Cannes 2019
Covered the fest for a second time for The Upcoming. Decided this time to format things as a RAW INFO DUMP of my OPINIONS. Feel free to CTRL+F any of the following:
Atlantics (Mati Diop) [C+]
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles) [B]
The Best Years of a Life (Claude Lelouch) [D]
The Climb (Michael Angelo Covino) [B+]
The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch) [B-]
An Easy Girl (Rebecca Zlotowski) [C]
Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe)[B-]
For Sama (Waad Al-Khateab & Edward Watts) [B]
The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil [C+]
A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick) [B-]
The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão (Karim Aïnouz) [C+]
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers) [B]
Little Joe (Jessica Hausner) [B]
Lux Æterna (Gaspar Noé) [B+]
Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (Abdellatif Kechiche) [D]
Les Misérables (Ladj Ly) [C-]
Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino) [B-]
Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodovar) [B-]
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho) [A-]
Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher) [C]
Sibyl (Justine Triet) [C]
Summer of Changsha (Zu Feng) [C]
Too Old to Die Young - Episodes 4 & 5 (Nicolas Winding Refn) [C-/B-]
The Whistlers (Corneliu Porumboiu) [C+]
The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yi’nan) [C]
Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne) [B-]
Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello) [B]
***
The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch) [B-]
Far more intriguing than it eventually turns out to be, Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die is a zombie movie – in the same way that Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire movie, Ghost Dog is a samurai movie, Dead Man is a western, and so on. These films use genre, ostensibly, as both a post-modern joke – calling attention to the practical absurdities of tropes, e.g. Tom Hiddleston’s moody vampire stealing blood from the local hospital, Ghost Dog using pigeons to communicate with mob bosses – and as a jumping off point for all of Jarmusch’s usual pet obsessions about time and culture.
The Dead Don’t Die mostly fails on this count, as it eventually morphs into a slow, dull horror movie whose metafictional jokes only highlight how perfunctory the exercise is. But there’s some fun to be had along the way. Working with an undeniably stacked cast – including Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny as the local cops of a small town called Centerville, Tilda Swinton as an oddball Scottish coroner/samurai, Tom Waits as a forest-dwelling hermit, and Iggy Pop as, obviously, a zombie – Jarmusch works overtime to create one of his hermetically sealed spaces where anything, it seems, can happen.
Since before the dead even come to life, the town of Centerville is an odd place, where daylight stretches on for too long, animals have run amok, and the same song keeps playing on the radio. Jarmusch keeps things interesting by keeping us guessing as to what he’s up to, and setting up repeating jokes – which are laboured, until they eventually become funny. There’s a tangible undertow of political anger, as pundits on the radio deny any scientific evidence of trouble, and Steve Buscemi plays an overt stereotype of a Trump supporter. It’s almost a mockery of the same small-town Americana that he (basically) celebrated in Paterson; the diner and police station are sarcastically labelled in boring fonts, and the small-town patter is almost ludicrously twee.
Then the dead rise, and things turn explicitly George Romero – who Jarmusch references by name, of course, along with Herman Melville, and plenty of others. But we’ve seen this before. Zombies moan about the things they were obsessed with before – “coffee”, “baseball”, “Wi-Fi” – and the ensemble clash and overlap as they’re overrun. Whatever thread Jarmusch was tugging on, he seems to lose, and an outré meta-climax isn’t quite enough to claw things back.
***
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles) [B]
A strange, fascinating film from a strange, fascinating filmmaker, Bacurau doesn’t so much defy explanation as provide almost too much to sift through on first glance. It’s ostensibly a portrait of a fictional small town community, situated somewhere on the border between Paraiba and Rio Grande de Norte in northeastern Brazil. Its rough location is shown to us in the opening shot, a CGI zoom-in from space, which is the first indication that Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighbouring Sounds, Aquarius), along with his regular production designer Juliano Dornelles, is working in a more ambitious register this time around. The town has essentially come together for the funeral of the grandmother of Theresa (Barbara Colen), but it doesn’t take long to realise that something strange is afoot.
As further evidenced by Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, one of the first emerging themes of this year’s festival is that cinema is now a postscript to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. For a long time, Bacurau keeps its audience guessing as to what, exactly, is going on, withholding key information about why the town has suddenly disappeared off all maps, why a truck has developed bullet holes, and why something that looks like a UFO is hovering over it all. It’s something to do with the town’s scumbag mayor, who slicks his hair like Elvis, and a mysterious character played – with scene-stealing malevolence – by Udo Kier.
But to spoil this would be to spoil most of the fun, though it’s safe to say that the emerging beast is a surreal, violent film that, surprisingly, warrants comparison to Sergio Leone and John Carpenter (who intentionally pops up on the soundtrack) – or maybe Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, a similar left-turn into violence as the only remaining political expression. Though like that film, it’s perhaps a touch too academic to work as a satisfying genre exercise. While there are potent threads of globalisation, late capitalism and the erasure of local cultures – in a chilling scene, a villainous character tells another, “Please don’t speak Brazilian here” – they don’t quite come together in the same way as Aquarius, which had the benefit of centring itself on Sonia Braga’s brilliant performance.
Braga crops up again here as an eccentric local doctor, and she’s great, but the whole thing suffers for having no strong characters to grab onto, in favour of a more conceptual approach. Still, it’s worth remembering that Brazil’s cultural output is under attack from a far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro – and like A Touch of Sin, Bacurau evokes a surreal horror that, one imagines, isn’t too far removed from the emotions of life underneath such an oppressive regime.
***
Les Misérables (Ladj Ly) [C-]
[NOTES 5/6/19:] Cliché-ridden portrait of life in the banlieue made actively offensive by the fact that its only three-dimensional characters are a squad of cops who’ve brutalised a total non-character POC. Comparable in many ways to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – and like that film, it’s been inexplicably praised for how “propulsive” it is. Roll eyes.
***
Atlantics (Mati Diop) [C+]
It’s difficult to know where to start with Atlantics. It’s a film of firsts, first and foremost: the first feature from Mati Diop, primarily known for her work as an actress and her award-winning short films; and the first film from a black woman to premiere in Cannes’s competition. It’s a mysterious and moody drama that keeps changing shape, starting in the realm of social realism and growing progressively more fantastical and haunted. It’s also quite boring. But is this because it’s deficient on a narrative and formal level, or because there are reasons behind its organisation that have escaped this (white, male) critic on first glance?
Set in Dakar, along the Atlantic coast, and kicking off with a worker’s dispute – where Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore) and his fellow crew members have not been paid for their three months’ work on a giant tower – the film becomes a forbidden romance of sorts between Souleiman and Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), who’s engaged to a man she doesn’t love. The introductory shots of these characters are stunning; him in the back of a truck, in existential anguish as others celebrate around him, her glimpsed between the carriages of a passing train, each cut bringing them closer together. Yet as soon as their sweetly hesitant language of gestures is established, Souleiman attempts to escape across the ocean, towards Spain. Their boat is said to have been lost, but Ada’s wedding night is then disturbed by a massive fire – and Souleiman is spotted on the scene by one of her friends.
What follows is something where, again, mystery is key, and changes in register are both baffling and welcome in their potential to liven up the story – though there’s something frustratingly mellow about how the director chooses to convey most of this. Diop first came to prominence by starring in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, and while it would be entirely reductive to say that she attempts to mimic her style, there’s clearly an influence. She elides traditional dramatic beats in favour of something more self-consciously poetic, relying heavily on shots of roiling ocean waves, the interplay of light across the characters’ faces. This pays off in moments – a creepy ambush inside a house, a suggestive final scene – and the naturalistic acting is certainly worthy of praise. But is it enough?
***
For Sama (Waad Al-Khateab & Edward Watts) [B]
It’s hardly the most rigorous filmmaking in the world, but the footage on display in For Sama – the work of Syrian journalist Waad al-Kateab, who started filming the dire situation in Aleppo in 2011 and basically didn’t stop – is just undeniable. Her work a document of life under siege, an epic from the perspective of a mother who started out as a radical activist, and then channelled this energy into working as a documentarian for news outlets around the world. And her perspective is extraordinary.
Al-Kateab’s conceit is that she’s making a film that directly addresses her daughter, Sama, explaining her decision to keep her in Aleppo – a decision that put her life at risk. She recounts her marriage to Hamza, a doctor, and their time spent in hospitals, doing their best to help those affected by the conflict. A mixture of airstrikes from Russian jets and attacks from Assad’s regime meant they were never short of patients, not to mention the fact that they were trying to avoid being killed themselves.
All of this information is available on BBC News, so the perspective al-Kateab provides is that of first-person, sparingly edited experience. Her intimacy with the community lends her unfettered access – most of her subjects either seem to forget the camera is there, or are clearly happy to be filmed. Many scenes play out like regular home videos – al-Kateab’s wedding, playing with baby Sama, a friend being gifted with a rare fruit by her husband – only with a constant background soundscape of explosions and gunfire.
It’s these moments, contrasted with the unbearable images of children dying on the operating table, that make For Sama work. It invites us to consider nothing but the human cost of war, and the division between people’s dreams and their harsh reality. There’s an remarkable moment, similar to one in Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, where a baby is pulled out of a woman’s stomach. It’s completely grey and isn’t breathing. The doctors try everything, eventually holding it by its ankles and beating it. After a long, long moment, it starts to cry. Another one comes when a woman – a family member of a victim in hospital – angrily asks if al-Kateab is filming, then urges her to continue doing so, to show the world what’s going on. The film is an incredible one, almost by accident, as there’s some prominent music cues and bits of editing that feel too bluntly manipulative. But it is incredible.
***
Little Joe (Jessica Hausner) [B]
How much do we know about plants? They sit in our homes and offices, and they’re alive, responsive, undergoing constant chemical changes. But we don’t think of them as ever posing a threat. Jessica Hausner’s new film – her fourth at Cannes, and her first in the English language – takes a premise that once interested M. Night Shyamalan and runs with it in a completely different direction. It’s at once a botanical take on Invasion of the Body Snatches, a corporate satire, and – most chillingly – a tale of motherhood, vis-à-vis the specific ways in which women can have their identities questioned and their sanity undermined.
The terrific Emily Beecham (Daphne) plays Alice, a scientist who, along with shy Chris (Ben Whishaw), has developed a new species of plant. It’s designed to emit a pathogen that will increase the recipient’s happiness, and perhaps engender feelings of maternal love towards the plant. She nicknames it “Little Joe”, after her own son, Joe (Kit Connor). The problem may be that it works too well. After coming into contact with the plant, people start behaving oddly. They’re not violent or aggressive – they’re just a bit off. And they’ve suddenly become quite protective of the plants.
Hausner uses English the same way that Yorgos Lanthimos did when he made the jump between languages; embracing its awkwardness, as well as its curt precision. Through eerie, precise camera movements – often zooming in to an empty part of the frame – and a jangling, Japanese-inspired soundtrack, Hausner forces the viewer into the same paranoid mindset as Alice, as she questions whether anything is, in fact, wrong at all.
Yet, while there is a constant sense of mystery, it’s essentially a vehicle for Hausner’s more pressing concerns: the ways in which the “infected” treat Alice in apparent efforts to keep her subdued. Joe starts acting sullen and distant, but it’s played off as him entering puberty, and she’s told she needs to let him grow up. Chris confesses he has feelings for Alice, which are initially reciprocated, but his intimations suddenly start becoming more aggressive – and he’s just pleasant enough that she can’t confidently rebuke him. The most upsetting thread involves Bella (Kerry Fox, also great), the oldest scientist, who recently returned to work following a breakdown; when she tries to express her paranoia, she’s nastily discredited because of her mental health. In a similar way to Gaslight – the frequently adapted play about carefully constructed lies destroying a woman’s sanity – Little Joe proves to be frightening because it feels so real.
***
Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher) [C]
In 2007, Columbia Pictures released a film called Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, starring John C Reilly. A pitch-perfect parody of 2004’s Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, it eviscerated the cradle-to-the-grave clichés of the genre, from the traumatic childhood, to the montage of the singer’s meteoric rise, the drug problems, the fall, and the eventual redemption – with pictures of the real person over the closing credits. That Rocketman hits each and every beat Walk Hard made fun of, 11 years later, is all that really needs to be said about its hollow approach to capturing the life and spirit of Elton John.
The film’s rigid adherence to formula might have been forgivable if there’d been some novelty or cinematic flair to any of its sequences – and, to be fair, Eddie the Eagle director Dexter Fletcher tries. Armed with a rich back catalogue of music, Fletcher sets up a series of reality-bursting music numbers: “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” at a rowdy carnival, “Crocodile Rock” at a bar in LA, “Rocket Man” in a drug-fuelled dream sequence. “Your Song” is composed on the spot while Elton (Taron Egerton, giving a decent enough performance) fools around on the piano at home, his mum and gran stopping what they’re doing to listen.
Yet the songs cut out too soon, the voice is often lost in the fray, and the choreography is a lot of flash to distract from the fact that the film has no interest in really digging into what went into them. Rocketman‘s most daring element is maybe the acknowledgement of gay sex, in the form of the singer’s rocky relationship with slimy manager John Reid (Richard Madden) – but that’s the faintest of praise. It’s Elton John! Maybe there’s no real way the film could have been a masterpiece, since biopics almost always run into the problem that a real person’s life doesn’t fit inside a satisfying three-act structure. But this could have easily been so much better.
***
Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodovar) [B-]
There is a grand tradition, late in a director’s career, to make what might be referred to as their 8½. The most obvious example is Federico Fellini’s 1963 opus, but the idea of a director making a veiled autobiography that prominently features their industry – and doubles as an interrogation of their own process – is a common one. (To name a few: All That Jazz, Stardust Memories, Knight of Cups.) Sometimes the most exciting element of this is trying to work out what’s fictional and what’s real, and whether such a distinction matters in the first place; whether the filmmaker’s wildest flights of fancy are representative of their “real” selves more than anything else.
Pedro Almodovar’s latest, Pain and Glory, is about a director, Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas). He hasn’t made a new film in years, obsesses about his own health, and spends most of his time shuttered away, thinking about his own past. When a prominent cinema puts on a retrospective of his work, he’s prompted to reach out to Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), an actor he hasn’t spoken to in years. The two strike up a bond over a heroin addiction, which Salvador apparently develops out of sheer boredom, and subsequently has trouble managing. Interspersed with this is a depiction of his childhood, with Penélope Cruz playing his mother. Salvador wonders where he went astray in the time in between.
Having first made his name with an excessive, queer sensibility, then fusing that with a more accessible, melodramatic form in the late 90s and 2000s, Almodovar now seems to have tipped over the other way. Pain and Glory certainly doesn’t lack for colour or texture, but it is quite flat. Banderas gives his all in the role, but there’s only so much one can bring themselves to care about a rich, privileged director having a mid-life crisis, and the dramatic stakes are virtually non-existent. What’s left are, like in 8½, interludes about the nature of creativity. Some are lovely; a rekindling encounter with a former lover (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a flashback to Salvador tending to his dying mother (played, as an older woman, by Julieta Serrano). But much of it fails to make an impact, simply bouncing off the maxim that pain is key to creating great art.
And then there’s a final scene so shocking it made this critic gasp aloud. It won’t be spoiled here, but a second viewing is a must, if only to help clarify what’s fictional and what’s real, and whether such a distinction matters in the first place.
***
Too Old to Die Young - Episodes 4 & 5 (Nicolas Winding Refn) [Episode 4: C-, Episode 5: B-]
Nicolas Winding Refn likes things … slow. He likes … to take … pregnant … pauses … before something … bad … suddenly … HAPPENS! This can go one of two ways. When there’s the threat of violence, a dramatic tension reverberating throughout the scene, it can be good fun – in the vein of patient genre subverters like Tarantino and S. Craig Zahler – particularly when he drops the pretentions and goes for an exciting set piece. But when it’s just empty provocation, snippets of inane dialogue between brooding expressions, there are few filmmakers capable of being more insufferable.
His new, indulgent TV series, Too Old to Die Young – specifically, episodes four and five – mostly falls in column B. It follows Martin (Miles Teller), who brings Ryan Gosling’s trademark silent non-energy in Drive to a similar role. He’s a cop by day and hitman by night, who sleepwalks through all of his scenes before having a quiet moral crisis during one of his jobs. He doesn’t want to kill people over small sums of money – he wants to kill the worst of the worst. So his bosses put him on the trail of two degenerate pornographer brothers, specialising in all things illegal and immoral.
There are other threads involving John Hawkes as a fellow hitman, but they don’t go anywhere as they’ll probably be explored elsewhere in the series. So it isn’t until a full hour in that there’s any sense of a pulse. Teller’s attempts to assassinate the pornographers – one of whom is played by a slimy James Urbaniak, who steals the show – contain some genuinely thrilling moments, including a cheekily self-reflexive car chase, scored to Barry Manilow. But they’re surrounded by drivel that robs the material of its effectiveness. Refn’s attempts to satirise LA are as broad as ever, and one wonders if the rest of the series follows the same pattern, randomly throwing in a scene with e.g. Billy Baldwin with cruel, thick-headed irony. There are the same usual caveats with Refn; his work looks gorgeous, and Cliff Martinez’s score is typically entrancing. But for an artist who proclaims himself to be on the edge of the avant-garde, this all looks and sounds very familiar.
***
The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan) [C]
The modus operandi in The Wild Goose Lake is chaos: a country in chaos, a story in chaos, a directorial vision that embraces chaos and unpredictability at every turn. But there’s a difference between a film about chaos and a film that’s out of control. Diao Yinan’s latest after his Golden Bear-winning Black Coal, Thin Ice is another grimy neo-noir, defined by sudden explosions of unpredictable violence. The first major scene involves a gang meeting suddenly erupting into a civil war, and the director hyperactively intersperses wide-shots of elaborate fight choreography with more impressionistic inserts – such as a lightbulb swinging back and forth – and then moves to a motorcycle chase with an insanely gory flourish.
The issue is that Yinan then never calms down afterwards. He never establishes characters or a clear narrative through-line; we know that Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) is on the run for accidentally killing a cop, and he’s allied himself with Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun-Mei), a kind of prostitute known as “bathing beauties” for plying their trade at the titular lake. Zhou wants to contact his ex-wife (Regina Wan), but so do the police, and the question is whether Zhou will be caught in their trap.
But every scene is shot in such a stylish way that it’s hard to know what to focus on. Most sequences are set at night, in crowded streets and warehouses, and the timelines criss-cross and dart between perspectives at an unpleasantly rapid rate. There are constant intrusions, where people suddenly walk in and out of the frame, appearing where they’re not supposed to. It’s like watching a film on fast-forward; a rape scene suddenly appears out of nowhere.
This would be fine if it fit into the overall fabric of the film, as some seem to think it does – it might well be a valuable insight into the rage surging throughout modern Chinese society. But that’s not enough for this critic. The best noirs might have had ridiculously convoluted plots, but they always provided something to grasp onto to guide you through it all. By choosing not to develop any characters, or emotions, or even emphasise what the viewer is looking at, Yinan makes his film needlessly difficult, when it is – at heart – a genre exercise. The neon-hazed photography is reminiscent of Bi Gan’s legitimately great Long Day’s Journey into Night from last year's Cannes – but unlike with that film, we are not supposed to slip into a dreamlike haze, but actually pay attention to what’s happening. And on that level, The Wild Goose Lake fails.
***
The Whistlers (Corneliu Porumboiu) [C+]
Kicking off with Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” and descending into a Cold War-style espionage thriller, in which cop Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) must learn a complex language of whistles in order to recover a large sum of money with some gangsters, Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers certainly doesn’t lack for style. It’s got a good visual sense and offers a fresh take on corruption in Romania, which has repeatedly been tackled in more realist fare. It doesn’t add up to much more than that – but it’s just about enough.
Divided into chapters which ping-pong between timelines, The Whistlers doesn’t waste time setting up its conceit. The scene where Cristi learns how to whistle is funny because it’s random – the logic is simply that the language is indistinguishable from birdsong and thus easy to conceal. Porumboiu is a director who’s always been interested in communication, but it doesn’t seem to have much symbolic import here. It’s just funny. More pointed are scenes with the protagonist’s boss Magda (Rodica Lazar), whose corruption is as matter-of-fact as the brutality of gangster boss Paco (Agustí Villaronga).
The plot is breezy enough – satirical on matters of the church and of local communities – that the violence, when it comes, is shocking (there’s a particularly gruesome shot of blood soaking into a keyboard). Some of the narrative threads don’t come together – the treatment of Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), a sort of femme fatale drawn into the scheme, borders on objectifying – and it ends on an empty note, but it’s an otherwise satisfying enough treatment of a familiar subject.
***
Lux Æterna (Gaspar Noé) [B+]
It’s a bit embarrassing to identify as a fan of Gaspar Noé. An enfant terrible who emerged from the New French Extremity movement at the turn of the 21st Century, the director’s films are often simplistic and stupid; he has a tin ear for dialogue and works overtime to annoy and upset his audiences. (His 2002 film Irréversible, a story of rape and violence told in reverse-chronological order, was one of the most controversial films of the decade, inspiring mass walkouts and even fainting spells). And yet, he is so self-assured, so possessed with an uncanny sense of what is and what is not “cinematic”, that this critic finds his work weirdly irresistible.
Lux Æterna – a pint-sized experiment clocking in at 50 minutes, originally an advert for Yves Saint Laurent but still very much a proper movie – could be paired with Climax, Noé’s entry at last year’s Cannes, about a party between dancers that collapses under the influence of drugs. It was defined by a constant sense of movement that eventually crosses over into the realm of disturbing performance art. The director’s latest is also about the chaos behind a compelling performance, albeit in an environment closer to his heart: a film production.
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Béatrice Dalle play themselves as the star and director, respectively, of a project about witches being burnt at the stake. Their opening, amiable conversations about the humiliations they’ve endured over their careers – and how these have nonetheless led to interesting films – gives way to a nightmarish portrayal of a set in chaos. Noé’s camera zips around the space, often in split-screen, taking in scheming producers, disgruntled actors, frantic crew members looking for some semblance of order, and a director of photography, Max (Maxime Ruiz), with an ego the size of a cathedral.
The set they’re working on is ridiculous: three stakes against a flaming green-screen backdrop, with extras carrying lit torches. Yet once Gainsbourg and her fellow witches are tied to their stakes, the backdrop malfunctions, and the final stretch becomes an epileptic assault on the eyes and ears. Noé includes an aside about Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, describing how a shot of a horrified woman being burnt at the stake was made more effective by her having been up there for over two hours before shooting.
Likewise, the unpleasant, convulsive atmosphere leads Gainsbourg to panic as she realises she’s stuck up on the stake – and it’s then that Max encourages her to lean into her fear. And the result is a captivating performance. Noé’s argument regarding creative cruelty may strike some as reductive, even offensive, but it’s presented in such a confident and tongue-in-cheek manner – and in a way that honestly acknowledges how much art was probably a nightmare to make – that this critic is inclined to give the director the benefit of the doubt, and view it as a thrilling essay on the pleasure and pain of his own creative process.
***
Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne) [B-]
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s latest naturalistic drama caught a few raised eyebrows in the lead-up to Cannes. It’s because of its premise: a young Belgian boy, Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi), plans to murder his teacher (Myriem Akheddiou) because of her attitude towards his Islamic religion. The Dardennes are two white men in their sixties, and many rightly had their suspicions about whether these artists had any right to tackle such problematic subject matter. Having watched the film itself, it’s not that much clearer whether Young Ahmed is artistically bankrupt because of this, or whether its relative sensitivity and compelling moment-to-moment drama make for any kind of redeeming qualities.
The principles of Ahmed’s extremism are plausible enough; he’s missing a father, and the local Imam has taken him under his wing, instilling within him the tenets of the Qu’ran, which the boy follows to the letter. He’s apparently only been this way for a month, but he won’t touch women, and adheres to a punctual prayer schedule. His teacher wants to start a class that teaches Arabic using songs instead of scripture – which divides the Muslim community. Ahmed decides to take matters into his own hands. The tension throughout the rest of the film is whether he’ll realise his mistake, or continue down his extremist path.
No matter how sensitive their portrayal of the subject may be, the Dardennes’s regular approach – giving moral dilemmas an unforgiving, almost thriller-like urgency – means that the deck is entirely stacked against a religion and race other than their own. Ahmed is insufferable, because he’s a kid, and he’s taken the lessons of the Imam too seriously. The white people around him – the adults, social workers, even a young farm girl (Victoria Bluck) – basically have the purity of saints, because of the economy of storytelling. The directors only tell us what we need to know in order to make each situation tense and revealing of character; they set up obvious solutions to scenes, only to go in a different direction entirely.
This kind of rigidness isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it’s in the service of a worthy dilemma, such as Marion Cotillard trying to unite her co-workers against the forces of capitalism in Two Days, One Night. And wound tight at 85 minutes, Young Ahmed is, in fact, intensely watchable – the moments where Ahmed starts to break away from his indoctrination are as moving as anything they've ever done. But the problems are inherent to the premise itself. It’s up to the viewer to decide if they’re deal breakers.
***
An Easy Girl (Rebecca Zlotowski) [C]
There’s something disconcerting about watching a film that’s set where you’re watching it. Rebecca Zlotowski’s An Easy Girl takes place in Cannes, primarily aboard one of the private yachts lined up along the seafront – looming objects of enviable wealth and status. It follows Naima (Mina Farid), a teenager whose attractive cousin, Sofia (Zahia Dehar), has suddenly started living with her and her mother, and it’s this financial tension that animates this otherwise intensely overfamiliar coming-of-age story.
The first shot is a zoom-in on Sofia as she swims, topless, in the ocean. The camera ogles her large breasts and bum, to make it clear that she’s the “easy girl” of the title. The young woman is eager to flirt with older men, particularly those with money, as she knows that her looks will buy her a better life. In fact, it’s the only way she can make a living. Impressionable Naima follows after her, eventually ditching her best friend Dodo (Lakdhar Dridi) as she’s drawn into the world of a wealthy yacht owner.
Naima’s relationship with Sofia should be the driving force behind the story, as the “easy” gold-digging life is gradually revealed to be hard, unforgiving work, but it’s scuppered by Dehar’s fairly terrible performance; she really has just been cast for her looks. The idea of a teenager getting caught up in situations beyond their control is potent enough to have fuelled plenty of coming-of-age stories, but beyond the sun-kissed locations, there’s nothing new here.
***
La belle époque (Nicolas Bedos) [C+]
A somewhat charming French comedy in its own right, the major problem with La belle époque is that its premise is too good. It’s about a cartoonist, Victor (Daniel Auteuil), an old-fashioned man who repeatedly squabbles with his dissatisfied wife Marianne (Fanny Ardant). He’s stuck in the past, moaning about modern technology, while she goes to bed with a VR headset on. When one of their fights gets out of hand, Victor is thrown out on the street, while she embarks on an affair. It’s then that Victor takes up his son’s offer to participate in a Westworld-style experience, run by director Antoine (Guillaume Canet), where sets and actors are used to reconstruct a client’s memories.
Victor decides to go back to 1974, when he first met Marianne. She’s played in the simulation by Margot (Dora Tillier), who’s coincidentally embarking on an affair with Antoine. The set-up is classic screwball comedy, and director Nicolas Bedos manages to create an atmosphere of lighthearted possibility. He cuts between situations and moments – often going from the re-enactment to the director’s control room and back again – with good comic timing. There’s some fun had in the meta-element of performance, all peeling sets and extras forgetting their lines, and when Victor accidentally happens across a parallel re-enactment set in 1940s Germany, he gets to slap Adolf Hitler.
But it almost hurts to imagine what someone like Charlie Kaufman or Michel Gondry could have done with this premise. The idea of fantasies being used as a therapeutic device – and the danger in getting too involved in this – have made for many great films, such as David Fincher’s The Game, where Michael Douglas signs up for a life-changing, interactive experience at an agency only to suddenly find himself beset by danger, wondering whether the “game” is, in fact, real. La belle époque is cosy and funny, but it never loses itself in its fantasy – it always brings itself back down to Earth – and it’s a worse film for it.
***
Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino) [B-]
[LETTERBOXD CAPSULE:] On the one hand, I'm glad that Tarantino has shaken up his approach in such a low-key way — there's a tenderness here that's been missing since Kill Bill: Vol. 2, and while the film is still a sea of references to other media, there's little of the tiresome postmodern irony in how they're invoked. On the other hand, I don't really know what it's trying to achieve. While some sequences absolutely sing — Pitt at the Manson ranch, for example, is a masterclass in mounting tension, while DiCaprio's acting crisis on the Western actually brought me to tears — the rest is so aggressively anti-dramatic that it makes me wonder what, exactly, I'm missing. Tarantino's attempt to create an Inglorious Basterds-style alternative history, vis-à-vis Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, is admirable but underdeveloped, even hypocritical, given Tarantino's complicity in the Weinstein scandal and the casting of Emile Hirsch as Tate's best friend. And the ending is a total whiff, frankly, the most obvious course of action that fails to follow through on some of the film's most potent ambiguities — Pitt's problematic history with women, for instance, is all but forgotten. Though maybe it's possible to read the film as a self-critical text, an inadvertent apology from Tarantino for the mistakes he's made throughout his career, and the way he's inevitably drawn towards violence as catharsis. I'm not sure this would entirely change my stance towards the film — it is, I think, too boring and baggy in stretches to entirely work — but I'm already keen to revisit it nonetheless.
***
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho) [A-]
Is there anyone else quite like Bong Joon-ho? A graduate of the kinetic Korean New Wave of the mid-2000s, his films look, sound and move unlike anything else, often combining broad slapstick with gruesome violence and surprising bouts of melancholy. His formal command is astonishing, as is his ability to shift between genres; early in his career, he went from making the beautifully wrought serial killer epic Memories of Murder to the gonzo creature feature The Host, whose bravura opening set-piece saw a giant sea creature rampage through the streets of Seoul in broad daylight. It’s no wonder that Quentin Tarantino called him the next Steven Spielberg. And speaking of Tarantino, nothing could have stolen his spotlight more effectively than Parasite: a brilliant, borderline-uncategorisable class thriller that – whisper it – might be Bong’s best work yet.
It’s the kind of film that’s best experienced blind, so much fun are its twists and turns, though there’s nothing wrong with knowing the basic premise: a family of poor grifters – bumbling Dad Ki-taek (Kang-ho Song), his wife Chung-sook (Hyae Jin Chang), son Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi), and daughter Ki-jung (So-dam Park) – manage to infiltrate a rich family by posing as up-market servants and tutors. Like in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, they’re affected by class envy – they live in a hovel where drunks piss on the street outside, while the family they target enjoy a worry-free existence in their spotless modern mansion, adorned with a huge glass window in the living room.
While Bong certainly shares the same savant-like command over the medium as Spielberg, he really builds off the legacy of Hitchcock. The scenes which earned the most raucous appreciation at the press screening, including two applause breaks, were ones that take basic, suspenseful conceits – characters deceiving one other, hiding behind walls and furniture, setting up objects and conceits (e.g. WiFi coverage) that pay off further down the line – and crank them up to 11. The director plays the audience like a fiddle, able to transition from uproariously funny slapstick to something terrifying, like the sight of a dark, empty doorway, with a thrilling sense of ease.
And for most of its runtime, Parasite is wired tight as a drum, an exhilarating thriller with a killer class allegory at its centre. It eventually loosens towards the end, though it’s certainly understandable why – Bong is working through the potent, messy emotions of a society on the brink, operating within the same basic universe as last year’s Shoplifters and Burning while taking mad risks those filmmakers could only dream of. It’s a great film, and the crown jewel of this year’s Cannes film festival.
***
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers) [B]
[NOTES 5/6/19:] Didn't review this at the time, and it's unfortunately already degraded a bit in my memory. Thought it was very well-shot – the black-and-white within the boxy frame is consistently evocative, worthy of comparison to Bergman, or maybe something from the surrealists, e.g. The Seashell and the Clergyman – and I like Eggers's habit of really digging into the absurdities of period dialogue, particularly in the hands of such a capable double act. (I'm already looking forward to being able to endlessly re-watch Willem Dafoe's monologue about Neptune's Wrath on YouTube.) I am getting a bit tired of the clichés of the A24 "elevated horror" approach, though. There's only so many times I can take shots of dead animals accompanied by dramatic strings as a sign of menace, and some of the later scenes of madness border on incoherent. Still, most of these problems were shared by The Witch, which I really liked, so maybe it's just my tastes that have changed.
***
A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick) [B-]
[NOTES 5/6/19:] Was fighting sleep exhaustion throughout the first half, but quite moving in bits and pieces, as is late Malick's wont. Goes to show what an incredible job Scorsese did with Silence, given how naturally undramatic such a dilemma is to non-Christians – and it's another example of Malick's poetry not being quite captivating enough to carry it, which might, in this case, be due to the absence of Emmanuel Lubezki. Bit weird that a few people cheered Bruno Ganz – it's his last performance, sure, but he's playing a Nazi...?
***
Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe) [B-]
While Fire Will Come may be difficult to parse on first glance – so specific is its milieu and so ambiguous is its storytelling – it’s nonetheless a haunting experience. Spanish director Oliver Laxe (Mimosas) has the ability to conjure up gorgeous, terrifying images, and he starts with a stunner of a sequence: a forest at night, lights darting across trees that suddenly start collapsing. A herd of construction vehicles roar into view, tearing down everything in their path, until they stop before a huge, gnarled oak.
A character later in the film shelters underneath that same tree, but its importance is otherwise mysterious. As are the reasons why Amador (Amador Arias Mon) decided, many years ago, to become a pyromaniac. He’s recently been released from prison, and he returns home to the farm belonging to his mother (Benedicta Sánchez). He’s not the most talkative guy in the world – he isolates himself from the local community, tending to the cows and walking his dog. His only real discussions are with his mother, about whether they should try and attract tourists to their village for some extra money.
If there’s an overarching subject, then, it’s probably the onset of modernism. On his treks through the wilderness, a car sometimes appears, and the dog barks at it. The lovely shots of fog rolling through empty hills will likely become impossible to replicate as civilisation spreads and land is sold to corporate interests. Though Laxe balances this with a discussion of an ancient bell that’s been replaced at a cultural capital. Some think the new bell doesn’t emit the same sound – Amador says it sounds the same.
So what to make of the awe-inspiring climactic sequence of a massive forest fire? Is it a metaphor for the sacrifices necessary for modernity to prosper? Or is it less clear-cut than that? Whatever the case, Laxe’s uncompromising vision is difficult to shake.
***
The Climb (Michael Angelo Covino) [B+]
The Climb is an outlier in the modern American comedy landscape, in that it actually seems to have been directed. It’s an epic tale of a toxic bromance, divided up into several chapters, and each one appears to unfold in one or two continuous takes. Normally, this might be cause for concern – long takes tend to be praised for their technical difficulty, but they’re often just an opportunity to show off at the expense of every other filmic ingredient on the palate. But first-time feature director Michael Angelo Covino, also playing one of the leads, fills his scenes with life and detail, and doesn’t forget the value of good comedic timing.
Take the first scene. Mike (Covino) and Kyle (Kyle Marvin, also a co-writer) are buddies who’ve gone for a cycle ride in the hills of France. Mike waits until they’re going up a steep hill to reveal that he’s slept with Kyle’s fiancé, so that Kyle can’t catch him up; the dynamic changes so that Kyle starts chasing Mike, as passing cyclists and cars interject on the action at the worst possible moments. Covino earns big laughs by following after one character, then swinging the camera back to the previous set-up to reveal how something’s changed, and the performances – particularly among Covino and Marvin, but also GLOW star Gayle Rankin as their high-school acquaintance Marissa – are so lived-in that everything flows naturally.
The time jumps between chapters are surprising; the film frequently threatens to run out of steam, but it never quite does what’s expected, swerving away from the obvious path and deepening its character dynamics at every turn. It avoids easy sentiment by stressing how toxic a character Mike is, why the affable (to a fault) Kyle is drawn to him. Rankin is a great foil for them both, providing a spiky female perspective to an otherwise deeply male film about deeply male men.
But again, it’s the filmmaking that’s key, and hopefully ensures that Covino is set to have a prolific career. It’s silly to suggest that peppering a film with ambitious shots makes it more valuable than, say, something from the no-budget mumblecore movement. But his approach cedes much creative control to the actors. And not just to the leads; like Jonathan Demme, Covino gives everyone a personality and moment, including Kyle’s extended family, who gather manically for holiday meals. Even a guy waiting for his coffee is given a nickname and his own tracking shot. And Covino includes a lovely interlude in a cinema and a very funny climactic homage to The Graduate. Aside from some slightly irritating musical montages in between chapters, this is top-tier independent filmmaking and a major highlight of this year’s Cannes.
***
Summer of Changsha (Zu Feng) [C]
Zu Feng’s Summer of Changsha is a mystery thriller, revolving around a detective, A Bin (Feng), who’s on the trail of a scattered set of body parts. It’s also a serially miserable affair, a story involving grief, self-harm and the death of a terminally-ill child – and one that has fallen afoul of China’s notorious censors, meaning the production team was unable to attend Cannes.
What, precisely, they objected to is not always clear, as Feng’s film is formulaic to a fault, albeit explicit in its depiction of sex, violence and suicidal impulses. A Bin, mopey even by a detective’s standards, meets Li Xue (Huang Lu) across the course of his investigation, who suspects the body parts belong to her brother. The mystery itself isn’t that compelling, and is even resolved with a shrug; the real focus of the story is the relationship between the two central characters, who both carry significant traumas and find themselves drawn to each other.
Feng is primarily an actor, and he coaxes some decent performances out of his cast. Pacing his plot is another matter. It’s a film full of stuff happening, yet much of it seems random, designed to give his actors a showcase in portraying grief without any overarching consequence, or to emphasise an image that Feng finds compelling. On top of that, he gives the whole thing more endings than The Lord of the Rings – a few audience members started clapping when the screen faded to black, only for a “four months later” subtitle to slowly fade-in, to an almost tangible feeling of collective disappointment. Feng is far from an incompetent director, but his writing lets the film down.
***
Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello) [B]
Few filmmakers are as capable of uniting the past and present through their cinema as Bertrand Bonello. His great House of Tolerance from 2011 was as much about late capitalism as it was about its subject, a surrogate family of prostitutes living in a brothel at the turn of the twentieth century – as indicated by its epilogue, which showed sex workers standing on the streets of modern-day Paris, alone and defenceless. And 2016’s Nocturama, a brilliant and provocative film about disillusioned young people enacting a series of terrorist attacks, was inspired by George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, as its group of antiheroes holed up in an abandoned department store, trying on clothes as they waited for the police to catch them. Romero must have rattled around in Bonello’s mind, as his latest, Zombi Child, takes on one of the oldest subjects in cinema: the undead.
“Everything moves faster now, even zombies,” says one of the precocious teens in one of the film’s parallel strands, a posh girl’s school in modern-day France. Fanny (Louise Labèque) and her sorority are obsessing over a new girl from Haiti, Melissa (Wislanda Louimat), who’s got a few strange habits. She makes groaning noises when she sleeps, and she’d rather listen to music from her homeland than the profane rap favoured by the all-white sorority. Meanwhile, we keep flashing back to Haiti in 1962, where Melissa’s ancestor Clairvius (Mackenson Bijou) is poisoned and buried. He isn’t dead, though; he’s dug back up, and while he can’t speak, he can perform basic tasks. Bonello’s carefully researched portrayal sees him put to work on the fields at night, like a slave – he eventually escapes and roams the countryside, instinctively searching for his past love.
The zombies of Zombi Child are closest in conception to Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie and Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, in that they’re non-violent victims of disease, suffering a fate that robs them of their agency – it’s almost worse than death. But the effect this history has on the present isn’t always clear. It’s at its sharpest as Bonello makes a teen movie, where the racism and privilege of the girls are revealed, often in very funny ways. He emphasises the sterility of the classroom, and even pays homage to Carrie in one slow-motion shot.
Only it’s not much of a spoiler to say that Melissa doesn’t take revenge on the school for its micro-aggressions. Rather, we follow Fanny, whose path crosses with Melissa’s aunt Katy (Tatiana Wilfort), a practitioner of voodoo. By the climax, what started as a borderline academic exercise has morphed into full-blown visceral horror, as Bonello uses cross-cutting to simulate a nightmarish trance state. It’s sometimes hard to see what the director’s getting at, and he doesn’t always avoid the pitfalls of a white filmmaker tackling such racially charged material, but the ending brings it all together in ways unsettling and strange.
***
The Best Years of a Life (Claude Lelouch) [D]
At Cannes, the worst films are often, unfortunately, the French ones. They have the potential to revel in culturally-specific nostalgia and get away with it, content to sit within the traditions of their country’s cinema without even slightly pushing in a provocative direction. Take Claude Lelouch. Having made a hit with 1966’s Palme d’Or-winning A Man and a Woman – starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée as two lovers, Jean-Louis and Anne – he’s returned to the characters for the second time in 50 years. (He made A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later in 1986, which was badly received.) It’s comparable to Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, only in Lelouch’s case, the results are absolutely dire.
In The Best Years of a Life, Jean-Louis is in a retirement home, and suffering from dementia. Anne, after running into his son, decides to visit him, and they go on a daring adventure together that involves car chases, bank robberies, and a battle with an archdemon over a lava pit. Not really. They sit in a garden and have smug conversations, which Lelouch approaches by shooting one character talking, then cutting to the other character when they respond. At one point they go for a drive to the countryside, and then to the beach. Sequences from A Man and a Woman are interspersed, including climactic footage of Jean-Louis driving through Paris that literally – literally! – goes on for over ten minutes.
Trintignant is always a watchable actor, though his character is so slight (and weirdly horny) that one wishes he’d retired with Michael Haneke’s comparatively dynamite Happy End. If you’re an old person, and boring, then you might enjoy the film. This critic would urge anyone else to watch anything else.
***
The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão (Karim Aïnouz) [C+]
The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão may be a dramatically ungainly melodrama, but it’s so well-acted that it almost makes up for it. It's based on a popular novel by Martha Batalha, and while director Karim Aïnouz creates an interesting look for the film – grainy filmic textures, plenty of colour and light and shade – he’s otherwise overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the text he’s adapting.
We follows two sisters, Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and Guida (Julia Stockler), free spirits in 1940s and 50s Brazil, where the world wasn’t so amenable to such attitudes. After running away with a Greek sailor, Guida loses track of Eurídice, who marries a man herself, and the time-jumping narrative follows their mostly thwarted attempts to reunite.
It’s a familiar dramatic structure, playing off a culture where men had the upper hand and women were expected to give up their career aspirations and bear children. Aïnouz’s staging of the scene in which Eurídice loses her virginity is shocking, as drunk fumblings gradually turn into something less consensual, that nonetheless isn’t severe enough to destroy the marriage. In fact, the director handles most scenes well; it’s just the overall sweep that becomes exhausting, attempting to compress decade’s worth of material into its two-and-a-half-hour runtime.
But ambition is no bad thing, and the acting is, again, superb. Stockler – who bears an uncanny resemblance to Eva Green – is magnetic as a character who cynically smiles in the face of repression, while Duarte’s more gradual journey of self-realisation is equally impressive. It’s worth seeing for them alone.
***
The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil (Lee Won-Tae) [C+]
A gangster, a cop, a devil… As Tony Shalhoub said to John Turturro in Barton Fink, “Whaddya need, a roadmap?” Almost every year, Cannes programs something crazy from South Korea to show in its midnight slot – last year was North Korea-set espionage thriller The Spy Gone North, the year before that, action films The Villainess and The Merciless – and this year is no exception. In The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil, there’s a cop, Jung Tae-suk (Kim Mu-yeol) and a gangster, Jang Dong-soo (the physically awesome Ma Dong-seok, a.k.a. Don Lee, the breakout star from zombie mega-hit Train to Busan). They don’t get along very well, but they’re on the trail of a devil, Kang Kyung-ho (Kim Sung-kyu), who just won’t stop stabbing people. Needless to say, trouble ensues.
If you’ve got any knowledge about the kind of films the country tends to produce, you’ll know what to expect: violence, elaborate choreography, a tone that veers wildly between deadly serious and wacky slapstick, and, of course, violence, lots of violence. Much of the tension of the piece comes from the fact that cops and criminals are working together – the gangster is fending off a civil war of his own, while the cop is frustrated with the bureaucracy of a department that doesn’t let him do his job. But it’s all just table setting for some typically exciting bouts of action, including a showdown in a karaoke bar that makes ingenious use of a wooden door. Director Lee Won-Tae isn’t a master, but he’s good enough to make the punches and car chases count. And Don Lee is great as the Tony Soprano-esque gangster.
***
Sibyl (Justine Triet) [C]
It’s hard to think of two subjects less suitable to depiction in cinema than writing and therapy. No amount of text flying across the screen can distract from the fact that writing is an internal, boring creative process – while therapy involves people vomiting up their feelings, making it the laziest and least satisfying tool in the storyteller’s toolbox.
It’s to Justine Triet’s credit, then, that Sibyl isn’t totally unwatchable, given that it’s about a therapist who’s trying to write a novel. Virginie Efira plays Sibyl, who’s drawn to one of her patients, Margot (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Margot’s a mess; she’s an actress who’s involved with her co-star on her latest movie – ominously titled “Never Talk to Strangers” – and she’s become unexpectedly pregnant. She clings hard to Sibyl, and eventually asks her to fly out with her to set, on the volcanic island of Stromboli. Sibyl, bizarrely, agrees.
It doesn’t take us very long to realise that Sibyl is bad at her job. She plunders Margot’s life for creative inspiration, as well as her own, erotically tinged memories – she seems to have no interest in actually helping her. The early stretches of the film are boring, talkative with little forward propulsion, but things pick up when the protagonist arrives on-set and starts interfering with the love triangle of Margot, her now ex-boyfriend of a co-star, Igor (Gaspard Ulliel), and the director, Mika, played by Sandra Hüller.
Hüller is best known for her lead performance in Maren Ade’s tragicomic masterwork Toni Erdmann, and she is, far and away, the best thing about Sibyl. Her comedic timing is impeccable; she plays the director as both deadpan and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and her growing impatience with the demanding Margot is uproariously funny. She’s so good that she unbalances the film – no-one can rise to her standard whenever she’s off-screen, and the result is something otherwise flat and forgettable.
***
Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (Abdellatif Kechiche) [D]
[NOTE: My editor didn’t run this review – for obvious reasons – which meant I sat through this travesty for no reason. The magic of the movies.]
This critic was planning to write a grand pan of Abdellatif Kechiche’s torturous and unpleasant Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo, which follows a gang of anonymous young people as they party in a nightclub for over three hours, paying close attention the women’s jiggling bums and breasts, as they twerk and grind on poles to the strains of ABBA. But then they read this news item, which explained Kechiche’s process of filming: “Kechiche absolutely wanted a non-simulated sex scene, something the actors didn’t want to do. But by the way of insistence, and over time and with alcohol being regularly consumed, he managed to get what he wanted.”
Kechiche is also under investigation for sexual assault, and his Palme d’Or-winning Blue Is the Warmest Colour was eventually hit with accusations from its crew and cast, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, over the exploitative methods by which the director captured the film’s explicit sex scenes. Whatever sliver of value the new Mektoub may have – an attempt to elongate sensation, to align ourselves the lives of young people is constant motion so not to think about their futures – not already negated by the absurd length of the project, and his objectifying attitude towards bodies, is absolutely eradicated by this non-consensual attitude towards a vulnerable cast.
When asked about sexual assault accusations at the press conference, Kechiche said, “I’m not aware of an investigation. My mind is at rest in terms of the law,” describing the question as “stupid and misplaced”. He refused to talk about his methods with actors, and when Seydoux and Exarchopoulos’ former complaints were brought up, he said “I’d rather they kept quiet”.
Does anything else really need to be said?