Daisy Ridley stars in the true-life tale of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the Channel, in a drama that stretches the truth somewhat
You wait years for a stirring feminist true-life endurance swimming drama, then two come along within 12 months of each other. Young Woman and the Sea stars Daisy Ridley as Gertrude (Trudy) Ederle, the plucky butcher’s daughter from New York who, in 1926, became the first woman to swim the Channel. It follows Nyad, starring Annette Bening as Diana Nyad, who in 2013 swam from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64.
What we learn from watching both in relatively quick succession is that there are only so many ways that directors can inject tension into the inherently monotonous act of ploughing through the ocean for hours on end. Jellyfish peril figures prominently in both films, as does unprocessed childhood trauma. In the case of Ederle, a close brush with death as a young child battling measles means that she was subsequently treated as the runt of the family, and later her all-girl swimming team.
The extravagant crime drama was mishandled upon release, hacked apart by Warners Bros, but time has been kind to the fuller, bleaker version
There’s no mob whacking in movie history as gruesome as the job Warner Bros did on Sergio Leone’s final feature, Once Upon a Time in America, a sumptuous crime epic that Leone tried to cut down from 269 minutes to 229 for its premiere at the Cannes film festival in 1984, only to have 90 more minutes lopped off for its US release, taking it all the way down to 139 minutes. The changes, done without Leone’s supervision or approval, had the predictable effect of alienating critics, who’d lauded the film at Cannes, while tanking the film at the box office, and it has taken decades to restore its length and reputation. Longer cuts have circulated – a 251-minute version returned to Cannes in 2012 – but the 229-minute European cut has now become the standard, better late than never.
The excruciating irony of the situation is that time may be the film’s most important theme, and Leone’s signature style, established in classics like Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, is to elongate time as much as possible, squeezing every bit of tension and detail out of crucial moments. Through the full scope of its hero’s life – from his hardscrabble upbringing as a street tough on the Lower East Side in the 20s to his ascendence as a Prohibition-era gangster to his obsolescence as a regretful old man in the 60s — the film reflects the rotten, corruptible soul of the country itself over the same period. That’s not a story that could be told quickly. It was The Godfather for an era that had grown hostile to auteur visions.
Daisy Ridley leads the reductive, if at times stirring, story of the first woman to swim across the English channel
Born to German immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York, Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle crawl-stroked her way through the American dream. In spite of great adversity – a girlhood bout of measles that left her partially deaf, protestations from her butcher father, the ingrained sexism of a country freshly considering that women may deserve the right to vote – she pursued swimming supremacy with a single-minded determination, a drive that brought her all the way across the English Channel. As the first woman to make the treacherous 21-mile journey through choppy, jellyfish-infested waters, she proved that gender has nothing to do with athletic ability, and personified the current of progress rippling out from the suffragette movement into the rest of society.
The new biopic Young Woman and the Sea presents Eberle’s life as a broadly inspiring parable of female striving and triumph, its plot points readily mapped onto any struggle to break into a boys’ club. Delayed for five years at Paramount, recast, sold off to Disney, shunted to their streaming channel and reassigned to theaters after encouraging test screenings, the most surprising aspect of this neat-and-tidy success story is how long it took to get made.
Billed as a gen Z road trip film, the Ross brothers’ first fiction feature offers more than you’d expect from the genre, with a focus on human interaction over plot
In the opening seconds of the Ross brothers’ new film, a teenager professes his hope to discover a place “weirdos” like him can call home. The opening raises doubts about the novelty of what might follow: the trope of the high school outsider has been endlessly revisited. Gasoline Rainbow – billed as a gen Z road trip movie – starts off by replaying familiar images. As new high school graduates Makai, Micah, Nathaly, Nichole and Tony hit the road across Oregon for one final adventure together, we see the usual trappings of the genre: sing-alongs, parties by the campfire, and leaning out of car windows to enjoy the breeze and sweet call of freedom.
We move into welcome new territory when a mishap leaves their van out of action, and the group are left in the hot desert trying to scrounge a path forward, meeting strangers along the way. Directors Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross are known for blending nonfiction and fiction, and their loose, free-ranging cinéma vérité style. While Gasoline Rainbow is their first fiction feature, there are elements that nod to their DIY sensibilities: the teenagers are first-time actors, share the same names as their characters, and scenes were partly improvised. The result is a movie in the tradition of “vibes” film-making, less interested in a propulsive plot than exploring the revealing and delightful moments that arise from spontaneous human interactions. The group tells onlookers that they have no plan for their journey. It is a fitting statement for the film itself, which ambles along gently, happy to be pulled in new directions, seeing what treasures emerge by chance.
Flashbacks reveal an all-consuming bond when two friends reunite at a hen night in a country cottage
Filled with luscious shades of pastel pinks, blues and greens, the warm colour palette of Jaclyn Bethany’s latest feature blushes with the heady glow of summer. Like a bruised fruit, however, the sugary imagery belies unexpected notes of bitterness, as the film plumbs the complex depths of female relationship and the everlasting spell of first love. Led by an all-female cast, the mood is beguilingly woozy, even conspiratorial.
Friends in their teens as dance students, Scarlet (Amber Anderson) and Jo (Greta Bellamacina) reunite as adults for the latter’s hen night at a countryside cottage. Other guests will soon arrive, but much of the film hinges on the palpable tension and intimacy between the two women. Nearly opposite in temperament – Scarlet is reserved while Jo is more flamboyant – the pair finds their life paths have starkly diverged in terms of love and career. Resentment and hurt float to the surface, as flashbacks reveal that their all-consuming bond in the past has also been a romantic one. Their nostalgic conversations are dotted with stolen glances and hesitant pauses. They encapsulate that very specific push and pull between once-close confidants, who struggle to perceive each other with fresh eyes.
Marija Kavtaradze’s affecting film explores the relationship between a passionately physical woman and a man who is asexual
Two people can be seemingly made for each other and still find themselves out of kilter in a relationship. The attraction between dancer Elena (Greta Grinevičiūte) and sign language interpreter Dovydas (Kęstutis Cicėnas) is immediate. Elena is sensual and physically expressive, both professionally and in her many relationships. Dovydas, meanwhile, is asexual. But the fact that he doesn’t need or even want to have sex with Elena doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to be in a relationship with her.
It takes a bit of getting used to, but for a while it seems that love might conquer all, even the fundamental differences in their needs. Tensions between them are evocatively captured in this Lithuanian drama: an awkward, uneasy coupling between the pair is kept in a restrained mid shot, but the sequence that follows, showing Elena dancing with two colleagues, is filmed so intimately in closeup that the sweat and skin almost becomes abstract. The second feature film from director Marija Kavtaradze (Summer Survivors), Slow is terrific – an honest and affecting portrait of an atypical romance.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the film for which Rasoulof was given an eight-year prison sentence by the Iranian regime, receives standing ovation on the Côte d’Azur
The newly exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled his home country last month ahead of taking his new film to the Cannes festival, has spoken of drawing from his real life encounters with the repressive justice system in the Islamic Republic.
Rasoulof, who fled Iran after receiving an eight-year prison sentence for making the film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, also made an impassioned call for resistance directed at the film-makers and artists he left behind.
Cannes film festival Payal Kapadia’s glorious Cannes competition selection is an absorbing story of three nurses that is full of humanity
There is a freshness and emotional clarity in Payal Kapadia’s Cannes competition selection, an enriching humanity and gentleness which coexist with fervent, languorous eroticism and finally something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments. Kapadia’s storytelling has something of Satyajit Ray’s The Big City and Days and Nights of the Forest; it is so fluent and absorbing.
All We Imagine As Light is the story of three nurses in modern-day Mumbai: Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam). Each has come to the big city from smaller home towns. Prabha and the younger, flightier Anu are roommates and Anu (having only just moved in) is already asking the more sober and sensible Prabha to cover her share of the rent. She is also causing some scandal among the more gossipy elements of the hospital on account of her Muslim boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridu Haroon). Meanwhile, the older Parvaty, a widow, is being threatened with eviction because a property developer has bought her apartment building and her late husband did not leave her the documentation that would prove her resident’s right to remain, or at least to get compensation.
Cannes film festival Gilles Lelouche’s new movie aims for a Springsteenesque blue-collar energy but buckles under the weight of its own naivety
Gilles Lelouche’s new film is a giant operatic crime drama of star-crossed lovers and hurt feelings; it’s very French, but aiming for some blue-collar Springsteen energy. There are some good performances, and a very serviceable armed robbery scene. But Beating Hearts suffers from a lack of subtlety and bloat, with an increasingly insistent cry-bully sensitive-macho ethic, and a colossally inflated final section belatedly reassuring us of the film’s belief in the power and importance of love. In the end it is sentimental and naive, particularly about the legal consequences of beating your husband half to death in a phone box, however abusive he has been. And I had a strange taste in my mouth after a late scene in which the heroine, working on the checkout of a supermarket where her boyfriend is employed in the loading bay, coolly tells the obnoxious manager who’s been yelling at him for lateness, that her man is an ex-con who could go around to his house to scare him and his family if he wished. (Is the audience supposed to give a pro-underdog cheer?)
Lelouche, with co-writers Audrey Diwan, Ahmed Hamidi and Julien Lambroschini, has adapted Irish author Neville Thompson’s 1997 novel Jackie Loves Johnser OK?, transplanting the action from Ballyfermot near Dublin to a northern French town dominated by its oil refinery. Clotaire is a tough kid from the neighbourhood; he is played by Malik Frikah as a teen and later by François Civil as a grownup gangster. He and his other dropout mates amuse themselves by hanging around shouting facetious abuse at the girls getting off the school bus in the morning; this includes Jackie, played by Mallory Wanecque and later by Adèle Exarchopoulos. They meet-cute when she fearlessly stands up to him and talks back; there is a spark and soon they are deeply in love, with badass Clotaire doing wild and crazy things like stealing a box of Jackie’s favourite kind of pudding for her from the food wholesaler’s van.
While Jackie works hard at her studies, Clotaire gets involved with a gang run by scary drug dealer La Brosse (Benoît Poelvoorde) and he winds up going to jail for 10 years, taking the rap for La Brosse’s son shooting a security guard; he only got caught because he hung back while the others made their getaway, nobly trying to revive the fatally injured man. Of course, he loyally keeps quiet and does his time, but feels he is the innocent, injured party. No-one points out to him that as an armed member of a gang collectively committed to violent crime his innocence isn’t quite as pristine as all that. He comes out to find La Brosse’s creepy son running the show and Jackie now married to a beta-male salaryman, trying to convince herself she’s happy – and his emotions boil over.
The first act of the film has verve, showing the teen destinies of Jackie and Clotaire at first thrillingly united in rebellion and romance. The next act shows Clotaire using his inside knowledge of the oil refinery (where his father had just been laid off) to help La Brosse steal the wage delivery; it’s the apex of his criminal career, and that too has energy and punch. But then his post-prison life becomes uglier and meaner and then very unconvincing about what happens when you have a romantic road-to-Damascus change of heart about your criminal career. (The police might still want to question you about your recent unfinished criminal dealings, and your former colleagues in crime will be nervous about what you might say to them.) Civil and Exarchopoulos (and Frikah and Wanecque) give it everything they’ve got and that is a great deal. But this can’t prevent Beating Hearts being an unsatisfying experience.
Cannes film festival Miguel Gomes’s beguiling and bewildering story follows a jittery fiance fleeing his intended across the British empire, and her hot pursuit
Once again, Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes delivers a film in which the most complex sophistication coexists with innocence and charm. It is at once very worldly and yet unworldly – in fact almost childlike at times. It is elegant, eccentric and needs some time to be indulged. The British characters are played by Portuguese actors speaking Portuguese, except for a few rousing choruses of the Eton Boating Song, which is in English. (There is more literal casting for other nationalities.) And yes, it is six parts beguiling to one part exasperating. But quite unlike any other film in the Cannes competition, it leaves you with a gentle, bemused smile on your face.
The story, co-written by Gomes, could be adapted from something by Somerset Maugham, but is in fact an original screenplay. (I was also reminded of Jane Gardam’s colonial novels or Evelyn Waugh.) In colonial Burma during the first world war, Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is a minor British functionary in Rangoon, unhappily waiting for the arrival of the London boat, on which is the woman to whom he has for seven years been engaged: Molly (Crista Alfaiate). But Edward gets cold feet and before Molly arrives, he flees to Singapore, where he runs into his fiance’s rackety cousin in the bar of the Raffles hotel, and allows this seedy and excitable man to believe that his own extraordinary, furtive behaviour has something to do with spying.
Living like a hobo, Edward goes on to Bangkok, Saigon, Manila and Osaka, from where he is expelled by Japanese authorities for his suspected connection with US naval intelligence. Then he goes to Shanghai, Chongqing and Tibet where he sees pandas in the trees and meets an opium-addicted British consul who tells him the empire is finished and that westerners will never understand the oriental mind. But the formidable Molly is hot on his trail and not to be deterred.
Cannes film festival The heroine is a victim of her own beauty in this exercise in languorous image-making that is too conceited to allow any emotional investment
Paolo Sorrentino, for over 20 years one of the most vibrant and distinctive film-makers, is coming close to self-parody with this new film, which conceitedly announces its own beauty at every moment and finally drifts into an unearned elegiac torpor. It’s an exercise in style, with much bikini-clad gorgeousness and languorous image-making. There are some very exotic touches and though the camera movements are less hyperactive and angular than in his early work, this does not necessarily signal a new maturity; the lessening of flourishes might simply expose something rather facile.
We are in permanently sunny Naples and Parthenope, played by Celeste Dalla Porta with an unchanging Mona Lisa smile, is a young woman from a well-off Neapolitan background who is haunted by a tragic incident in her past, when her two older brothers were both incestuously obsessed by her beauty. Now she is destined possibly to be an academic anthropologist, as her professor (Silvio Orlando) is profoundly impressed by her intellectual brilliance. He himself is a shy, divorced man living with his son, who is unseen and evidently has some kind of burdensome medical condition. Yet when Parthenope finally does lay eyes on this son, and reacts with spiritual rapture, it is one of the film’s most tiresome and fatuous moments of sub-magic-realism.
Cannes film festival Sean Baker’s tragicomedy features Madison as an escort betrayed by a bratty oligarch’s son who she marries in a film that offers a more realistic take than Pretty Woman
What would Pretty Woman look like if it bore the smallest resemblance to the reality of sex work? Maybe something like this, Sean Baker’s amazing, full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal. It’s a non-love story which finds its apex in a Las Vegas wedding chapel in the middle of the night and then, with a terrible inevitability, slaloms downwards into the most extraordinary, cacophonous uproar of recrimination unfolding in what is more or less real time. The hangover outlasts the party by many days.
The heroine is Anora, though she prefers Ani, a New York escort and table dancer played with vocal snap and physical grace by Mikey Madison (Manson groupie Susan “Sadie” Atkins in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). One night, the club manager comes into the women’s dressing room and says a high-roller is out there, asking for a dancer who can speak Russian. Ani, who is from an Uzbek background and whose grandmother spoke Russian, volunteers.
Shot on 16mm, Marija Kavtaradze’s quiet drama tells a mature and moving story about the many ways people can be in love
A delicate love affair blooms in the new film from Lithuanian director Marija Kavtaradze, which explores attraction and intimacy with intelligence and compassion. It tells the story of Elena (Greta Grinevičiūtė), a contemporary dancer leading a workshop for deaf teenagers, who falls for sign language interpreter Dovydas (Kęstutis Cicėnas). When Dovydas tells her he is asexual, she assumes she is being rejected. He clarifies that he is telling her because he likes her. They decide to try and make it work.
Shot on 16mm film, Slow looks grainy and pleasingly tactile, a fitting look for a film that is interested in many sides of the human touch – how it can soothe, arouse and even spark discord. The gentle naturalism of Slow’s style – full of long takes, restrained dialogue and a moving handheld camera that makes liberal use of closeups – gives the story a homespun, intimate feel. Dovydas’s experience of asexuality, an underrepresented subject on screen, is portrayed with care. With strong performances by Grinevičiūtė and Cicėnas, Elena and Dovydas’s relationship unfolds at a gentle, unhurried pace, their growing attraction indicated by small details – coy glances, long, loaded pauses between conversation – that reward attentive viewing.
Dressed like an extra from The Crow, the actor plays a tragicomic supporting character in this drama that feels like a TV pilot show
Set in New York City and filmed in Manchester, England, here is a film that aims to play like a feature-length episode of The Wire or The Sopranos. Naturally, that is not an easy target to hit, and the result, while decent enough, falls somewhat short but is still watchable.
Luke Evans plays Adam, a nice guy who made a terrible mistake in his youth: shooting another young man and going to prison for 16 years. His partner, Donna (Stephanie Leonidas), has brought up their son Jimmy to believe his dad simply skipped town and abandoned them, so she’s none too chuffed to find Adam back in the neighbourhood and desperate to reconnect with a now-teenaged Jimmy (Rudy Pankow).
Cannes film festival Elaborate necrophiliac meditation on loss and longing stars Vincent Cassel as an oncologist who has founded a restaurant with a hi-tech cemetery attached
David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his now very familiar Ballardian fetishes. It’s intriguing and exhausting: a quasi-murder mystery and doppelganger sex drama combined with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller which comes very close to participating in that very xenophobia it purports to satirise. And among its exasperating plot convolutions, there is a centrally important oncologist who was having a possible affair with the hero’s dead wife and who had also been her first sexual partner as a teenager – but who never appears on camera.
Yet for all this, the film has its own creepy, enveloping mausoleum atmosphere of disquiet, helped by the jarring electronic score by Howard Shore. We are in Toronto of the present or near future in which a wealthy and stylish widower and entrepreneur called Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has founded a restaurant with a cemetery attached: a state of the art burial place where people can bury their loved ones with a new “shroud” whose thousands of tiny cameras can record and transmit real time, 8K pictures of the body’s decay, which you can watch on your smartphone.
The cinematic legend died the way he lived – in a blaze of inscrutable, impossible film-making. We meet the team who helped shoot the final scene of his swansong just before his death by assisted suicide
On Friday 9 September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard had one last wish. He needed a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre to complete his film, Scénarios, but the book was missing from the shelf in his Swiss home. Time was pressing: he was up against a hard deadline. The film’s final scene was to be shot on Monday. On Tuesday, the director would die by assisted suicide.
Fabrice Aragno takes up the story. As Godard’s longtime collaborator, Aragno was his eyes and his ears, his trusted technical advisor. Surely he would be able to find the book from somewhere. “So on Friday 5.30pm, I drive very fast to Lausanne, 20 miles away,” he recalls. “I park the car and I’m sweating. I run to the library but the library is closed. I run to a secondhand bookshop but they don’t have the text. It’s out of print anyway. And I’m running for my life. Or not my life, for Jean-Luc’s life.”
This impressive first feature from director Yoo Heong-jun is a visually and formally inventive exploration of malleable aspects of ourselves
A cinematic puzzle cast in minimalist black and white, Yoo Heong-jun’s slippery feature debut delves into the malleability of identity, performance and life itself. Unfurling over long takes, the tension between movement and stasis lingers in every frame.
Put on bed rest after a vicious stroke that damages her short-term memory, Hwa-ryeong (Cho Hyunjin) – an actor – struggles to recall the plot of her last film. Chatty visits from colleagues only serve to complicate matters. Mentions of a retired performer, a daughter and an ex-husband recur, but it remains unclear how these storylines cohere. It is as if, like Hwa-ryeong, her peers have been struck by amnesia.
Great scenery and a joyous Kristin Scott Thomas are outweighed by one infuriating lead character in Marc Fitoussi’s friends reunited French comedy
The closest of schoolfriends in 1989, despite their wildly contrasting personalities, risk-averse introvert Blandine (Olivia Côte) and gobby showoff Magalie (Laure Calamy) fell out spectacularly (full details are hazy, but it involved a boy) and lost touch. Now, thanks to the adult son of Blandine, who worries that his divorced mother is in danger of closing herself off from the world, the pair are reunited and find themselves embarking on the trip they dreamed of as teenagers: to the Greek island of Amorgos, location of the film The Big Blue. Except that, owing to erratic nightmare Magalie, they are kicked off the ferry for fare-dodging on to another island.
Two Tickets to Greece has some appeal: stunning scenery, Instagrammable taverna chic and the unexpected pleasure of seeing a cast-against-type Kristin Scott Thomas letting her hair down as a boho jewellery designer. But the character of Magalie is so enraging that you would chuck yourself into the Aegean Sea rather than spend two weeks in her company.
Cannes film festival Noémie Merlant’s first film as a director is relentlessly silly, self-indulgent and unsuited to its themes of misogyny and sexual violence
Here to prove that “actor project” movies are always the ones with the dodgiest acting is the otherwise estimable French star Noémie Merlant who presents her writing-directing debut in Cannes, with herself in a leading role and Céline Sciamma on board as producer and credited as script collaborator. It’s got some funny moments and there’s a great scene in a gynaecologist’s treatment room whose calm, straightforward candour completely annihilates all those other coyly shot gynaecologist scenes you’ve ever seen in any movie or TV drama. And the opening sequence is very dramatic, centring on a woman whose story is sadly neglected for the rest of the film in favour of the younger, prettier people.
But I have to say that the film is relentlessly silly, self-indulgent and self-admiring with a certain tiring kind of performer narcissism, always tending towards a jangling tone of celebratory affirmation which can’t absorb or do justice to the themes of misogyny and sexual violence that this film winds up being about. The cod-thriller scenes of corpse disposal do not convince on a realist level (though given that these corpses keep coming back as unfunny ghosts, a realist level is not needed) and do not work as comedy either.
Cannes film festival A thoroughly implausible yarn about a Mexican cartel leader who hires a lawyer to arrange his transition is carried along by its cheesy Broadway energy
Anglo-progressives and US liberals might worry about whether or not certain stories are “theirs to tell”. But that’s not a scruple that worries French auteur Jacques Audiard who, with amazing boldness and sweep, launches into this slightly bizarre yet watchable musical melodrama of crime and gender, set in Mexico. It plays like a thriller by Amat Escalante with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a touch of Almodovar.
Argentinian trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon plays Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a terrifyingly powerful and ruthless cartel leader in Mexico, married to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two young children. Manitas is intrigued by a high-profile murder trial in which an obviously guilty defendant gets off due to his smart and industrious lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana); she is nearing 40 and secretly wretched from devoting her life to protecting unrepentant slimeballs, who go on to get ever richer while she labours for pitiful fees. Manitas kidnaps Rita and makes her an offer she can’t refuse: a one-off job for an unimaginably vast amount of money on which she can retire.
The 20-year failed romance between a singer and a dodgy music promoter becomes the vehicle for director Jia Zhangke’s latest exploration of China’s momentous recent history
As so often in the past, Chinese film-maker Jia Zhangke swims down into an ocean of sadness and strangeness; his new film is a mysterious quest narrative with a dynamic, westernised musical score. It tells a human story of a failed romance spanning 20 years, and brings this into parallel with a larger panorama: the awe-inspiring scale of millennial change that has transformed China in the same period, a futurist fervour for quasi-capitalist innovation that has turned out to co-exist with some very old-fashioned state coercion.
Caught by the Tides reflects with a kind of numb astonishment at all the novelties that the country has been required to welcome, all the vast upheavals for which the people have had to make sacrifices. The film shows us the mobster-businessmen who have done well in modern China, the patriotic ecstasy of Beijing getting picked to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the creation of the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam which meant so much unacknowledged pain for the displaced communities. (This latter was the subject of Jia’s Venice Golden Lion winner Still Life in 2006.) And finally of course there is the misery of the Covid lockdown.
Saura Lightfoot-Leon stars as a traumatised, rubbish-fixated teen in British director Luna Carmoon’s admirable, if hard-going debut
There are certain films – Michael Haneke’s original version of Funny Games is one, Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s The Tribe another – that I acknowledge as singular, visionary works of art, but which I never, ever want to watch again. Hoard, Luna Carmoon’s profoundly uncomfortable directorial debut, fits this category. It isn’t harrowing in the same way as the other works mentioned. But Carmoon’s depiction of trauma, grief and mental health in crisis as a kind of putrid, repellent stench that clings to the skin, stings the eyeballs and turns the stomach makes for a queasily insalubrious viewing experience. Hoard is a film I admire, but struggle to like.
Saura Lightfoot-Leon is magnetic as Maria, a teenager who has lived with a foster mother in south London for the past decade. Her birth mother (Hayley Squires), a compulsive hoarder who channelled her fierce love for her daughter into offerings of scavenged foil balls and chalk, was crushed by a falling pile of rubbish when Maria was eight. The memories had been neatly tidied away, but when she encounters former foster kid Michael (Joseph Quinn), older by 10 years but odd in the same abrasive, unsettling way that she is, Maria starts to delve into the detritus of her past. In practice, this means that she stops washing, starts collecting humming bags of rubbish and enters into a teasing semi-sexual game with Michael (shades of the malicious playfulness of Yann Samuell’s Love Me If You Dare). It’s impressive, up to a point, but having taken the character to the brink of breakdown, the film doesn’t know what to do next. The ending is rather too clean for a story about mess.
The weather didn’t play ball, but Magnus von Horn’s fierce fairytale and Andrea Arnold’s kitchen-sink take on English mysticism should count among the first-week highlights for Greta Gerwig’s jury
The Cannes film festival opens just as the heavens do, too. It’s raining on the red carpet and on the black limousines and on the immaculate white pavilions that line up on the beach. The rain falls on the A-listers as they climb the stairs to the Palais, and on the stoic huddled masses who gather behind the police cordons. Everybody’s bedraggled and windswept; it feels as though the whole town’s been at sea. “My main wish is that we see some great films this year,” says Iris Knobloch, the festival’s president, casting an anxious eye at the sky. “But also I’m wishing for a little sunshine as well.”
If it’s raining in Cannes, it means there’s a glitch in the script. It’s one of the event’s in-built paradoxes that a festival which predominantly plays out in darkened rooms should be so dependent on good weather; so in thrall to its complementary circus of photocalls, yacht parties and open-air film screenings. All it takes is a downpour to trigger a disturbance in the force, a creeping sense of existential dread. The punters came expecting Technicolor. But the scene is all wrong: the world has gone monochrome.
An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser
Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk.
The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves him unceremoniously clear over the cliff-edge. Before long, our hero is living out of his car in the parking lot near the dunes, drinking from puddles, foraging for food from bins, and scheming all the while to make his way down to the shore.
Cannes film festival Yorgos Lanthimos reinforces how the universe keeps on doing the same awful things with a multistranded yarn starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons
Perhaps it’s just the one kind of unkindness: the same recurring kind of selfishness, delusion and despair. Yorgos Lanthimos’s unnerving and amusing new film arrives in Cannes less than a year after the release of his Oscar-winning Alasdair Gray adaptation Poor Things. It is a macabre, absurdist triptych: three stories or three narrative variations on a theme, set in and around modern-day New Orleans.
An office worker finally revolts against the intimate tyranny exerted over him by his overbearing boss. A police officer is disturbed when his marine-biologist wife returns home after months of being stranded on a desert island, and suspects she has been replaced by a double. Two cult members search for a young woman believed to have the power to raise the dead.
Login
