20 Cannes Films – Weekend
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There are too many great, good or just interesting directors in the program of the Cannes Film Festival this year, so it is absolutely impossible to make a top ten film. At least twenty.
opening film
“Jeanne Dubarry”
Maiwenn
Costume biographical drama – more precisely, judging by the trailer, the costume entertainment of Maiwenn (“My King”, “DNA”), variations on the theme of the relationship of the king and the courtesan, man and woman, power – and power. The return to the screen of Johnny Depp, who already gives out such a wry smirk on the movie poster that it becomes clear how Maiwenn chose him: “I needed an ambiguous actor,” she says, “handsome and destructive, and he had to be such that you I wanted to bow before him in bow as soon as you enter the room. Johnny Depp, who else.
contest
“Fallen leaves”
Aki Kaurismaki
This tragicomedy is considered “the fourth film of the proletarian trilogy” of the most important Finnish director – the previous work in this saga of his was “The Girl from the Match Factory” in 1990. The film’s official press release states that Fallen Leaves is a tragicomedy about two lonely people who meet by chance at night in Helsinki in search of their only love. The film is inspired by the song of the same name, based on the lyrics by Jacques Prévert from the movie Gates of the Night by Marcel Carnet; other permanent sources of inspiration for Kaurismäki are Bresson, Ozu and Chaplin. “But for this catastrophic failure,” the Finnish director clarifies, “only I am responsible.”
“Asteroid City”
Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson once again sends his regards to the symmetry of the world, the 1950s, pastel colors, the world of serious children and wacky adults. According to the story, in the mid-1950s in the Arizona desert, in a city called Asteroid City, a convention of young stargazers is held. And, apparently, aliens are wedged into the schedule of the convention. As usual, Anderson gathers actors so that they can just look at the camera and do nothing, it will still turn out brilliant: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright and other stars – but this time there were no Anderson favorites Bill Murray and Owen Wilson.
“Club Zero”
Jessica Hausner
Austrian Jessica Hausner, who considers herself a choreographer, and not just a director, has always been interested in spaces of power, institutions with strict rules, be it a laboratory where a flower of happiness is bred (“Baby Joe”, for which Emily Beecham received the Cannes Prize in 2019 Film Festival), an inn at the edge of the forest (Hotel) or a place of worship (Lourdes, Venice Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize 2009). Her new thriller is about a teacher (Mia Wasikowska) who organizes a certain club “Zero” in a private school, where they deal with eating disorders. The worst thing about Hausner’s thrillers is their accuracy, coldness, the eternal battle of perfectionists with the laws of nature.
“Chimera”
Alice Rohrwaker
Arthur is able to sense emptiness. Literally. He uses his gift to rob archeological graves. And, of course, his soul is also empty – there was love, and he lost it. Italian Alice Rohrwaker (Cannes screenplay prize for Lazarus 2018 and Cannes Grand Prix Jury 2014 for Miracles) deals with the black market of antiques with her inimitable manner of insinuating magical realism. The film stars Josh O’Connor and Isabella Rossellini.
“Monster”
Hirokazu Kore-eda
The deceptively simple films of the Japanese director, a follower of Ozu, are called “silent cinema”: these are family dramas in which there is always a sense of the incomprehensibility of the world. Monster is not a silent film. An ordinary school fight becomes the beginning of a tough story in which both parents and the school administration are involved. One of the last works of composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March of this year. Kore-eda’s previous film, The Middleman, won the Kanna Silver Palm for Best Actor (Song Kang-ho), his Shoplifters won the 2018 Palme d’Or.
“May, December”
Todd Haynes
An actress (Natalie Portman) is preparing to shoot a film based on a long-standing scandal between a teacher and a student. Now, 20 years later, they are a happily married couple. The actress decides to get acquainted with her prototype in order to better feel the role. The cinema of Todd Haynes is always a stylistic adventure, a transition from one way of telling a story to another: such is the kaleidoscope of Bob Dylan “I’m Not There”, and the retro dramas “Far From Heaven” or “Carol” (for her role in this film, Rooney Mara received Cannes Prize in 2017). And every time he makes films about the non-obvious ways of love.
“An old oak”
Ken Loach
A sentimental and uncompromising socialist realist, a consistent critic of capitalism, the British classic Ken Loach made his last – as he believes – film. This is the story of the owner of a pub called The Old Oak, the last one in a once prosperous mining town. The city is flooded with Syrian refugees, and the owner of the pub, unexpectedly for himself, begins to communicate with a young Syrian.
“Zone of Interest”
Jonathan Glazer
The result of ten years of work, a film adaptation of the novel by Martin Amis about Auschwitz, where, according to the plot, a Nazi officer falls in love with the wife of the camp commandant. Glaser (Stay in My Skin), a director whose cinema is a mixture of unease, disgust, and recognition, screens not plots, but ideas. He says that when he looked at photographs of Auschwitz as a child, he was struck by “ordinary Germans,” viewers who simply “stand around and look at it all.” The film starred Sandra Hüller (Tony Erdman) and Christian Friedel (White Ribbon), cameraman Lukasz Zahl (Cold War, Ida).
“Last summer”
Catherine Breya
A successful lawyer (Lea Drucker) who handles teenage abuse cases starts a relationship with her 17-year-old stepson. Sounds like the plot of a porn movie—or a plot fit for a Frenchwoman, Cartine Breillat (Anatomy of Hell, Romance, Abuse of Weakness). Breya – philosopher, writer, pornographer, lover of blood and Dostoevsky – always explores female sexuality, all her films are a kind of adaptation, if not theatricalization of female fantasies. “Last Summer” is a remake of the Danish erotic drama Queen of Hearts by May el-Touhi.
“Dry grass”
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
A drama about a school teacher who, working somewhere in the outback, hopes to move to Istanbul. But the student accuses him of harassment, and he understands that he cannot get out of this dull life. Turk Ceylan is a singer of restless spaces, existential anguish and literary allusions, an ideal “Cannes director”: his “Winter Sleep” received the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2014, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” – the Grand Prix of the Jury at Cannes 2011, “Three Monkeys” – Best Director at Cannes 2008.
“Youth (Spring)”
Wang Bing
Wang Bean, one of the world’s most important documentarians, continues to document the life and death of the working class, as in Crude Oil or Black Money. Youth, a story about the lives of 20-year-old provincial textile workers, seems to be a more optimistic film than you might expect from Wang Bing. The program “Special Screenings” will also feature his documentary project “The Man in Black” about the Chinese composer Wang Xilin. This honor – two films in the Cannes programs – was also awarded to the German Wim Wenders, who presented the comedy-drama Perfect Days in the competition, and the documentary film (Anselm Kiefer: The Noise of Time) in the Special Screenings.
out of competition
“The Flower Moon Killers”
Martin Scorsese
A new crime epic by the world’s leading specialist in crime epics. Early 1920s, a fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation deals with an Osage Indian case in Oklahoma. When oil fields were discovered on the land of this tribe, the Indians began to be killed. The film is based on the non-fiction novel by David Grenn and stars DiCaprio, De Niro, Brendan Fraser, Jesse Plemons and Lily Gladstone. “It’s a movie for the big screen, that’s how we made it,” says Scorsese.
cannes premieres
“Neck”
Takeshi Kitano
Kitano filmed his own novel, released in 2019. This story from medieval Japan about the death of the samurai Oda Nobunaga at the Kyoto temple has fascinated the director for the last thirty years – that is, since his work on Sonatina. Kitano has his own theory to explain what brought the greatest samurai in history to his death. Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai) plays in this historical drama – the producers claim that it is almost Shakespearean, but at the same time referring to both Seven Samurai and Kurosawa’s Shadow of a Warrior.
“Lost in the Night”
Amat Escalante
A film about the search for an activist who disappeared without a trace after participating in the protests. Five years after these events, her twenty-year-old son wants to find the one who is to blame for the disappearance of his mother. The Mexican Escalante (Eli, Best Director at Cannes 2013, The Wilderness, Silver Lion for Directing at Venice 2016) knows how to show the rage, the hatred and the violence in which that rage and that hatred bathe. In Lost in the Night, as in all his films, he screams about social oppression and injustice. “What else can you talk about in a country like Mexico?”
short film
“Strange Way of Life”
Pedro Almodovar
A half-hour western in which rancher Silva (Pedro Pascal) sets off in search of a friend of his youth with whom he worked as hitmen, Sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke). This is Almodóvar’s second English-language film after The Human Voice – and also a short one. The director says that this is his kind of response to “Brokeback Mountain”, which he once refused to shoot due to studio censorship restrictions.
directors biweekly
“Whim”
Ilya Povolotsky
Ilya Povolotsky, the author of the documentary Northerners and Foam, made his first feature film, a road movie about how a father and daughter travel across Russia with a film projector and an urn with their mother’s ashes. Povolotsky started out in advertising, and he knows how to show a living and greedy space so convincingly that his “Foam” – a feature-length documentary about people floundering at the end of the world in their small lives – received a special jury award at the IDFA festival “for creating a powerful sensory experience.” In “Blazhi” the main roles were played by Maria Lukyanova and Gela Chitava (“Shultes”).
special screenings
“Portraits of Ghosts”
Kléber Mendonça Filho
One of the most important contemporary Brazilian directors (Jury Prize at Cannes 2019 for the frenzied “Bacurau”, filmed in collaboration with Juliano Dornelles) presents a documentary work about his hometown of Recife, more precisely, about its center – as a place, as an idea, as a changing landscape like a receptacle for film history. Kléber Mendonça Filho says that this is a look at the geography of the city from a personal point of view. A film about cinemas, film ghosts, about the very idea of cinema. 60% of the film is archival footage and photographs taken from the Brazilian Cinematheque, film archives and private collections.
La Cinema
“Electra”
Daria Kashcheeva
Daria Kascheeva, a Gnesinka graduate and student at the Prague Academy of Arts, Film and Television (FAMU), presents the 26-minute Elektra, a collaboration between the Czech Republic, Slovakia and France, in the student film program. Her Daughter, a 2019 drama about a father-daughter relationship that recreated the feel of a handheld camera that is absolutely incredible for an animated film, won a student Oscar and was shortlisted for an animated Oscar. In Elektra, we are talking about memory and traumatic experience, the animation sequences are combined here with the game ones in order to convey the suffocating, predatory “narrative mosaic” of the heroine, remembering how on her tenth birthday … no, she is not ready yet remember what really happened.
closing film
“Elements”
Peter Son
Pixar-Disney animated rom-com about the city of the four elements, in which everyone has to communicate only with their own. But the clumsy boy-Water – made friends with a hot-tempered fire fighter. It has everything that the audience loves in Pixar cartoons: tenderness, clumsiness, irony, sentimentality. Director Peter Son (The Good Dinosaur, Partly Cloudy) admits that the film was partly inspired by his childhood memories in the Bronx: the director’s family emigrated from Korea in the early 1970s and ended up in New York, a giant cauldron where Rarely do cultures mix.
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