Movie Enthusiast Issue 68: Cannes 2019 In Review
The best way to experience the Cannes Film Festival is not to go. You’ll have a chance to see all the movies anyway—even all four and a half hours of the new Lav Diaz are bound to stream somewhere—so why wait in line like sleep-deprived cattle to experience the drama, the suspense, the discovery, when you can do it all from the comforts of your cubicle?
The Poll-of-Polls will be your primary window into the world of the Croisette. At the start of the festival, every film is listed in its respective section (Competition, Un Certain Regard, Quinzaine des réalisateurs, etc.). As ratings from critics start to trickle in, the Poll-of-Polls aggregates all the data and begins to recategorize the films into two sections. Films with an average rating of at least 6.00 are classified as “Good New Films” while only those that crack a 7.50 join the prestigious ranks of the “Very Good New Films.” Last year saw a record (in my lifetime) for Competition films to make the Very Good New Films cut: Burning, Shoplifters, Happy as Lazzaro, and The Wild Pear Tree all rose to the top (Cold War sat forlornly just below the cutoff with a 7.47 average rating). The year before, not a single Competition film ascended above a 7.08.
I don’t know who operates the Poll-of-Polls, but whoever it is expanded the ratings criteria this year to include, apparently, scores given outside of the festival context, thus skewing the reliability of the ratings. Here is where one must turn to the other polls. Foremost among them is the Apichatpoll, a grid of ratings from an international panel of critics colloquially known as The Godards. Scores in this poll are on a 0–10 scale and color-coded: red for below a 5, yellow for 5–6.99, green for a 7 and above. Here it is important to pay attention not only to the average score/color, but to the distribution of scores/colors. A movie in the yellow could turn out to be just as good if not better than a movie in the green if it happens, as appears to be the case with Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life this year, to be a film with a strong political or religious stance likely to offend the highbrow commentariat.
The Godards are a rather eclectic group of international critics, so if you are watching along from the United States you are more likely to enjoy following the Screen Daily critics grid. This year featuring Time magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek and the LA Times’ Justin Chang, the Screen Daily grid ranks films on a 4-star scale (with the coveted X available for a critic to deploy whensoever they choose for a real turkey). We’ll skip the Le Film Francais and IonCinema polls because honestly who cares unless you’re really invested in the machinery of the European film industry. However, this year I also discovered the Cannes Emoji Grid, the rare innovation in movie-rating formulae which is excellently suited to the business of mapping one’s immediate reactions onto a work of art.
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Quentin Tarantino was the talk of the town going into Cannes this year: Palme d’Or winner for Pulp Fiction a quarter century ago, eagerly anticipated back at this year’s festival for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. When the initial Competition lineup was announced in April, festival president Thierry Frémaux remarked on the Tarantino’s absence (please note that movies at Cannes are not referred to by title, but rather by director: the Tarantino, the Malick, the Jarmusch). Quentin, he assured us, was making a mad dash to the finish line to have his movie ready in time for a Cannes premiere. (Being French, Frémaux probably used a more elegant metaphor.) A week later, the Tarantino was indeed added to the lineup (along with a conspicuously four-hour-long Abdellatif Kechiche movie—more on that later). The appointed day for the Tarantino rolled around—May 21, the 8th day of the festival. It premiered to strong reviews, much to the relief of the American press, perched upon their keyboards like vultures perennially prepared to declare Cannes—an international film festival that’s as much a buyer’s market as anything else—a carcass of its former glorious self.
A few hours after the first screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood let out, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite premiered, immediately became the best-received film of the festival, went on to win the Palme d’Or by a unanimous vote of the jury, and continued to make headlines as it opened to a glorious $25 million opening weekend box office in South Korea the following week. Incroyable! How quickly fate can turn against a frontrunner! The Tarantino went home sans awards, but let’s not feel too bad for a movie that’s got millions of Sony’s marketing dollars at its back.
The other consensus highlight of this year’s Competition was Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (the English title, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, plays with the sound of the title of the Henry James novel much as the French title plays on the sound of Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs). Sciamma won the Screenwriting prize from Alejandro González Iñárritu’s jury, much to the chagrin of those hoping a woman director would finally win a Palme d’Or all to herself (Jane Campion, who won the prize in 1993 for The Piano, had to share the prize with Farewell My Concubine director Chen Kaige). I was first introduced to Sciamma with her 2014 film Girlhood, which is responsible for the best use of a Rihanna song in all of film history. Knowing how beautiful and powerful that scene is, I believe the hype about Sciamma’s latest.
Only three other women had films in Competition this year. French director Justine Triet premiered her psychological thriller Sibyl at the very end of the festival, receiving scattered praise from the one or two French critics I follow on Twitter but otherwise sauntering off into the mists of oblivion. Jessica Hausner, whose Amour Fou I discovered and instantly fell in love with earlier this year, brought the sci-fi thriller Little Joe, one of approximately 12 genre films to play in Competition this year; Emily Beecham, the film’s lead, took the Best Actress prize. From Senegal, Mati Diop, the star of Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum, debuted a feature-length version of an earlier short film, Les Atlantiques. The jury responded strongly to her film, bestowing on it the Grand Prix (essentially 2nd place). Diop, who to the festival’s great shame was the first black woman in Competition at Cannes in 72 editions, also became the first black woman director to receive any award whatsoever from Cannes.
Cannes Competition regulars Ken Loach, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Arnaud Desplechin, and Xavier Dolan returned with new films that will be of interest to people for whom their films are always of interest. Corneliu Porumboiu, a longtime attendee of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, graduated to the main competition with The Whistlers, a “police procedural” described by many as “the most accessible Romanian New Wave movie yet.” I’ll believe it when my friends listen to me and go see it! Aquarius director Kleber Mendonça Filho, partnering with co-director Juliano Dornelles, delivered one of the most bewildering films in Competition this year in Bacurau, a dystopian and politically incendiary western set in the water-deprived outback of Brazil. The veteran reader of this newsletter will recall my love for Aquarius in 2016 and will be thrilled, as I am, to hear that Kleber has enlisted the help of actress Sonia Braga once more and, even better, has gone all-in on the genre touches he deployed to great effect in his last film.
American director Ira Sachs brought Frankie to the dance, and it was shrugged aside with some of the lowest scores in Competition. Isabelle Huppert stars in it in a role which I gather is a chimera of her last 15 film roles. Pedro Almodóvar, on a technicality I can’t quite understand, brought his magnum opus Pain and Glory to the Competition (it had already premiered in Spain to career-best reviews weeks before the festival began). I have never really taken the plunge with Almodóvar, which means I will need to spend the next five months frantically watching as much of his filmography as I can so that this film, with a Best Actor-winning Antonio Banderas in the role of an Almodóvaresque film director, can pack the emotional punch it deserves to.
Outside the Competition, treasures abounded. Robert Eggers, director of The VVitch, returned with The Lighthouse, a comedy-drama-horror-fantasy(?) mashup with Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as Melvillian protagonists trapped in a Becket play trapped in a film stylized in an outrageously antiquated black and white palette. By my estimates, Eggers received the second highest praise of the festival after Bong Joon-ho; A24 will be distributing his film later this year. Also well-received was Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced, a queer coming-of-age film set in Georgia (the country) in a folk dance troupe; or as I like to call it, Tim: The College Years.
On the more outré end of things, Albert Serra shook up this year’s Un Certain Regard with Liberté, a film that I have seen so many different critics parodically call Salo, or the 121st Day of Sodom that I have to wonder if these people are capable of independent thought at all. Russian upstart Kantemir Balagov, whose debut film Closeness reviled Cannes audiences a few years ago (it included real footage of a terrorist decapitation), returned with Beanpole, a film which seems to be right at home with Liberté and Closeness on the shelf of movies I am in absolutely no rush to see whatsoever. The Un Certain Regard prize went to a Brazilian film, Karim Aïnouz’s The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão. I had heard nothing about this movie until it won this prize. Part of the benefit of watching Cannes from afar is the potential it affords you to be surprised.
I promised we would talk about the Kechiche, so we may as well let him bring up the rear. Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo, literally overnight became one of the most legendary films ever to play in Competition. On the second-to-last day of screenings, Kechiche’s film—by this time having lost a half hour of its runtime off its initially announced 4 hours—played for critics at 10 PM. For three hours, the lucky few who hadn’t either checked in for the night or checked out of the festival entirely were treated to a nearly nonstop barrage of women’s butts! (The other half hour consisted of conversations on the beach.) What can I say, I guess the man loves butts! Butts in motion, butts at rest, butts on the dance floor and butts on…other things. Was he just trolling us? Did he really auction off his 2013 Palme d’Or to finance this? And did he honestly believe that, given the investigations into sexual assault allegations against him, plying his cast with drinks in long shoots that lasted late into the night to coerce out of them performances they were unwilling to give sober would really be a wise artistic career move? Whatever the case, we were due for a disaster and, just as it did with truly Very Good New Films, Cannes 2019 delivered.
Reading
Alternatively, if you want to read about Cannes from the perspective of someone who did go, I recommend Travis LaCouter:
The Grand Théâtre Lumière, the flagship venue at the Palais, can seat over 2,300 viewers. Simply being gathered together with that many people makes watching these films feel different, especially from the average viewing experience at a cramped local cinema. Gone was the endless crinkle of snack wrappers, the half-hour of mindless commercials and infantilizing preliminary chastisements, the intrusive glow of tiny blue light from an errant mobile device. Rather, we were all engaged in the act of viewing—we were all enthralled. Within the Grand Theater, we were one body, vulnerable in that vast darkness to the stories we were being told.