Issue 12: Cannes Film Festival in Review
Previously on Movie Enthusiast: The Cannes Film Festival got off to an overwhelmingly strong start, with new films from Romania, Germany, South Korea, and the U.S. finding fans among critics and general audiences alike. By the festival's midpoint, the father-daughter comedy Toni Erdmann looked to be the runaway favorite to take home the Palme d'Or, the coveted top prize handed out by a jury of international directors, actors, and producers, this year headed up by George Miller.
The claws came out in the second week of the Cannes Film Festival. The first boos to be recorded at a competition screening came from Oliver Assayas’ Personal Shopper, a ghost story of sorts starring Kristen Stewart as the personal shopper for an offscreen Parisian celebrity. Stewart's character can also, apparently, communicate with the dead; the film's most divisive scene involves a twenty minute text message exchange with, uh, her deceased brother. Well, I guess we can never fault Assayas for trying.
Things picked up a few screenings later with the Brazilian Aquarius, a film advertised in the press booklets as the story of a time-traveling 65-year-old music teacher. There was no time traveling to speak of in the final cut of the film, but that didn't stop critics from praising it or its lead actress, Sônia Braga—perhaps the most famed Brazilian actress of all time. Whispers of Best Actress frontrunner status started here (as did the inevitable OSCAR! screeches from awards prognosticators greedy to get a jump on predicting awards that won't be handed out for another nine months). After Aquarius, Personal Shopper looked like a minor hiccup in what remained otherwise a strong lineup.
That impression didn't last long.
After the Dardenne brothers premiered their new film to great disappointment (too much deliberate plotting this time around), a string of misfires stumbled out the gate. The nadir seemed to come with Xavier Dolan's Juste la fin du monde, a strident, shot-entirely-in-closeup adaptation of a short play. I'm not convinced that critics weren't going into his film gunning to tear it to shreds, despite the protestations to the contrary some offered. Dolan's film received such a tremendous critical thrashing that in an interview the following day, he confessed that he had all but lost the will to go on directing movies (narcissism and hyperbole have always been his strong suits!).
Lucky(?) for Dolan, Sean Penn swooped in the following day with an outrageously insensitive directorial effort to steal the prize for Undeniably Worst Film in Competition. (All you need to know: two white doctors fall in love against the backdrop of African genocide. Très choquant!) Things failed to improve much from there, with Nicholas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon receiving a ghastly smattering of personal insults at its press premiere, including an anecdote that has immediately secured its place in the annals of Cannes lore: when a title card dedicating the movie to Refn’s wife Liv appeared at the end just before the credits, an especially displeased critic told the theatre loud and clear exactly what he thought of Liv.
All this led up to two of the most hotly-anticipated films of the festival: Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman and Paul Verhoeven’s return to directing, Elle. The former premiered with a shrug, winning over certain fans and leaving other critics grumbling; the latter, despite its controversial subject matter of a rape victim who refuses to report the crime such that she can take revenge into her own hands, ended the festival on a darkly hilarious high note, earning some of the highest overall scores of the entire lineup.
When all was said and done, the award winners looked like they would be foregone conclusions. Maren Ade was the obvious candidate to take the Palme d’Or for her inventive and universally beloved comedy, Toni Erdmann; Paul Verhoeven and Park Chan-Wook looked to be the frontrunners for the Best Director prize; and Jim Jarmusch's Paterson, Cristi Puiu's Sieranevada, and Aquarius were all expected to be rewarded in some way or another.
Naturally, none of the abovementioned films or flimmakers took home any awards. The Irish social justice dramatist Ken Loach received his second Palme for his been-there-done-that I, Daniel Blake, a politically-relevant drama that won hearts and minds on the jury (whose members were presumably less familiar with Loach's schtick than the critics who mostly snoozed through this one). Perhaps even more shocking than the Toni Erdmann snub, however, was the runner-up prize winner: yep, Xavier Dolan’s second-worst-in-competition film took home 2nd place. The critical establishment was livid, and while I spent the better part of the last three weeks trying to figure out whom I wanted to side with in this battle, I've finally decided to just let things be and wait for the films in question to, you know, actually open in theaters Stateside so I can go see them and form my own opinions. As I suggest you do, too.
Articles, News, and Interviews
Although if you're really curious to know why the critics were so up-in-arms over the perceived injustices of the jury, L.A. Times film critic Justin Chang has some ideas about why this year’s Cannes awards were such a disappointment: “Is there no room, in the recognition of cinematic excellence, for movies that don't wear their politics or morality on their sleeve — that touch less obvious, more nuanced chords?”
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Poster of the Day
A brief history of dancing…in poster form!