Maybe it’s an illusion, but Cannes always seems to end in a mad rush, because the cinemas of the festival squeeze in the last contenders for the awards. (Two new competition films premiered on Friday, the day before the Palme d’Or is awarded. Giving the jury time to think about its decisions is not a requirement at Cannes.) Let’s take the last four in a row.
by Catherine Breillat “Last Summer,” his first part since the more-or-less-autobiographical “Abuse of Weakness“10 years ago, he was seen returning to his trademark mode of sexual provocation (“Fat Girl,” “Anatomy of Hell“). Technically, it’s a remake of the Scandinavian film “Queen of Hearts“(2019), although my memory of that movie will serve, it is a more considered and cutting treatment, especially about its ending.
Anne (Leah Drucker) is a lawyer who regularly defends rape victims and therefore knows a few things about power dynamics and how witnesses can be framed as liars—a skill that will prove useful in his personal life. Despite the obvious danger, she finds herself attracted to and continues a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old son, Théo (Samuel Kircher), under the nose of her husband and the his father, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin).
Breillat is interested in many things here: trying to make the audience uncomfortable, candidly portraying female desire (one of the sex scenes keeps the camera in a close-up of Anne’s face), defending sexual rights hypocrisy. However, “Last Summer” is pretty good by Breillat’s standards, and I don’t believe for a second that these characters will be together. But perhaps the film deserves a little license on that point.
“Perfect Days”is Wim Wenders’ second film at Cannes this year, after a 3-D documentary “Anselm,” an immersion in the work of artist Anselm Kiefer. This fiction feature was shot in Tokyo (which looks great with cinematographer Franz Lustig’s electric palette) and almost entirely in Japanese. Koji Yakusho Plays Hirayama, a bathroom janitor who is not mute but mostly unable to speak. It wouldn’t be surprising at all if Yakusho’s slightly physical performance wins an award on Saturday.
Most of the movie consists of plain sightings of Hirayama driving around Tokyo, cleaning the bathroom, playing an ongoing game of tic-tac-toe with a mysterious patron who leaves a sheet of paper. in one of the bathrooms for him, and / or listening to the animals, Nina Simone, or whoever else Wenders wanted to throw on the soundtrack. (Lou Reednaturally, giving the title.) Eventually Hirayama’s nephew (Arisa Nakano) shows up at his door, and for a short time “Perfect Days” almost has a plot. The movie looks like a mood piece of the Wenders who made “Kings of the Road” and “Paris, Texas” than the Wenders who made “Palermo Shooting” (2008), the director’s last foray into Cannes competition. But while the black-and-white dream sequences add an element of mystery, the “Perfect Days” finally felt small.
by Alice Rohrwacher“La Chimera” a late contender for weirdest and least classy film in the competition. These are stars Josh O’Connor as Arthur, an Englishman in Italy who becomes part of a group that makes money by finding, digging up, and robbing Etruscan tombs, selling the antiquities to a mysterious man called Spartaco (probably like in the “I am Spartacus” scene in “Spartacus“—it could be anyone, but no).
Rohrwacher (“The Wonders,” “Happy like Lazarus“) always has an oblique narrative approach, and it takes a while to watch “La Chimera” just to get a full understanding of the implications of the plot. It doesn’t take time, though , to see that this is a relentlessly inventive film, mixing film stocks (Helene Louvart creates cinematography) and aspect ratios and moves seamlessly between dream logic and reality. The humor is offbeat (in the opening minutes, Arthur socks a sock salesman on the train, and there’s a late set piece involving an art sale at sea that might have strayed from an “Austin Powers” sequel). I found “La Chimera” completely charming and completely unstable. “Happy as Lazzaro” took me two viewings to appreciate, and I suspect that will be the case here as well.
The title of Ken Loach’s new drama, “The Old Oak,” refers to the name of a pub that became a controversial territory in a town in the north of England in 2016. Long-time locals resent the decline of their former mining community and see a scapegoat for the recent influx of refugees from Syria. TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), the owner of the bar, is reluctant to give help to the newcomers, betting that the xenophobic locals will pay his bills. But he inspires Yara (Ebla Mari), a photographer, who helps him see that an old value of the miners’ union—the idea that if people eat together, they stick together—can be solution to close a useless. division.
Loach can be self-righteously didactic (“I, Daniel Blake“which won him his second Palme d’Or in 2016, disguises a nuance-free political position as an existential statement), but “The Old Oak” is one of the stronger films of his long run with the screenwriter Paul Laverty, with whom he has worked since the late 1990s. That party is about character. TJ and Yara are not just pawns in society, but have truly complex motives that are influenced by their lives and history. Unfortunately, Laverty’s penchant for creating what should be subtext in long speeches has not completely disappeared, and the brutality visited upon a dog seems to be something he and Loach have added to heighten the cause of pain (there are shades at the end of “WHO“). But this is still a powerful thing.
Finally, I have to double back to address the two competing films that screened earlier in the festival that I didn’t mention.
Kaouther Ben Hania’s“Four Daughters” so, with Wang Bing “Youth (Spring),” one of two documentaries in this year’s competition; most years it doesn’t. It centers on Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother who has two daughters who fled to join the Islamic State in Libya. Frankly, this is just one case where I struggled a lot to get absorbed in the movie, a problem often attributed to the festival syndrome-trying to see too many films in too short a time. But “Four Daughters” uses a certain amount of conceptual gimmickry (mixing actors and real people in the re-enactment) that tends to detract from the story. I wonder if it would have been more entertaining as a straight documentary.
And by Ramata-Toulaye Sy “Banel and Adama”It had the misfortune of ending its main press screening just three minutes before the start of Martin Scorsese “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which means any reporter worried about his blood pressure goes straight for Scorsese and catches “Banel & Adama” late, if at all. As far as I know, that has the effect of spreading the spotlight on Sy’s film.
“Banel & Adama” is his feature-directing debut. (He had a hand in the screenplay for “Our Lady of the Nile,” directed by Atiq Rahami, who is on the jury this year.) It’s about the title couple, who live in rural Senegal. Banel (Khady Mane) was originally married to Adama’s brother, but Adama (Mamadou Diallo)—according to tradition—married her after the brother died. And Adama, at the age of 19, was reluctant to assume a position as village chief.
I’m with the apparent consensus on this one: Other reviews have generally noted the mismatch between the film’s blistering imagery and its spotty narrative, where the exposition is either on-the-nose or MIA.