Movie Enthusiast Issue 49: Cannes 2018 Preview; A Wrinkle in Time; Hong Sang-soo and Kim Min-hee in the news (again)
In just under a month, the organizers of the Cannes Film Festival will announce which movies will be competing for the Palme d’Or! This is always my favorite time of year, where industry insiders start whispering the news about all of the most hotly-anticipated movies of the summer and fall. (The new Asghar Farhadi is really bad! the new Alfonso Cuarón is really good!) As always, we should take whatever rumors we hear with a grain of salt, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a bit of fun guessing what movies will make the cut. Here, based on my preliminary field research, is my most educated guess as to which 20 or so movies will make the Cannes Competition lineup for the festival’s 71st edition.
(For those playing along at home, remember: festival rules provide that no more than 4 French films can compete in a given year. When I did this last year, I got 7 films right and guessed 4 more that ended up playing in sidebar selections.)
Plaire, aimer, et courir vite (France – Christophe Honoré)
High Life (France – Claire Denis)
Maya (France – Mia Hansen-Løve)
The Sisters Brothers (France – Jacques Audiard)
Peterloo (U.K. – Mike Leigh)
Roma (Mexico – Alfonso Cuarón)
Where Life Is Born (Mexico – Carlos Reygadas)
Radegund (Germany – Terrence Malick)
Under the Silver Lake (USA – David Robert Mitchell)
The Beach Bum (USA – Harmony Korine)
Beautiful Boy (USA – Felix Van Groeningen)
Untitled film I just learned is going to Cannes 12 hours ago (Iran – Jafar Panahi)
Ash Is Purest White (China – Jia Zhangke)
The Wild Pear Tree (Turkey – Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Vision (Japan – Naomi Kawase)
Burning (South Korea – Lee Chang-Dong)
Loro (Italy – Paolo Sorrentino)
Suspiria (Italy – Luca Guadagnino)
The Nightingale (Australia – Jennifer Kent)
Sunset (Hungary – László Nemes)
Cold War (Poland – Paweł Pawlikowski)
So if any of the above is right, we’re looking at the highly awaited follow-up films from the directors of It Follows,The Babadook, Son of Saul, and Ida, Alfonso Cuarón’s self-professed, long-gestating passion project, the Claire Denis sci-fi movie that it feels like I’ve been writing about in this newsletter for years, Terrence Malick’s (alleged) return to narrative filmmaking, a remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, and an underwhelming four female directors in competition. We’ll get there someday.
For a while I’ve wanted to write about the curious case of Hong Sang-soo and Kim Min-hee in this newsletter, but somebody else went and did the work for me! For those who don’t know, Hong is the prolific director of low-budget indie movies in South Korea (he’s made 22 films in 22 years; last year alone he made three). His movies usually play at international film festivals and then disappear. If you’ve seen one, you’ve essentially seen them all: a male artist shows up in a new part of town, meets a pretty woman, attempts to woo her, drunkenly makes a fool of himself, and repeats the process the next day with typically better results. Hong uses a lot of zooms and makes his actors film drinking scenes with real alcohol so everyone is really drunk while the cameras are rolling. He’s an acquired taste.
In 2016, news broke that Hong had broken off his marriage to have an affair with Kim Min-hee, the actress he had shot his most recent movie with (though she’s best known to the general public for her breakout role in The Handmaiden). I get a very Roberto Rossellini-and-Ingrid Bergman kind of vibe off of the whole thing; they have proceeded to make 4 more movies together since their affair became public. So clearly Hong has been taking the Korean media circus around his infidelity in stride, but what about Kim? For her, the story’s much different, and Donnie Kwak at The Ringer has a good piece on the consequences of the affair on her career:
At a time when mainstream Korean cinema has a decided lack of female protagonists, Kim seems capable of filling the void—and at age 36, she is squarely in her prime. Why not another period blockbuster with Park Chan-wook, or maybe a meaty role in Bong Joon-ho’s next project? How about an action flick, or an artsy horror part? (And maybe even a love interest closer to her own age?) For an actress of Kim’s prodigious talents, nothing feels too far out of range. At the moment, however, with the smoke from her relationship with Hong hardly cleared, her reacceptance in the Korean film industry doesn’t feel likely. An anonymous Korean film insider claimed that recent attempts to cast Kim in commercial movies were thwarted because either the investment fell through or the actress herself refused the part. “It’s disappointing because it feels like we lost a great actress,” the official said. “Her absence is even more unfortunate because of the lack of leading female actresses.” Whether by choice or by industry exile, Kim’s career is now thoroughly attached to Hong’s.
I have not seen Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle and Time and based on the buzz, I probably won’t. Too bad! The book and its sequels were some of my favorites growing up. Susannah Black has a great piece on the movie and its relation to its source material and author:
I didn’t want to write this piece really, because being a cranky writer complaining about the de-Christianization of Starbucks cups is not part of my ambition. I don’t want to be That Essayist. But here’s the thing: if the Christianity in A Wrinkle in Time has been erased in the movie, the particular flavor of Madeleine L’Engle’s Christianity is in danger of being erased in the hot takes. And that flavor of Christianity is what was, for me, a bridge to belief.
It was a faith that was braided together with a fascination with molecular biology and cosmology; L’Engle saw science, actual new discoveries about the world, as harmonizing with and not threatening to faith. The world was a mystery: in the pages of scripture and in the thought experiments of Einstein, in cellular evolution, one was able partly to pull back the fabric of the universe and look beneath it, to see some of the harmonies in the way it worked. Reason and faith were not competitors; discovery and poetry and revelation all avenues to truth. It’s not that I’m a Thomist now because I loved Madeleine L’Engle then; it’s that the part of me that St. Thomas appeals to is the part that she appealed to.
It’s not the case that fiction need be Christian to tell truth, to be good, solid, real stories. It’s not the case that movie adaptations must follow their source material in all ways. And I’m not — I hope– complaining about the movie’s de-Christianization of the book per se. What I want to look at is whether the movie did what its makers believed they were doing with the book, and I want to look too at what this faith of hers was.
Spring is just around the corner! (So I’m told; D.C. certainly hasn’t been in any rush to start showing signs of it.) I’ve arbitrarily decided to spend this season filling in a lot of my French New Wave blind spots. Yes, that means I’m going to have to hold my nose and spend a lot of time with Godard. Pray for me, if you are of the praying sort.