies. The two bond and Karoline agrees, somewhat reluctantly, to become a wet-nurse, until it soon emerges that there is a terrible secret behind this work.

Unfolding in pristine black and white – and DoP Michal Dymek does a great job visually along with set designer Jagna Dobesz  – this is a full blown horror story with all the hallmarks of Robert Lynn’s Dr Crippen (1963) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931) not to mention Dickens or The Brothers Grimm (but this is no fairy tale). The echoing, plangent soundscape and special effects – a series of leering faces that morph from a smirk to a gurning glower –  are really sinister while feeling totally in keeping with an era fraught with human death and destruction in the trenches.  Carmen Sonne and Dyrholm, really plummet the depths of Hell to dredge up these two ghastly women: one forced, through force of circumstance, to be dreadful; the other evil incarnate.

Needles become a metaphor for the pain and suffering that they deliver throughout the film: whether it be morphine, ether or an abortion attempt. Peter soon reappears maimed and disfigured and wearing a mask and unable to eat without making disgusting noises. Another ghastly character is Dagmar’s seven-year-old ‘daughter’ Erena (Knox Martin) another evil concoction – a blond female answer to Damien from Omen II. Not for the feint of heart and certainly not for those frightened of needles. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Quentin Dupieux | Cast: Lea Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, Raphael Quenard | France Comedy | 80′

Best known for his ‘zany’ comedies (The Deerskin, Incredible But True) writer director Quentin Dupieux gets the opening slot at this year’s 77th Edition of the CANNES FILM FESTIVAL with his latest The Second Act that follows a group of bored actors on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The task here is trying to make their boredom funny, and Dupieux doesn’t quite pull it off.

The film stars Lea Seydoux, Vincent Lindon and Louis Garrel (who has recently turned his talents to comedy) and the action revolves in the confines of The Second Act, a diner in the middle of nowhere, where Garrel is David, the love interest of Seydoux’s character Florence who is keen to introduce him to her father (Lindon) as ‘the man of her life’. Problem is, David doesn’t really fancy her and tries to get his friend Willy (Quenard) involved. But Willy isn’t convinced.

When they all eventually sit down together the bickering continues between their characters in the film being made and the actors they play in the actual film. There’s an inspired scene where the waiter (Manuel Guillot), clearly a lonely depressive, tries to serve them an expensive Cote du Rhone, but, due to stage fright, manages to spill it everywhere but in the glasses.

The Second Act is occasionally funny and Dupieux’s script full of good ideas and topical themes such as sexuality and racism and also touching on more contemporary subjects like the emergence of AI for budget filmmaking, and the late arrival to the French film industry of cancel culture and the #MeToo movement. But Dupieux just doesn’t know how to bring this all together into a story with a dramatic arc that leads to a satisfactory denouement. Ultimately the film outstays its welcome in a series of amusing skits brilliantly performed by a talented cast who eventually run out of steam with their laborious, receptive dialogues. A missed opportunity with some fun moments. @MeredithTaylor 

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | OPENING FILM 2024

Dir: Montxo Armendariz | Spain, Drama 93′

A young man grows up in the rural surroundings of Spain’s Navarra region in Armendar’s poignant ethnographical portrait of working lives that echoes Victor Erice’s  El Sur, created two years previously.

Armendáriz adopts a meditative approach to his minimalist depiction of Tasio’s powerfully visceral world that comes to life in Jose Luis Alcaine’s incandescent camerawork. Spare of dialogue yet speaking volumes, the film shows how Tasio ekes out a modest existence making charcoal. It’s a slow-burning (quite literally!) and arduous process: wood is piled into enormous mounds and then set alight  as it gradually smoulders into a sooty mound of dense black remains. Tasio, the `carbonero’, pokes and prods the mass making sure it gets just enough just air to continue its process in a centuries old cottage industry that still exists in parts of Spain.

The film was shot on the borders of the Basque Country (Euskadi), in the extreme west of Navarra (Navarre) around the villages of Aranarache, Eulate, Urra, Baquedano and Zudaire, villages forming the area known as Améscoa not far from the bosky slopes of the Sierra de Urbasa. A simple but noble look at times gone by. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES CLASSICS 2024

Dir: Laetitia Dosch | Cast: Laetitia Dosch, Anabela Moreira, Anne Dorval, Francois Damiens, Pierre Deladonchamps | France, Comedy 83′

Laetitia Dosch first came to Cannes in Leonor Serraille’s Golden Camera winning Jeune Femme (2017). Here she stars in her own confident first feature as an animal rights lawyer determined to fight for her client, a recidivist dog.

Based on a true story, the comedy satire takes place in a small Swiss town where Maitre Avril Lucciani (Dosch) is a sucker for lost causes; much to the annoyance of her barrister colleague (Deladonchamps). We first meet the two of them in a cafe where he is complaining about Avril’s lousy track record. He meanwhile makes no excuse for misogynistic comments in extolling the virtues of a recent trip to Italy (“the women are amazing, their breasts are like fruit waiting to be picked – and they give wonderful blowjobs”!). The pace here is brisk and the humour eye-wateringly outré in the style of French comedian Blanche Gardin. 

The next day Avril predictably takes on another lost cause: that of Cosmos, a dog who has bitten several people and is now being sued by a Portuguese cleaner (Moreira), and her barrister played by Anne Dorval. Cosmos’ owner (Damiens) clearly has a screw loose but Avril is convinced by her argument that dogs should have just as many rights as humans. She pleads that Cosmos is not ‘a thing’ but ‘an individual’ who also has needs (and here she illustrates with the dog’s need to pee). Meanwhile the prosecution claims the animal should be put down. Noisy courtroom scenes jostle with filmed footage of street demonstrations and contemplative domestic settings where Avril reflects on her ability to fight for her cause.

Dosch’s arguments are well thought out and she doesn’t look for easy answers in a pithy dark comedy co-written with Anne-Sophie Bailly. What starts as a satire lampooning animal welfare and the French legal system soon ripples out into the thornier territory of street violence, casual misogyny, racism and even trivial consumer concerns. Going from strength to strength, Dosch clearly now has a talent for comedy in her tightly scripted debut that never outstays its welcome @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CAMERA D’OR | UN CERTAIN REGARD 2024 |

PALM DOG WINNER 2024 IN CANNES

SENIOR STRAY KODI SCOOPS TOP PRIZE FOR

SWISS-FRENCH COMEDY DOG ON TRIAL

GRAND JURY PRIZE GOES TO LITTLE XIN IN CHINESE DRAMA BLACK DOG

77th CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 14 – 26 MAY 2024 |

Dir: Elias Belkeddar | Cast: Reda Kateb, Benoit Magimel, Meriem Amiar, R’Mimez, Chahine Beriah, Mourad Khan

Benoit Magimel and Reda Kateb star in this artful crime caper as a couple of French gangsters on the run in Algiers.

Omar la Fraise (Kateb) has just received a 20 year prison sentence, and his only way of escape is retreating to Algeria where he hopes to lie low with his partner in crime Roger (Magimel in his louche comedy guise honed in Pacifiction and his third appearance at this year’s Cannes Film Festival).

The close friends take up residence in a palatial villa on the coast, and Omar – in the pretence of turning over a new leaf, takes a job in a pastry factory where he meets and falls for the feisty Samia (Amiar), providing the film with its most confident plot point: the classic case of a good woman falling for a felon and redeeming him through the power of her love. Omar and Roger’s crime story is less convincing – although the two make an amusing double act as hardened crims, although the extreme violence involved in their activities feels out of context in the otherwise light-hearted nature of this airy crowd-pleaser.

Often waxing lyrical Elias Belkeddar’s feature directorial debut plays out like an affectionate tribute to the town of Algiers, and we get a really soulful sense of the country through magnificent aerial views of the capital city and its surroundings (provided by Darius Khondji’s nephew Andre Chemetof), the camaraderie of the people and their strong attachment to music with a lively score by composer Sofiane Saidi. MT

PREMIERED AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE.

Dir: Stephanie Di Giusto | Cast: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Benoit Magiel, Benjamin Bioloay | France, Drama 115′

Hair – or the lack or lack of it – is an emotive subject for both sexes. And particularly for women. Classically styled but highly original this unusual arthouse drama draws inspiration from a true story that scandalised Brittany in the 1870s.

French director Stephanie Di Giusto’s sophomore feature explores the life of a woman who is forced to reinvent herself when she arrives in a small village in Brittany, to be married. Nadia Tereszkiewicz is a force to be reckoned with in the title role of Rosalie. Her desperate desire to be loved, and initial lack of confidence is due to a terrible secret. On their wedding night her new husband Abel (Benoit Magimel) throws Rosalie out of the house. He feels cheated and appalled and unable to accept the rampant body hair that Rosalie has had since birth.

But Rosalie refuses to be defined by a natural phenomenon. Challenged by her isolation in this small community she soon realises that a change of attitude is needed in order to secure the success of her marriage to Abel, a bar owner struggling in debt. This change of perspective sees her gently blossoming with a growing acceptance of herself and a proud defiance that ripples out into all her relationships with surprising and often conflicting consequences.

Sumptuously captured in its ravishing rural locations this is an unsettling and thought-provoking film that questions traditional views of eroticism, sexuality and gender roles, touching on prejudice and also the male and female gaze. Rosalie is an understated look at the positive affects of perseverance, determination and self-belief and a triumph. MT

NOW IN FRENCH CINEMAS | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

Dir: Amat Escalante | Cast: Juan Daniel Garcia, Ester Expósito, Barbara Mori, Fernando Bonilla, Hero Medina, Vicky Araico | Thriller 120′

The rich and the poor have a Mexican standoff in this Neo western – and no prizes for guessing who triumphs. Amat Escalante first came to Cannes with his shocking feature debut Heli. Lost in the Night is a muddled murder mystery that looks spectacular but leaves us in the dark for most its running time. A pervasive sense of uneasiness gradually gains momentum in the final stages but some questions are left unanswered in a quietly savage tale of revenge that simmers in Adrian Durazo’s widescreen landscapes of the craggy Guanajuato setting.

Juan Daniel Garcia is Emiliano, the hero of the piece. This morose Mexican macho is motivated by a keen sense of justice. He is a serious man with a mission – to shed light on the fate of his pioneering mother (Araico) who disappeared after campaigning against the sale of the local mine to foreign investors and the contingent job losses. And he soon tracks down his suspect, an effete conceptual artist called Rigoberto (Bonilla), who hangs out in this stark backwater, postering around a curious concrete lakeside villa with his steely wife Carmen (Barbara Mori), and her influencer daughter Mónica (Ester Expósito), whose speciality is fake suicide videos. The local police, headed by Jero Medina, are not fit for purpose so Emiliano makes his own investigations by offering to work as the family caretaker.

Emiliano represents solid values, Rigoberto all that is spurious in this world: his most famous work conceptualises dead Mexican bodies. But Escalante’s narrative often gets bogged down in these modernising themes derailing the story from its central focus and stretching the film rather too thinly over its two hour running time. Emiliano’s female equivalent Jasmin (Mafer Osio) is a traditional Mexican ‘madonna’ who offers him tenderness but never really gets a look in. Monica throws herself at him, turned on by his strong silent earnestness. At one point he dives in and rescues her from the lake after one of her more petulant displays of narcissism. So an interesting addition to the Escalante archive but not one of his most memorable. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | PREMIER 2023

https://youtu.be/S38sRUvJjYs

The late 1960s was certainly a time for female filmmakers in Hungary, amongst them Líva Gyarmathy and Martá Mészaros. Judit Elek (1937-) made a name for herself with short films and then went on to direct her first of sixteen features, an atmospheric curio entitled, Sziget a szárazföldön, The Lady from Constantinople.

Elemér Ragályi was behind the camera providing the drama with its distinctive visual allure that adds considerable value to Iván Mándy’s slim but texturally rich plot centring on the titular lady (Manyi Kiss) who arrives at Budapest station in the opening scenes, and then proceeds to heckle her way through a lecture about Istanbul. Back in her apartment she stares vacantly at the wall outside and eventually decides to move out. And this provides the story with its central focus as wanders around collecting her possessions together to a piano score by Tihamér Vujicsics’

A low point in Elek’s career involved her ordering the gratuitous burning alive of 16 sheep during the making of her 1989/90 feature Tutajosok. This act of brutality saw her condemned by a group of scientists from Poland “No director knowing her own worth would debase herself for using so primitive and cruel methods”. (Source: Wikipedia). Nevertheless the film went on to win the Grand Prix at Creteil International Women’s Film Festival and the Montreal World Film Festival: Prize of the Ecumenical Jury in 1989.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES CLASSICS 2023

Dir: Claude Schmitz | Cast: Marc Barbe, Louise Leroy, Kate Moran, Olivier Rabourdin, Tibo Vandenborre, Edwin Gaffney | France/Belgium 117′

This stylish neon-drenched detective thriller premiering in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight sidebar channels France’s ‘cinema du look’ phase of the 1980s, and stars Olivier Rabourdin as Gabriel Laurens a scuzzy Belgium-based private detective who finds himself caught up in a surreal drug-trafficking investigation when his niece, Jade (Leroy), asks him to investigate her father’s death in the South of France.

Just when Laurens thought the coast was clear to enjoy his semi-retirement he finds himself embroiled in the complex financial problems of his estranged drug-dealing twin brother Francois (also played by Rabourdin), and a dodgy series of lowlife characters ducking and diving between Perpignan and the border with Spain.

There’s a touch of Luc Besson’s Leon to his relationship with his niece and this gives the film some of its more nuanced and soulful sequences particularly their coastal limousine drive and nighttime cocktails where Laurens explains the tragic fall-out with his brother.

Naturally the Americans have to get involved, finding it impossible to stay their side of the Atlantic, and this introduces Laurens to his twin brother’s ex Shelby (Moran) and her hunky French henchman (Barbe and Vandenborre), and Scott (Gaffney) who feels entirely out of place in the narrative with his chipper nonsense and tales of derring-do in Afghanistan.

Amongst other sub-plots Scott also rubs up against Marc Barbe’s gang-leader who swears revenge for their cultural contretemps providing a racial touchstone. Full of anecdotes and dry humour (question: what’s the Spanish for ‘paparazzi’, answer: ‘paparazzo?). With an evocative score and clever twist to the tale The Other Laurens is a smart and good-looking thriller that refreshes the genre. MT

DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Dir: Stéphan Castang | Cast: Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, Francois Chattot, Karoline Rose Sun | France/Belgium, Fantasy Thriller 115′

A darkly hilarious and good-looking take on ‘The Office’, showcases Karim Leklou’s brilliant comedy talents as an ordinary man who somehow becomes the butt of random violence.

Brilliantly written by Mathieu Naert the film imagines Vincent (Leklou) in a variety of ghastly scenarios that accurately reflect life today. At work Vincent he is bludgeoned by an office intern who hits him in the eye with a computer. On a date he is then menaced by a tramp, and finally, riding home on his pushbike, he becomes the target of road rage. Even his neighbour’s kid attacks him on the stairwell. Clearly something must be done. Vincent is going downhill mentally and physically, until he buys himself an American bulldog called Vulcan. But he that lives by the sword can die by it too. When love comes along in the shape of Margaux (Vimala Pons) things get even more complicated.

Satirising our increasingly brutal and dangerous world this noirish tongue-in-cheek thriller imagines – with humour – a world where the psychological affects of generalised anger and violence have an everyday impact of society as whole making us fearful, defensive and even aggressive until we gradually become closed off to society as a whole. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | CRITICS WEEK 2023

Dir.: Kanu Behl; Cast: Mohit Agarwall, Vipha Chibber, Rahal Roy, Ruhansi Sharma, Anschal Coswami, Pryanka Bose. India/France 2023, 118 min.

Kanu Behl certainly walks on the wild side in Cannes, very much like his countryman Anurag Kashyap with Kennedy. Set in the titular Indian city, Agra is a take on “Crime and Punishment”, where male hero Guru is full of toxic masculinity in an overcrowded, decrepit India, caught between tradition and modern technology, giving few positive identity models for the male youth of today. Agra proves that meaningful sex is the  panacea of the modern world. And unlike drugs it comes free.

Guru (Agarwall), 25, but still lives at home – he even sleeps in his mother’s bedroom. The cramped conditions force his father (Roy) to live on the upper floor with his mistress. Not surprisingly, Guru is confused, imagining a torrid sexual relationship with the nubile Mala (Sharma). He wants to marry her and move into the house, using the spare terrace as his new home. Unfortunately, Mal only exists in his dreams, and his family is unable to convince him of the truth.

In this state of sexual frustration and high anxiety Guru goes out of control. After killing his pet squirrel he is sent away from home and becomes obsessed with ‘phone sex, trying in vain to set up dates with women on the internet, his desire for a relationship taking over his life until dream and reality merge and threaten to swallow him up in surreal images captured on a dizzying handheld camera through the labyrinthine streets of the city. .

Then along comes internet cafe owner Priti (Bose), a forty year-old woman with a limp, who proves to be an ideal sexual playmate. Both are plagued by their family in a complex narrative that sees Behl eventually running out of steam, even though Guru finally becomes his own person, saying good-bye to Mala. Guru has no moral compass for his life’s trajectory, although he eventually finds an emotional touchstone in Priti.  In modern India, it seems as if many are more or less homeless or on the verge of being evicted – jobs are few and far between, and civil servants still have the upper-hand like under British rule. Agra has little pity with society – and if it would not have been for the schmaltzy ending, this could have been a real great feature.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Dir.: Amjad Al Rasheed, Cast: Mouna Hawa, Haitam Omari, Yumma Marwan, Salwa Nakkara, Mohammed A Jizawi, Eslam Al-Awadi, Seelena Saltanian; Jordan/France/Saudi Arabia/ Qatar 2023, 112 min.

This debut drama from Amjad Al Rasheed is also the first ever Jordanian feature film to be presented at Cannes, via Marrakech Film Festival‘s Atlas Workshop 2022. 

Inshallah a Boy certainly deserves this honour in showcasing the outrageously misogynist laws that hold sway in many Arab countries: if a widow has no male heir, her deceased husband’s family is by law entitled to half her possessions. Al Rasheed’s tightly-written script makes what could have been a dry and worthy story absolutely gripping throughout its running time. Al Rasheed co-wrote the screenplay with Delphine Agut and Rula Nasser, based on his own original story.

Nawal (Hawa) wakes up one morning to discover her husband has died in his sleep. With her young daughter Nora (Sultanian) Nawal is soon facing the greed of her brother-in-law Rifqi (Omari), who demands 1000 Jordanian Dinar for a pick-up truck he sold to Nawal’s husband, plus a fifty percent share of the family flat, originally bought with her parents’ money.

But there could be a way out of this injustice. And it will come via Lauren (Marwan) the daughter of her Nawal’s boss Mrs Souad (Sakkara), who employs her as part of a team of carers looking after her mother Colette (who is dying of Alzheimer’s). Nawal was the family’s sole breadwinner, her husband having lost his job – without telling her – four months prior to his death. If Nawal can prove she is ‘pregnant’, Rifqi cannot lay his hands on her property, or her daughter, for whom he claims custody, telling the court that Nawal is unable look after the girl. If Lauren can provide Nawal with a forged positive pregnancy test in return for helping her track down an abortionist to get rid of the child (conceived with the husband she no longer loves or lives with) then Nawal can keep her worldly goods. 

A complex narrative then, but Al Rasheed handles it with aplomb. There’s another twist to the tale that could complicate matters: Nawal’s colleague Hassan (Al-Awadi) has developed a crush on the widow, but this could work in her favour. Then disaster strikes when Lauren’s husband finds about his wife’s pregnancy and puts his foot down to an abortion. The two women’s inventiveness is then put to the test as they both fight the law and Jordan’s male-dominated patriarchy finally to find peace and contentment.

There is never a dull moment in this frenetic drama, DoP Kaname Onoyama using a lively hand-held camera to follow Nawal who seems to be perpetually on the move in the busy streets of Amman, even trying to learn to drive her dead husband’s truck. The ensemble acting is convincing, with Omari the standout as the scheming villain supported by Nawal’s double-dealing brother, the two no better than rats from the capital’s sewer.

JORDAN’s ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATION

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | Critics’ Week 2023

Dir: Elena Martin | Main Cast: Mila Borras, Alex Brendemuhl, Marc Cartanya, Cristina Colom | Drama, 118′

A woman’s adolescent sexual awakening and its impact on the rest of her life is the focus of this artful and innovative psychological study from Catalan director Elena Martin. It could be anyone’s story but still somehow feels intimate yet relatable with its universal appeal.

Mila’s story unfolds at five, fifteen and thirty five where the film opens with Mila Borras having found contentment- or so it seems – with Gerard, sensitively played by Marc Cartanya. The two of them are moving to her parents’ house in the country but this fresh start fails to ignite their failing sex life, and Mila’s mental state is suffering as a result.

Reflecting back on the past Mila can find no real cause for the blockage or her failure to respond sexually to Gerard anymore. Often a rash appears which sends Mila down-spiralling into a state of near hysteria although Gerard remains positive and supportive and they work through the situation.

In their nuanced narrative Elena Martin and her co-writer Clara Roquet explore false memory, buried trauma, societal misogyny and even over-thinking in this brave and beautifully captured drama that makes evocative use of its Summery settings in an around Girona, Barcelona and Sitges.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

Dir: Filipa Reis, Joao Miller Guerra | Cast: Carla Maciel (Ana), Fátima Soares (Emília), Vitória Nogueira da Silva (Mónica), Sara Machado (Sofia), Paulo Calatré (Victor), Manuel Mozos (Guilherme) | Drama, Portugal

An award for most enchanting opening scenes in this year’s Quinzaine selection much surely go to DoP Vasco Viana. Legua unfolds in deepest Portugal where a country estate – seemingly abandoned by its owners – is now home to three generations of God-fearing women who live an almost feudal existence in this quiet backwater miles from Lisbon and Porto.

Ana is an also a decent cook and a capable gardener. She believes her duty lies with her boss and with her Emilia (whose health is now rapidly going downhill) rather than with her husband, who she loves passionately, but who has been forced to seek work in France. Their daughter Monica is very much a city girl, who has no truck with the past. Monica fizzes with teenage energy as she talks about planning a rave in the nearby countryside: “although no one would come!”. It’s  lively performance from Vitória Nogueira da Silva, but Monica has as hard-edged selfishness to her personality. Typical of youth, she has no time for the past, only the future.

The strength and appeal of the narrative is this convincing portrayal of all three generations: their respective notions are cleverly melded and given equal respect within a film that is never judgemental of youth, or age – for that matter – but gently observes the feelings and authentic rituals of each of the women, while also reflecting and luxuriating on the surrounding landscape, both flora and fauna, which is also gradually disappearing with the passage of time. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2023

Dir.: Joao Salviza, Renee Nader Messora; Cast: Francisco Hyjno Kraho, Luzia Cruvakwyj Kraho, Debora Sodre.

The Kraho are an indigenous tribe of hunters gatherers who have continuously fought and died to retain their lands along the Balsas River in northeastern Brazil, since 1940. Renee Nader Messora and Joao Salaviza introduced us to these people back in 2018 with their Un Certain Regard jury prize winner The Dead and the Others/

Five years later they are back in the Un Certain Regard sidebar to elaborate on their experience living amongst the tribe, this time spending 15 months living with them and shooting on 16mm. The Buriti Flower much connects to a global narrative of survival for small communities all over the world struggling to maintain their ancestral rights and preserve their freedom in the face of the developed world that continues to expand into their ancestral territory.

The government of former President Bolsonaro called the area “unproductive” and helped European settlers to “reclaim” it by force. The history of the Kraho people is a history of massacres, with the government of the day more or less complicit. The “National Indian Foundation” (FUNAI) was founded in 1969, after its predecessor had to be abandoned because it supported the aggressive settlers in taken the land from the Kraho and other Indian minorities.

Jotat Kraho a young girl (who like most of the actors play themselves) has hallucinations about an upcoming disaster. Her sleep is disturbed and she flies through the air in her dreams. Her uncle  asks the titular Buriti palm for advice. He and other Kraho people are on the way to Brasilia for a congress of Indian minorities wanting to bring their grievances to the central administration.

But before they set off, we are told in detail the massacres of the 1950s, when the two most wealthiest ranchers of the area hired cow-boys and their guns, to liquidate the Kraho population so that their land would fall to the massacre’s perpetrators. One young Kraho woman woke up early on that fateful day, so she could warn others, before hiding. The village eldest Balbino – who we see in a black-and-white film shot before the massacre, tried to argue with the aggressors, only to be shot in the back when walking to his house. Up to this day, the “Gatehouse” to the village is always covered twenty- four fours because the threat of another invasion is always virulent.

Buriti ends on a hopeful note with the birth of the baby: “One more, but we need Two for the Leopard”. This is a melancholic and languid feature rather like the waters that dominate the landscape. There is a ghostly atmosphere that lends a surreal air to the proceedings, pregnant with possibility. DOP Nader-Messora lets her imagination roam freely, and the result is a kaleidoscope of water fairies and dream like creatures of all kinds This is set against the barbaric background of history. Unique and emotionally gripping.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | UN CERTAIN REGARD 2023

Dir.: Anurag Kashyap; Cast: Rahul Bhat, Sunny Leone, KK Gautlam, Megha Burman, Benedict Garrett; India 2023, 142 min.

Best known for his epic Gangs of Wasseypur, Anurag Kashyap is back with his latest, a neo-giallo thriller that unites him with Rahul Bhat who starred in his kidnapping drama Ugly in 2013,

Kennedy is more or less a killing spree that follows an insomniac ex-cop still operating in a corrupt underworld. The film has been mostly shot during the night on Mumbai streets, over a period of 30 days and sees the titular character morphing into another person while still doing the dirty work for the corrupt Police commissioner in Mumbai.

Kennedy (Bhat) moves around without a fixed address, making it difficult for his old superiors to control him. One of his favourite places is a luxury hotel in the city, where he meets the equally enigmatic Charlie (Leone), whose alliances are not very clear – like with most characters. One exception, a senior clerk in the government, pays for his anti-corruption with his life – and so does his whole family.

There is a McGuffin, with Kashyap trying to confuse the issues even further; intertitles announce a countdown to the big night where all will be revealed. But the killing goes on, often to classical Viennese music (courtesy of the Prague Philharmonic choir) and this gives the scenes – with bodies flung all over the place – a distinct surreal feeling, elevating it from mainstream thrillers.

Kennedy seems to soften as the film wears on, making contact with his daughter on the net. But whether this spells redemption for his nefarious ways is never quite made clear – or if we are in for a Kennedy ‘Mark Two’. The bloody mayhem is commented on by a London News reporter (Garrett), who keeps the audience on board with the action – a very much needed intermediary.

Kashyap is a fan of neo-noir author Patrick Manchette and the late French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, both influences leading to a ambivalent hero status for Kennedy, who seems to be happy to kill, only regretting his actions moments later. Obviously this is down to a split personality, allowing him to be effective as a killer, and very withdrawn when left to his own devices. There is a false bravado about him, particularly when dealing with women like Charlie.

DoP Sylvester Fonseca must take credit for the success of this revenge thriller, set in artificial, claustrophobic interiors – often hotel rooms – trapping the victims like animals. Fonseca and Kashyap also remain on target for most kills in one sequence, their relentless pace leaving us breathless. These repeated nightmares merge into each other, leaving very little room for reflection. But Kennedy still manages to tell a story – however warped and ambiguous.
The eye-candy, if you can call it that – is just right for a Midnight screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Kashyap’s feature is the only Indian film in the programme.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | MIDNIGHT SCREENING 2023

Virginie Efira, Arieh Worthalter, Félix Lefèbvre, Alexis Tonetti, Mathieu Demy, India Hair | Drama Belgium France 110’

A mother’s spirited struggle with the French legal system lies at the heart of Rien a Perdre, a fast-moving feature debut for Delphine Deloget best known for her TV fare and award-winning documentary No London Today that bagged a prize at the major Swiss festival Visions du Reel fifteen year ago.

Virginie Efira once again gives a feisty performance as the intractable Sylvie, a single mother with an explosive personality, trying to hold together her family of two tearaway boys – and a chicken – after the father of her youngest has cleared off. Teenage Jean-Jacques (Lefebvre) is a gifted trumpet player, but when his younger brother Sofiane (Tonetti), the more troubled and least fleshed out of the two, gets badly burned on the chip fryer, it becomes clear that Sylvie cannot cope.

Sylvie puts on a brave front but faces some difficult choices and her mental state has clearly suffered as a result. Her bother Alain (Demy) tries to help by offering Sofiane a home but is deemed too close to the problem. And her lover (Worthalter), is .

Sooner or later the authorities catch up with the family but Sylvie comes to blows with a pleasant social worker who proposes a move to a foster home for the boys. This turbulent intervention and the family’s slowly emerging backstory provides the driving force for the remainder of this naturalistic and often moving feature which offers Efira another chance to display her talent for playing strong-willed women. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | UN CERTAIN REGARD 25 May 2023

Dir.: Ann Sirot, Raphael Balboni; Cast: Lucie Debay, Lazare Gousseau, Florence Loiret Caille, Nora Hamzawi, Florence Janas, Tarek Halaby, Ninon Borsei; France/Belgium 2023, 89 min.

Playful and often hilariously funny The (Ex)perience of Love is an emotional rollercoaster in the same vein as Jan Bucquoy’s 1994 drama The Sex Life of the Belgians.

Presented at this year’s Semaine de la Critique at Cannes it the sophomore feature of Belgian writer/director Ann Sirot and her French filmmaker partner Raphael Balboni, who recently bagged the top prize at Belgium’s “Marguerites” Awards for their debut Madly in Life. 

Sandra (Debay) a fitness instructor, and her partner Remy (Gousseau), editor of a high-brow art magazine in Brussels, are trying to have a baby. Nothing seems to work until their Danish gynaecologist comes up with a diagnosis and a possible cure: Apparently, Sandra and Remy are suffering from a “past loves syndrome”, and need to circle back and sleep with all their ex parters to clear the ‘blockage’. 

Both have complex emotional backstories in tune with modern times: Sandra has had more lovers than Remi whose ex Julie (Hamzawi), who would later become his sister by marriage. Quite understandably, Julie’s husband Manu is very much against “lending” his wife to Remy, who is also something of a snob. Remi’s first love Nora has given up on relationships and now lives, sexually active, with two female friends in a shared flat.

So the completion between Remi and Sandra begins, both enjoying their   “backlog’ of ex-lovers. Remy meets Marion (Caillle), who is open to all forms of sexual experimentation. Justine (Borsei), Sandra’s sister and a mother of two, tries to help her sibling, who now feels emotionally side-lined by Remy, who is  rather enjoying his status as a ‘single man’. On his way to ‘sexual liberation’, he uses Sandra as a sort of guide, trying to sleep with a woman during an orgy in a swimming pool where everyone is wearing an animal head. But no experiment is without its surprises as both Remi and Sandra soon discover.

The (Ex)perience of Love is a study in male sexuality, with Remy regressing to teenage-hood, all too ready to sleep with new women, ‘forgetting’ Sandra and the child they so much wanted. Although the ending is a little too cosy and constructed, the directors confirm that sex without emotional commitment is empty. And that men like Remy are emotionally much less mature than Sandra had hoped for. Hilarious at times, The (EX)perience paints a rather sober picture of gender politics. MT

SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 

Dir: Monia Chokri | Cast: Magalie Lepine, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Francis William Rheaume, Monia Chokri | Comedy Drama Canada 111′

Girl meets boy from the other side of this tracks in this Quebec-set drama that explores how love can break down even the toughest barriers of class and intellect, until the cracks start to show.

Canadian actor and filmmaker Monia Chokri returns to Un Certain Regard with her third feature having won the Jury prize of the Cannes sidebar in 2019. The Nature of Love very much brings to mind Brigitte Rouan’s 1997 feature After Sex: A forty year old woman, in a loveless and sexless relationship, embarks on a risky affair in a social environment unknown to her. It’s a well-worn formula but told with style and appeal.

Sophia (Lepine-Blondeau) and Xavier (Reaume) are middle-class intellectuals living together in Quebec. Held together by a shared history and a tight circle of friends they have drifted into that ‘friendship’ zone that so often sounds the death knoll on passion. But when Sophia meets Sylvain (Cardinal), a builder working on her new summer house, the chemistry is electrifying.

Sylvain is all brute strength and masculine charm, and Xavier seems content to let things slide. But soon Sylvain’s blue-collar background is at odds with Sophia’s soigne milieu. And rather than accepting his gaucheness amongst her own set, Sophia persists in correcting her new lover’s limited vocabulary (“he has to learn to be precise to give his opinion greater value”). And that flies in the face of Sylvain’s male ego. After the usual recriminations the lovers split, and Chokri then explores the aftermath digging deeper into their cultural differences in a scene of utter confusion.

Chokri plays Sophia’s close friend Francoise, her role is to support this new beginning, while Sophia’s mother is the voice of reason, knowing her daughter all too well. Xavier’s father is the Alzheimer’s sufferer, reminding us to live life to the full: the Grim Reaper is always waiting in the wings.

Not as intricate and poetic as Mia Hansen-Love’s One Beautiful Morning, The Nature of Love is still a passionate portrait of a woman on fire. Shot with simmering compassion by DoP Andre Turpin, Chokri keeps up a relentless pace in this no-holds-barred dark comedy. @MeredithTaylor

THE NATURE OF LOVE will be released in UK and Irish cinemas 5th July 2024

Dir: Paloma Sermon-Dai | Purdey Lambert, Makenzy Lombet, Louise Manteau, Donovan Nizet | Belgium, France Drama 82′

An artful and entrancing coming of age story that unfolds one sultry summer in lakeside Belgium where teenagers Makenzy and her younger brother Purdey are discovering love and life in their working class neighbourhood after their mother leaves home.

Paloma Sermon-Dai’s tender debut drama is another personal project for the Belgian filmmaker whose award-winning documentary Petit Samedi chronicled her brother’s struggle with substance abuse.

There is a distinct cinema verite feel to It’s Raining, the director drawing from her documentary experience, and once again casting her own relatives, real-life sister Makenzy, almost 18, and fifteen year-old half-brother Purdey, in a naturalistic feature inspired by her 2017 short film Makenzy.

Needs must when the devil drives, and the siblings have to fend for themselves in a story that is slim on plot but triumphs with impressive camerawork from Frederic Noirhomme (Playground) who instills the piece with a sense of soft-peddling, bucolic charm. The kids’ naturalistic often amusing banter avoids a melodramatic approach to their trials and tribulations, capturing instead the banality and frustration of their humdrum everyday existence, often with flinty humour.

But while Purdey is more mature and realistic in outlook, trying to get a job and talking to the social services after she splits with her controlling Moroccan boyfriend, her brother loafs around with his friends and steals from the local store to make ends meet. Purdey’s petty crimes gradually turn more hard-edged when he meets some kids from Brussels, providing the film with a sombre change of tone in contrast to the carefree vibe of the opening scenes. Time for Purdey to make some serious decisions about her future. Sometimes the strongest bonds emerge out of hardship. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE |

Dir: Justine Triet, Wri; Justine Tried, Arthur Harari | Cast: Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner, Samuel Theis | Drama 151’

French director Justine Triet enters the premier league of French film directors with this absorbing and fiercely intelligent psychological drama that sees a writer implicated in the death of her husband.

Certainly deserving its top prize at this year’s Cannes competition Anatomy of a Fall stars Sandra Huller, her second role of the festival, in a gripping courtroom drama that begins with a mysterious death and the gradually dissection of a marriage that in the early scenes appears to have everything going for it, and with an appealing little boy (Machado Garner) to show for it. But who knows what goes on behind the scenes?. And in this case the setting is a remote and picturesque chalet in the French Alps where, as the film opens,  successful German novelist Sandra (Huller) is being interviewed by a young PhD student from nearly Grenoble. The relaxed atmosphere sees the two women enjoying wine and gossipy banter, but loud music from the upper floor soon brings this genial meeting to close. Sandra’s husband is composing and playing back his syncopated vibes on a loop. And when Samuel is found dead, having fallen – or jumped – from a window, it gradually dawns that all is not well in this snowy paradise.

Over two hours then slip by in an engrossing battle of wits where the action swings from the magnificent Alpine hideaway to the sober confines of the court where Sandra, defended by her barrister and close friend Vincent (Swann Arlaud), will have to prove her innocence against the vicious cross examination of the prosecution (Antoine Reinartz). And here fact, reality, and fiction come under the spotlight, including Sandra’s dirty laundry which she is forced to reveal in public: her temper, her bisexuality, but also her keen intellect: and once again we realise that the Law is not about discovering the truth but winning the battle of perception.: As Vincent puts it succinctly to Sandra who insists: “I didn’t kill him”. “That’s not the point” – “You need to deal with how you come across to others”. As courtrooms dramas go this is one of the best. MT

Winner Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language | Best Screenplay – Motion Picture – 81st Golden Globes 2024 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | WINNER PALME D’OR

Dir.: Asmae El Moudir; Drama-Documentary with Asmae El Moudir; Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt 2023, 96 min.

La Femis graduate and director Asmae El Moudir, follows her first film The Postcard with this feature debut set against the troubled past of her homeland, Morocco.

Aesthetically the film follows a daring concept: On the one hand El Moudir questions her forebears’ history, using puppets and a handmade replica of the Casablanca neighbourhood where she grew up, at the same bringing herself into the feature, openly questioning her parents’ version of events.

The story centres on a single photo. El Moudir wants to know why she only has one photograph from her childhood, and why the girl in the picture isn’t even her. Her dictatorial grandmother burnt the rest of the memorabilia. The snap is shot in a Kindergarten setting and it soon turns out the girl in the photo is her sister Fatima, one of the victims of the massacre ordered by King Hassan II in Casablanca in June 1981, when the poor rose up against the cost of living crisis: bread and sugar prices increased by a staggering 77%.

On that fateful day in June 1981, the grandmother had closed the house but she was the only person who could have seen the assailant, who killed her granddaughter. Confronted by the surviving sister, the grandmother used bullying tactics to keep her, and the rest of the household, quiet. Not by accident, the photo of Hassan II is the only other image which survived to tell the tale.

The death toll was officially put at sixty six people but observers believed over six hundred were killed by police and military. After many years of the Sahara War, the Kingdom had run out of money and the price rises were supposed to cover for the seemingly endless military adventure. El Moudir questions her mother, father and grandmother’s account about their home and their country. Slowly, she unravels the layers of deception that have shaped her life.

As it turns out, Fatima was not the only victim in the house. The filmmaker’s father was a promising goalkeeper with the local team. One morning, the army and police used the pitch to bury the victims of the massacre, ending the father’s dream career. He joined his brothers who were jailed for decades, in mourning a lost past. One of the brothers recalls his time in prison: many where forced into claustrophobic cells where they were suffocated.

El Moudir painstakingly puts together the repressed history, with the grandmother defiant to the last. The use of puppets and miniatures actually makes the grand deception even more real, and quite alarming. There are echoes of the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussaud’s wax work museum. DoP Hatem Nachi cleverly merges the two artistic levels seamlessly. The film is particularly convincing in showing how the tyrannical grandmother uses her status as the matriarch to repress any form of resistance from her docile and traumatised family. The Mother of all Lies is innovative and startling. An impressive start to a promising filmmaking career. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

Dir: Catherine Corsini Cast: Suzy Bemba, Esther Gohourou, Aïssatou Diallo Sagna, Lomane de Deitrich, Cédric Appietto, Denis Podalyds, Virginie Ledoyen | France, Drama

Catherine Corsini is arguably most successful in her intimate character dramas. Summertime particularly comes to mind. Her eleventh feature premiering at Cannes Film Festival captures the intensity of a summer holiday, with two terrific central performances from newcomers and onscreen sisters Suzy Bemba (Jessica) and Esther Gohourou (Farah). The French island of Corsica provides a stunning playground for them to get together after a long time apart, and experience first love before going on to real life.

The French are big on holidays: barely a month goes by without some kind of long weekend or school break, and Corsica is becoming increasingly popular with its secluded beaches and craggy coves. To bring us up to speed with family set-up Corsini starts her film with a preamble showing a mother Khédidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna) fleeing Corsica with her two little girls, their father having died in enigmatic circumstances. Flip forward fifteen years and the three of them are heading back there where Khédidja will be serving as nanny to a wealthy family from Paris. Here Corsini and her co-writer Naïla Guiguet skilfully manage the various narrative strands involving the trauma of their characters’ collective past, occasionally veering into melodrama but always with feeling.

Jessica is the smarter of the girls and soon develops a close bond with Gaia (Lomane de Deitrich), the daughter of the Parisian couple (Denis Podalydès and Virginie Ledoyen). Meanwhile the tomboyish Farah starts to dabble with drugs and meets Corsican bandit (Harold Orsoni) providing the film with some spikier moments. Bemba and Gohourou make for alluring couple exuding both charm and humour, somehow making their mark in an environment that is distinctly unfriendly to outsiders, and there’s a racial element at play here. Clearly they don’t fit in, and Farah is not the most likeable of teenagers.

But mostly this is an extended family story about sins of the past and redemption. All the characters experience a transformation as the dynamic gradually shifts with satisfying outcomes. Corsica is very much a character, its breathtaking scenery stealing the show as it did in I Comete: A Corsican Summer and Let the Corpses Tan.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Dir: Kore-eda Hirokazu | Cast: Sakura Andô, Eita Nagayama, Soya Kurasawa, Hinata Hiiragi, Mitsuki Takahata | Japan Drama 126′

This study of classroom bullying, and childhood trauma is not one of Kore-eda’s best films, and never reaches the emotional heights of Our Little Sister or Like Father, Life Son. But after a choppy first hour Monster  eventually comes together as a stirring drama about the benefits of friendship and imagination. The film also deals with the controversy of parent versus teacher in an educational environment where increasingly staff are having to take responsibly for often false accusations in order to keep the peace and avoid PTA reprisals.

Minato (Kuokawa) lives with his widowed mother Saori (Ando) in the Japanese coastal city of Suwa. The climate here is extreme and frequent downpours and typhoons provides the story with its often stormy atmosphere that mirrors the emotional state of this troubled but tightly-knit couple who we first meet watching a blazing fire from the balcony of their family flat.

Minato has a new teacher called Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), and their controversial relationship gives the story a sinister undertow when the boy starts behaving strangely. Clearly something it going on but Kore-eda keeps us guessing in a series of rather other sequences. It soon emerges than the boy has been injured by Mr Hori after an incident at school. Saori wants answers but they are not forthcoming, the staff and Mrs Fushimi (Tanaka), the reserved head mistress, merely bow and express their deep regret in Japanese style.

The focus then turns to Minato’s relationship with another student, Yori (Hinata Hiragi) whose father, a single parent, appears to be off the rails. From then on, sharing their past traumas the boys form an indelible bond as the story gradually turns into a affectionate buddy movie where the two of them scamper around in the summery fields and explore an abandoned train which becomes their hideout and a place to escape to and enjoy a sense of adventure and fantasy.

Complimented by a soothig score from late Ryuichi Sakamoto Monster often feels like a film in two halves, the second being the most satisfying and enjoyable and exuding Kore-eda signature tenderness and his skill for working with children. The seasoned director elicits some really stunning naturalistic performances from the entire cast. Yoko Tanaka is probably the most impressive as the stylishly elegant Mrs Fushimi, the epitome of discretion but always with a twinkle in her eye.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Dir Anh Hung Tran | cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoit Magimel, Pierre Gagnaire | Drama | France, 135′

One time lovers Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel re-unite for a sumptuous feast of the senses that sees gastronomy as a conduit for a long lasting celebration. The French Vietnamese filmmaker first came to Cannes twenty years ago with his ravishing feature debut Scent of Green Papaya that won the Camera d’Or.

The Taste of Things, his seventh feature, adapted from Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel The Life And Passion of Dodin-Bouffant is set in France in the late 19th century, the film follows the life of Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) as a renownd chef living with his personal cook and lover Eugénie (Oscar®-winner Juliette Binoche). Eugénie and Dodin share a long history of gastronomy and love. While emotions remain contained, the culinary discoveries are, on the other hand, breathtakingly exquisite. The only sadness for Dodin is that Eugénie refuses to marry him. So, the food lover decides to do something he has never done before: cook for her.

 We first meet Eugenie (Binoche) in her kitchen garden on a blissful summer’s morning chosing a fresh lettuce for a mouth-watering meal of gastronomic proportions. Dodin (Magimel) and his guests will savour at their leisure later on at luncheon. Every dish is a work of art created from a basis of fresh local ingredients in season. But the film also symbolises a wider appreciation of the simple pleasures in life we often take for granted such as the intense anticipation of a delicious dinner or the satisfying sensuality of long-lasting desire.

Eugenie luxuriates in the quiet pleasure of cooking and enjoying time spent with Dodin over the twenty years of their time together. Their epicurean partnership has gradually led to the bedroom where occasionally the two indulge in the realm of the senses that extends beyond the purely culinary. But Dodin wants to formalise the arrangement with marriage. And is also concerned for Eugenie’s well-being and her failing health. Slowly he takes over in the kitchen preparing the food as an act of affection and appreciation he feels for her in their relationship of mutual respect and dedication. And the act of successful courtship like the preparation of a delicious dish requires patience and meticulous timing, a heavy-handed approach may ruin the chemistry, but he must keep the pot simmering in this delicate dance of love that is typically French. @MeredithTaylor

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | IN COMPETITION 2023

Wir/Dir: Ramata-Toulaye Sy | Cast: Mamadou Diallo, Moussa Sow, Binta Racine Sy | Drama 87′

Senegal’s dry sunny climate and spare sandy landscapes make a spectacular setting for this simple but never simplistic love story from first time feature director Ramata-Toulaye Sy. It sees a young couple conflicted by the modern world and the spirituality of African folklore.

Vibrant images and spectacular framing picture the newlyweds Banel and Adama at peace in their small village. But dark clouds soon gather over their idyll when Adama becomes increasingly absent from the picture dealing with his commitments as a farmer in a worrying drought. Banel spends her days aimlessly walking around repeatedly talking about her plans to leave the village and emerging as a rather spiteful and vacuous character, killing small birds and reptiles with a sling through boredom and bitterness.

A little boy named Malik is always on her trail, monitoring her movements. Adama calls him a “scribe angel,” who is trying to read her mind. But Banel becomes abusive towards him and she realises the futility of her life without a clear purpose. Is the director trying to make a point about a women’s role in tribal society. While the men tend their cattle the women have their own part to play. They must run the home and bear children. If so Banel is neither a trailblazer nor a role model, but a frustrated character and her life is without foundation in these shifting sands.

Ramata-Toulaye Sy has an outstanding gift for visual storytelling and a real eye for framing. Banel and Adama is a cinematic and atmospherically powerful film full of striking imagery, brooding discontent and baleful glances, including the extraordinary sand storm sequence that brings this enigmatic feature to a close. There are some intriguing ideas and concepts at play, but whether the story – about tradition and the modern world – can captivate an audience for the film’s entire running time, without character development and a satisfying plot resolution, is questionable. So script development is certainly where this talented filmmaker needs to focus her attention. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS

Wri/Dir: Catherine Breillat | Cast: Lea Drucker, Olivier Rabourdin, Clotilde Courau, Samuel Kircher | France Drama 104′

This French remake of May el-Touky’s far edgier awarding-winning original Queen of Hearts is so laboured, long-winded and last-century.  

Léa Drucker gives a steely performance as Anne a smug but successful juvenile rights lawyer who likes to live on the wild side and risks it all to have a casual affair with her mixed-up, ugly duckling stepson Theo (Kircher) because she can. In this sleek makeover where the focus is the upmarket Parisian suburban settings, Anne plays token mother to her adopted Japanese daughters, but most of the time she is flaunting her voluptuous figure in couture dresses, and stilettos, and is rarely without a glass of wine to get through her days of being a legal champion and massaging the ego of her rich and raddled industrialist husband Pierre (Rabourdin) who she can also alienate in a second with her razor-sharp rhetoric. 

But this sweet tale sour when Theo throws his toys out of the pram, confessing the liaison to  Pierre on a ‘man-to-man’ break. Anne strikes back with a vituperative counterclaim bringing her husband back onside and threatening Theo with her legal prowess. Breillat shocked audiences twenty years ago with her avantgarde approach to sex from the women’s point of view, most notably in Romance – but this material is so passe and lacks the bite of her early work, playing out like an bland erotic comedy with some skilful camerawork thrown in. It is also overlong.

El-Touky co-wrote the script but her original film Queen of Hearts – an apt title embodying the control freakery behind Anne’s character – also dived deeper into the psychological aspects of the story of an abusive narcissist with a heart of stone. Breillat’s film focusses on the intimate sexual relationship which provides awkward and ultimately tedious viewing, and is particularly unconvincing in its motivations as Theo is no adonis and lacks charisma. And who really wants to sit through endless close-up sweaty sequences of people having sex?  MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan | Cast: Merve Dizdar, Deniz Celiloğlu, Musab Ekici | Turkey, Drama 197′

The past and the present once again collide in this discursive latest drama from Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It sees an art teacher languishing in a remote Anatolian backwater yearning for a transfer to the bright lights of Istanbul.

Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) has always been proud of his easy manner and genial way with his students although recently this bonhomie has failed to materialise due to his stalling career. He shares a comfortable house with a younger colleague Kenan (Musab Ekici) who joins him by the fireside after trudging across the snowbound wasteland in the film’s opening sequence. The two seem unaware of the latent competitiveness in their relationship,

But summer soon arrives bringing with it a vast expanse of dry grasses. Ceylan’s elegant framing once again provides a contemplative setting for this reflective story about school staff having to shoulder responsibility for accusations from pupils. And Samet soon comes under scrutiny when a pupil accuses him of abuse.

Samet has a soft spot for his prize pupil 14 year old Sevim (Ece Bagci) and the two often engage in inappropriate banter. But when Sevim betrays their clandestine friendship by filing a complaint about his behaviour to the authorities Samet backs off immediately, wondering whether his more attractive colleague Kenan is fact partly to blame for the complain. Kenan then becoming the focus in the inquiry. All this has a negative impact on Samet’s ego accentuating his competitive streak with Kenan. By way of getting his own back he decides to sabotage Kenan’s budding romance with his female colleague Nuray (Merle Dizdar) who works in a bigger school in a nearby town.

Although the Turkish auteur reworks his customary themes in one of his most resonant works so far, his films are always intriguing, memorable, and wonderful to look at. This time around a cheeky fourth wall adds an element of surprise to the Ceylan’s signature style. And although Dry Grasses never reaches a resounding conclusion, we leave the cinema feeling satisfied and enriched by the experience. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | Best Actress Award Merve Dizdar

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Dir.: Wim Wenders; Documentary with Anslem Kiefer, Daniel Kiefer, Anton Wenders; Germany 2023, 93 min.

To call Wim Wenders’ portrait of German artist Anselm Kiefer a documentary would be selling the work of both artists short. ANSELM is a potted history of post war Germany, rooted in the society where both men were born, in 1945. Neither of them escaped unhurt, even though Kiefer, a more confrontational character than Wenders, took the brunt of criticism. But “Das Rauschen der Zeit” is first and foremost a chronicle of a country still not ready to face its racist past. Their output is shrouded in enigma and ambivalence. There is always confusion and reverie: Wenders’ American set films and Kiefer’s French based creations are flights of imagination. But the shadow of the Third Reich looms large, and cannot be negotiated with art or gestures.

Anselm Kiefer, represented as a young man by Daniel Kiefer, and as a school boy by Anton Wenders, gained  prominence in 1971 as Joseph Beuys’ master student in Dusseldorf. This was followed by a scandal in Venice, at the Biennale in 1980, when Kiefer was accused of being a neo-Nazi, with him insisting he just wanted to refer to the victims of the Holocaust, wearing his father’s Wehrmacht’s Uniform and greeting the public with the Nazi salute. In 2022 Kiefer would make a triumphant return to the city.

But by now his work output was colossal – both in yield and form: He created topographic landscapes in an old brick factory in Germany, and landscapes in the South of France. And continues to this day with mega installations in his new studio in Croissy near Paris. There are architectural constructions, numerous pavilions, underground crypts and a gigantic, roofed amphitheatre. Everything is larger than life, and Kiefer is still at it, in a big way, always moving forward to the next project. Flame throwers are his favourite “weapons” of art, giant lift constructions lead him to the top of the world. Literally.

Then we return to the beginning with Paul Celan (1920 – 1970), holocaust survivor, poet and translator, who drowned himself in the Seine. The author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1976) a member of the circle of artists striving for a new beginning, not another cover-up. She died in an “accidental” fire in her own bed. But they were outnumbered by the ex-Nazi supporters who went into “inner exile” while still supporting the regime, like the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who never apologised or even tried to explain. There is a moving snapshot of Celan trying to meet Heidegger – but like Richard Strauss, leader of the NSDAP “ReichsmusikKammer” (Musicians had to be Aryans to take part), Heidegger could not even be bothered to say sorry, keeping his international reputation intact.

There is brilliance on both sides of the camera, thanks to DoP Franz Lustig, and it is a credit to both artists to return to the failed new beginning, because the huge majority of Germans preferred to feel sorry for themselves and were busy with collective denial. Wenders and Kiefer are still attempting to evade the past. But try as they may, it still outruns them. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | SPECIAL SCREENING

Dir: Karim Ainouz | Cast: Alicia Vikander, Jude Law, Eddie Marsan, Sam Riley, Ruby Bentall, Erin Doherty | Drama

Jude Law is grotesque as Henry VIII on last his last legs – quite literally – in this imagined drama chronicling his marriage to Catherine Parr, the only wife who survived him, played with elegant conviction by Alicia Vikander.

Brazilian/Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz last came to Cannes with a ravishingly beautiful 1950s outing The Invisible Life of Eurydice Gusmao. His latest, adapted for the screen by ‘Killing Eve’ writers Jessica and Henrietta Ashworth from a novel by Elizabeth Freemantle, is another story about the plight of women living constricted lives, this time in turbulent Tudor times.

Catherine Parr was the first woman to publish in the English language but the focus here is not so much her literary skill as her feminine guile seen through her struggle to survive this putrid, coercive and quixotic tyrant who forces himself on her at every opportunity in the desperate need to provide a male child. His gruesome grunts and larded buttocks bear testament to Catherine’s gruelling ordeal. She is far the most interesting character here but is rather left on the sidelines with the flatulent bully Henry taking centre stage.

Firebrand is a dark disturbing drama that unfolds within the claustrophobic confines of the royal quarters only occasionally making it into the fresh air of its glorious Spring settings. Intrigue, conspiracy and sculduggery are par (!) for the course: and familiar touchstones to those terrible times of misogyny and paranoia, the threat of beheading hanging over every woman, and man in the court.

Catherine Parr was the most fortunate of Henry’s alliances, and was even appointed regent while the king was in France. But she was also suspected of harbouring radical religious views in her objection to the church’s use of Latin: and this plot line sees her befriending the outspoken Protestant heretic Anne Askew (Erin Doherty) causing a rift with Simon Russell Beale’s Stephen Gardiner, a Catholic bishop and Catherine’s implacable opponent. So nothing really new to write home about here but certainly a film worth considering. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | COMPETITION

Dir: Wes Anderson. Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Jeff Goldblum | US Comedy drama

Wes Anderson has a dedicated following but even diehard fans were put off by his 2021 film The French Dispatch, with its over-talky, complicated structure. In contrast Asteroid City is so exuberant, nostalgic and lovely to look at the sheer dynamism is sure to endear it to even Anderson sceptics although some complained, at the Cannes press screening, it lacked an ‘involving storyline’. This is a movie that is constantly on the move with Anderson’s regular A-list cast and candy-coloured eye-popping visuals that just make you gawp in amazement for two hours in a film about a play within a TV show .

Once again the narrative unfolds through multiple framing devices with Bryan Cranston introducing the show in a black and white opening scene where we meet Conrad Earp. (Norton) He is the playwright of the 1950s story we are about to watch which then bursts on the screen in a dazzling blast of technicolour transporting us to the mythical desert location of Asteroid City famous for its massive meteor crater and observatory for stargazers eager to see the Milky Way. It’s also a military testing ground for atomic weapons, pioneered by the serene scientist Tilda Swinton. There is a textbook style alien (Jeff Goldblum) whose appearance causes Jeffrey Wright’s army commander to launch an investigation. But Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe get left on the sidelines in nondescript cameos.

But the film’s focus is Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a melancholy, pipe-smoking photographer and recent widower who arrives with his children, and his wife’s ashes, in a retro shooting-break that promptly blows a gasket. Butch mechanic Matt Dillon scratches his head unable to mend the vehicle so Augie asks his father in law Stanley (Tom Hanks) for help, meanwhile falling in love Scarlett Johansson’s luminescent but lonely Hollywood star Midge, in scenes that plays out like a psychedelic version of Psycho. The nostalgia comes from the music – Rupert Friend is the crooning cowboy – the colours and the upbeat gaiety that recalls a time when America was great and led the way in all things cutting edge, including scientific breakthroughs and space travel, but still had decency and family values at its heart. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Wri/Dir: Jonathan Glazer | Cast: Sandra Huller, Christian Friedel, Ralph Herforth, Max Beck | UK 107′

Another daring and distinctive outing from the English auteur/commercials director, and his first non-English film, centres on a Nazi family living in an immaculate villa boasting an idyllic flower-filled garden.

On the other side of the wall smoke rises from the ovens of Auschwitz concentration camp. As birdsong fills the air the camera focuses on the crimson petals of a delicate dahlia while screams of torture ring out in Mica Levi’s chilling score. Beauty and horror shared in one chilling frame.

Music leads us into Glazer’s brave and bracingly original fourth feature, a valuable addition to the Holocaust sub-genre. Inspired by the 2014 novel from Martin Amis it takes an another, unique, look at the genocide this time focusing on a dissociative family in total denial of their neighbours. While they briskly build a life with a growing family, thousands are losing theirs in the most inhumane way possible beyond the wall.

In many ways a holocaust of sorts is still going on all over the world today. The film explores an ongoing debate about the extent we are all prepared to go to to protect and further our own lives and interests at the expense of others. The Zone of Interest asks: Who is beyond our wall, and who would we sacrifice to preserve our way of life?

Filmed in Poland and immaculately lensed by Lukasz Zal (Cold War), geometric framing and pin-sharp images offer a clinical, realist take on daily life for butch camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his priggish wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) who spends her days complacently primping her garden: the perfect hausfrau with a heart of stone. Meanwhile Rudolf struts into his tidy living room to discuss with his sturmbannfuhrers the best way to incinerate 700,000 Hungarians.

A decade in the making and based on comprehensive research The Zone of Interest delves into the lives of Rudolf Hess (1901-47) and his wife who were just ordinary people who loved and took care of their family, but that’s where their empathy finished. Hess was no anomaly; somewhere along the line he and his fellow Nazis all became serial killers. The Zone of Interest is not just about the banality of evil, it takes the concept further to question our own individual capacity for violent words and deeds and points towards the possibility of each one of us being these people. And in this way the film connects subconsciously to us, the audience.

An early scene captures an intimate testament of loss and callous gain: Hedwig twirls around in a beautifully fashioned sable coat, just one of the personal items stolen from an Auschwitz victim. In the pocket a rose red lipstick is dabbed on tentatively and then relegated to her dressing table. As Hedwig and her staff gather round the breakfast table silk lingerie possibly still warm from the bodies of its victims is then divided casually amongst the women as their gossip about food and shopping.

Gradually more sinister elements surface in this Eden which play on our imagination in the same vein at The White Ribbon. A this is very much and interactive experience with its unsettling score that leads us into doom evoked by the blood-curdling overture. They are a family going through the motions in their lush riverside setting but clearly all is not well in Paradise. 

Cinema is full of stylish films about the Holocaust: most recently Son of Saul and The Conference. This one, focussing on the ’Interessengebiet’ (or area around the Auschwitz camp), is far from ‘gemutlich’ but provides chilling food for thought and a tribute to Martin Amis, whose novel sparked Glazer’s interest, and whose death was announced on 19th May 2023, just after the film’s Cannes Film Festival premiere. MT

NOW ON RELEASE | OSCAR FOR BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM, BEST SOUND Johnnie Burn, Tarn Willers  2024 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL GRAND PRIX | 2023 |

Wri/Dir: Jessica Hausner | Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sam Hoare, Camilla Rutherford, Elsa Zylberstein | UK

Jessica Hausner is back in Cannes with a psychological drama that unfolds in an elite school where a teacher forms a sinister bond with a group of students.

A dereliction of parental duty is behind the faddish behaviour of so many kids today. Or so Jessica Hausner would have us believe in her primary-coloured feature that also highlights eating disorders through the online ‘pro-ana movement’, climate change and self control.

Mia Wasikowska heads the eclectic cast of singularly unlikeable characters as Miss Novak a nutritionist specialising in ‘zero eating’ in a modernist school billed as one of the best in Austria. The parents are rich and mostly neglectful of their kids who channel this latent disappointment and lack of real guidance by voicing a series of contemporary convictions which sound entirely laudable in the opening scenes: their love of sport, their need to impact less on to the environment. No one actually mentions a desire to be slim. Gradually Miss Novak indoctrinates her students into a cult of disfunctional eating, promoting the miraculous health and environmental benefits.

Hausner and her regular screenwriting partner Geraldine Bajard certainly make some really valid points but the cold-edged, non-naturalisitc interiors and characters are so universally unlikeable, performed by a cast of inexperienced newcomers, we do not care a jot for any of them as they fade into pasty-faced insignificance, and this, along with an irritating percussive soundscape and the relentlessly unforgiving depiction of Gen Z, makes for an arduous watch.

The exception here is school principal Sidse Babett Knudsen who lights up every scene with her amusing charisma, as Ms Dorset. Fellow auteur Ulrich Seidl is behind the production team but the film has none of his dry wit or deadpan appeal. Instead we are forced to endure one scene involving one teenage girl (Ksenia Devriendt) who eats her own vomit, echoing the ‘yuk’ factor of last year’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Dir/Wri: Aki Kaurismaki | Cast: Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen, Nuppu Koivu | Finland Drama 81

A spare but satisfying love story emboldened by Kaurismaki’s usual deadpan humour and blatant disregard for visual appeal. Fallen Leaves sees two lonely blue-collar workers form a tentative bond when they first set eyes on each other in a run down industrial backwater to the north of Helsinki.

Morose panel beater Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a heavy drinker, lives in a squalid trailer with his fellow factory workers. When Friday night comes around he joins a colleague for karaoke where he meets Ansa (Alma Pöysti) but neither seems particularly impressed with each other. Or so it would seem. After taking her number, he promptly loses it and so begins an obstacle-ridden path to romance. 

Aki Kaurismaki won the Gold Bear for his Syrian refugee story The Other Side of Hope in 2017. Six years later he tracks back on similar themes in this ironically entitled ‘fourth’ episode of the Proletariat Trilogy, that started over two decades ago with The Match Factory Girl. Unlike Ken Loach’s recent agitprops Fallen Leaves avoids collective whingeing instead opting for playful humour to tell a tightly-scripted tale of gentlefolk, inured to their humble existence, and content with their situation in life – but love is always the balm they seek to get them through the day.

Full of irony and innuendo, Fallen Leaves works through familiar territory: immigration, zero hours contracts, social isolation and the healing powers of love in a light-hearted drama where music plays an important part, weaving in tunes from the Finnish songbook and offering a welcome antidote to the hardcore fare in this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Cheers and standing ovations prove this to be one of the most popular features of this years 76th edition. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023

https://youtu.be/qmtYPFON7Us

Dir/Wri: Mikko Myllylahti | Cast: Jarkko Lahti, Iivo Tuuri, Katja Küttner, Marc Gassot, Ulla Tapaninen | Finland, Drama

Roy Andersen and Aki Kaurismaki clearly influenced a fresh new voice in the Finnish directing firmament. Best known so far for co-scripting The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (2016), winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard. Myllyahti’s feature debut is a quirky, darkly humorous hotchpotch of horror, sci-fi and wickedly dark drama underpinned by a politically infused existential narrative.

With a deadpan tone and Arsen Sarkisiants striking hyper realist images this Critics’ Week entry tells the tale of Pepe who works in a small industrial wood-processing plant deep in snowy heart of Finland’s northern forests where he lives a humdrum existence with his wife and little son. Myllyahti clearly understand the milieu having grown up in the small northern town of Tornio. The highlight of Pepe’s day is sharing a TV dinner with his wife after sharing a few beers with the locals. But his contented life takes a turn for the worse after a series of tragic events gradually destabilise the placid status quo. At first Pepe seems to take it all in his stride but soon his discombobulation gets the better of him. The Woodcutter is one of those films with niche appeal – but there’s some laugh out loud scenes – and you can’t deny its wacky inventiveness and unique style. MT

61st SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2022