It consumed, delighted, and maddened many of us, even from afar, but the 2019 Cannes Film Festival is finally done. South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho‘s social satire “Parasite” won the coveted Palme d’Or prize (a first for South Korea), and Mati Diop’s “Atlantique,” won the runner-up Grand Prix prize, becoming the first Black female director to win a Cannes prize (after 72 years, she was also somehow the first Black female director in competition). The Dardennes brothers, who have already won the Palme d’Or twice took the directing prize away from other contenders (Pedro Almodovar was heavily favored), but other than Celine Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” only taking the screenplay prize, there weren’t that many controversial decisions. And hey, people even seemed to love the Quentin Tarantino film and no one decided to cut the movie down to size.
READ MORE: Cannes: Oscar Gets A Jolt From Tarantino, ‘Parasite,’ Banderas & More
The jury, led by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, was unanimous in its decision of the Palme; the members all loved the Bong Joon-Ho film which is perhaps a nice change of pace from previous years. But Cannes has set the stage for the rest of the year. The Oscar landscape has shifted, Terrence Malick‘s film has a U.S. distributor (Fox Searchlight) and in general, everyone seems fairly pleased with how Cannes has turned out near the midway point of the year.
What about our critics? Yes, they had a good run of films, too. And so before we say goodbye to Cannes 2019, we thought we’d do a quick rundown of what each of our three Cannes Critics thought about the festival and their highlights (and one lowlight). Here we go…
Bradley Warren
The Highlights
“A Hidden Life” (Terrence Malick) [Review]
What does it mean to be good, and what is the price? There is something vital—and urgently relevant—about holding on to one’s integrity and remaining morally upright when it seems like the world has gone mad. To be honest, it took a second pass to wholly embrace Terrence Malick’s latest, a three-hour declaration of principled faith about a conscientious objector refusing to swear fealty to Hitler during the Second World War. “A Hidden Life” has been rightly praised by many as a benchmark for the prolific-of-late director, albeit against the unfair metric of meeting or surpassing “The Tree of Life” which itself is a lazy dismissal of everything Malick has made in between. Subsequent viewings are sure to reveal more connections to his earlier, less flighty opuses; “A Hidden Life” is certainly more grounded and focused as a narrative, deeply spiritual but with a secular point of access as well. The relationship between Franz (an exceptional August Diehl) and Franny (Valerie Pachner) is natural and heartfelt—the pure kind of love story that gives you cinematic butterflies. Jôrg Widmer is a worthy successor to regular Malick cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, capturing the valley of St. Radegund in all its resplendent glory (also: threshing, so much threshing). These are images we will bask in for years to come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWC4dVB8n1s
“Fire Will Come” (Oliver Laxe)
Nestled in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section was the best film to be screened outside of the Competition. “Fire Will Come” is a major step forward for Galician director Oliver Laxe. His third feature tells the story of a middle-aged man (soft-spoken nonprofessional Amador Arias) released from prison after serving a sentence for arson. He returns to live with his mother in the countryside, but his presence causes unease for those that remember the damage of his crime. Pastoral scenes are familiar but beautifully rendered. The drama is mostly interior, and the local population is skeptical but also touchingly empathetic as the introverted protagonist attempts to reintegrate into society It’s a quiet movie overflowing with feeling; there is the constant underlying threat of a destructive impulse simmering unchecked inside the human heart. Visceral images of a raging forest fire are overwhelming and the crackling of its flames drown out the cinema. “Fire Will Come” may bear the “slow cinema” label for much of its run time but it nonetheless demands to be seen on the big screen, executed with greater vision than any comparable blockbuster that employs incendiary CG effects. Already the winner of the Critics’ Week’s main award for his previous film “Mimosas,” Laxe picked up a UCR jury mention for “Fire Will Come.”
“Matthias & Maxime” (Xavier Dolan) [Review]
To be fair, most of Québécois wunderkind Xavier Dolan’s worst tendencies are on display in “Matthias & Maxime.” It’s a polarizing film sure to be abrasive to many, and yet I completely surrendered to this full-hearted romance. After the dismal theater adaptation “It’s Just the End of the World” and a flop sojourn to Hollywood with the as-of-yet-unreleased “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan,” the Canadian director successfully returns to his Montreal and queer-themed roots. Dolan himself plays the titular Max—a more adult, dignified turn for the former voice actor—who discovers romantic feelings for childhood friend Matt (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas) on the eve of departing to Australia. The soundtrack—Arcade Fire, Britney Spears and especially Phosphorescent, one swoons just thinking of its placement—is ace, drawing you further into the melodrama when it could just as easily play like cliché. It’s a critic-proof film replete with formal experimentation and romantic abandon. A magnet for criticism, Dolan just doesn’t seem to care; “Matthias & Maxime” bravely strives to reach higher tonal registers and mixes in new visual novelties like snap zooms and gleefully indulgent slow-motion sequences. Props as well to the production for bringing a 35mm print to Cannes, making it the only feature besides “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” to be projected on celluloid. Dolan’s collaboration with cinematographer André Turpin is also woefully under-recognized, and it’s a real treat to see Turpin’s images on film proper.
“Pain and Glory” (Pedro Almodóvar) [Review]
Pedro Almodóvar finally makes his “8 1/2,” and it’s a towering, tender achievement. A career-best turn, Antonio Banderas plays Salvador, an inactive filmmaker overwhelmed by physical and psychic maladies who is drawn to memories of his childhood and his mother (Penelope Cruz in a small, but crucial, role). “Pain and Glory” is loaded with enough autobiographical details to feel authentic, but entertains with the fabulous pop-art style that the Spanish auteur is famous for. Almodóvar has paid homage to the women in his life on many occasions and made numerous movies about artists of all stripes, but it is the personal touch here, like “Bad Education,” that is precious. Queer themes also take on a new maturity, now far removed from the camp and controversy that ignited the director’s career in the 1980s. Now part of the canon of films about movie-making by cinema legends, there is invaluable wisdom on display in “Pain and Glory” that only comes with late-period perspective. The film received a well-deserved Best Actor prize for Banderas’ instant classic performance, which is very likely a prelude to Oscar attention; the veteran actor channels the filmmaker’s experiences into a full-blooded character. One can’t help feel, however, that this was finally Almodóvar’s year for the big one.
“Zombi Child” (Bertrand Bonello)
Les zombies, c’est cool, ça. In the most unexpected theme across the entire Cannes selection, the walking dead were to be found everywhere up and down the Croisette: “The Dead Don’t Die,” “Atlantics” and “Sick, Sick, Sick.” The best of the living-dead films is without question Bertrand Bonello’s spooktacular and thoughtful “Zombi Child”—found in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar—which taps into the old-school “I Walked with a Zombie” brand of the undead. Bouncing back and forth from Haiti in the 1960s to contemporary France, the “Saint Laurent” director’s latest takes a sharply critical perspective towards his country’s colonial past without shirking on the scares. In this scenario, it is a group of young girls at a boarding school for the offspring of Legion of Honor recipients who mess with something that they don’t understand. The cross-cutting of the gripping climax only reinforces Bonello’s mastery of time, an echo of the mesmerizing overlapping chronology of “Nocturama.” What’s most surprising, however, is the tender romance at the core of “Zombi Child”—the naive infatuation of a teenager is contrasted with a love for one’s ancestors that transcends generations and even death. Bonello is keenly aware of his outsider relationship towards the subject, and pays the appropriate respect to the cultural and familial importance of the voodoo rituals that have been warped beyond recognition by the zombie genre.
The Dud
“The Dead Don’t Die” [Review]
There were worse films at this year’s Cannes—tedious French comedy “All About Yves,” saccharine self-styled “final screening” (don’t call it a closing film!) “The Specials”—but none more disappointing than indie icon Jim Jarmusch’s aimless zombie comedy. Bill Murray and Adam Driver feature as small-town cops fighting back against the undead hordes, with Tilda Swinton and Chloë Sevigny among those in key supporting roles. Wasting probably his finest cast assembled to date (or disassembled, as the poster insists), the reflexive movie is largely brainless and takes aim at the easiest satirical targets: Trump, climate change and gender binaries. If it was just any mainstream film in the post-“Zombieland” landscape, “The Dead Don’t Die” would be passable, but expectations are higher for the filmmaker of “Dead Man” and “Paterson,” particularly when he tackles a genre that’s been reanimated so many times already. The story goes further off the rails as the movie wears on; Swinton’s inane Scottish undertaker-cum-samurai being the low point. For a director who up to this point seemed incapable of making a bad film, “The Dead Don’t Die” is dismal enough to make you wonder if he can still make a good one.
