Exceptional acting chops aside, Fjord‘s Renate Reinsve is, of course, a classic Norwegian beauty — the kind that time’s natural process has barely touched. And yet during today’s press conference, she somehow looked even more radiant. I guess having a great makeup and beauty consultant helped, but still.
From David Rooney’s THR review of Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord:
And this:
Cannes Friendo: “Those passages from Rooney’s review are strong, but even there, his jokey conclusion — ‘cancel your Norwegian cruise!’ — misses the point, or avoids it. Fjord isn’t about effing Norway. It’s about a larger mentality, a larger ideology, that began to take root in the U.S. in the mid to late teens. A mentality, I shouldn’t have to add, that we’re all submerged in at Cannes. Will the critics acknowledge this?”
HE to Cannes Friendo: “Not only will they not acknowledge the widespread prevalence of Stalinist wokethink within elite showbiz and media circles — they will also insist on characterizing Fjord as fraught with ambiguity and declining to align itself with either side in the depicted dispute.”
In his recently posted review of Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, a culture-war drama set in a small Norwegian village, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond writes that Mungiu, “in his typical spare and deliberate style, has crafted yet another Palme d’Or-worthy film that fearlessly treads into controversial issues in our society but pointedly doesn’t take sides.”
Wrong, Pete. You’re not being honest with your readers. In this soft-spoken, matter-of-fact saga about a strict Christian family of five, headed by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinve, being persecuted by a small clique of left-progressives, Mungiu is careful to deploy a somewhat ambiguous brush and in so doing avoid black-and-white condemnation of this or that character or chorus.
But Fjord unmistakably does take sides, and the shitheads — the heartless, judgmental child service bureaucrats, I should clarify, who take away Stan and Reinsve’s five children pending an investigation intio possible physical abuse — are definitely the lefties.
“This may frustrate people who want it to [take sides],” Hammond writes, “but Fjord is a fiercely intelligent and gripping movie that finds its power in providing no easy answers, only questions about what is right and what is wrong. This is a movie that defiantly refuses to ask us to take a stand in a polarized society, but rather consider that nothing is necessarily black and white, only shades of gray.”
Bullshit, Pete…bullshit.
There are three startling visual metaphors in Fjord. The first two are a pair of snowy avalanches, one tumbling down a steep hillside in Act One without much concern among the locals, and a second, larger avalanche arriving near the end of Act Three. Make of these what you will, but the idea is clearly that natural disaster looms.
The third metaphor…well, I’m not even 100% sure of what I saw, but I’m 85% to 90% certain that it shows a fraught teenaged girl walking on water.
Other Hammond-like critics are skirting the ideological slant, but make no mistake — Fjord is a complex, ambiguous, thoughtful assault upon left totalitarianism — a takedown of wokethink as practiced by the harshly judgmental residents of said village.
The victims, as noted, are the newly arrived Gheorghiu clan of seven — an evangelical religious couple, Stan’s Mihai and Reinsve’s Lisbet, with five kids. Their brood includes two teens — Vanessa Ceban‘s Elia and Jonathan Ciprian Breazu‘s Emmanuel — two tweeners, and a still suckling infant.
The Gheorghiu’s sins or offenses, as it were, are hardcore conservative values as far as child-rearing and setting boundaries and corporal disciplines are concerned. (Stan’s Mihai also frowns upon gays.) This is a strict, rightwing, traditional-marriage couple who don’t believe in progressive laissez-faire attitudes and are maintaining strict no-no rules — no social media, no rock music, no YouTube access, no smartphones.
I don’t happen to believe in these kind of prohibitive behaviors being forced upon teens and tweeners, but there’s no mistaking that the bad guys are the socially progressive lefties, and two tight-faced women from Child Services in particular…soft-spoken, correctly-mannered ice monsters who decide that the couple’s five kids have to be taken away from them pending an investigation into possible child abuse (i.e., striking them and leaving bruises), although it’s not at all clear that the parents are generally guilty of this.
And at the end, as a young girl (Henrikke Lund-Olsen‘s Noora) from a progressive family who’s become friends with Elia…as the Gheorghiu’s are leaving Norway to escape religious persecution, Noora, frantically upset at losing a good friend, gets out of a car and approaches the river/fjord as the ship is leaving, and she seemingly walks upon water as she’s crying “goodbye.”
That or there’s an invisible wooden pier just below the water line (i.e., the kind that Peter Sellers walked on at the end of Being There).
It’s mindblowing that a major auteur film being shown at the Cannes Film Festival, where pretty much all of the flicks involving social isses and whatnot skew pro-left or LGBTQ-friendly or at least left-progressive…it’s mindblowing that a film by the great Cristian Mungiu launches a blistering assault upon oppressive woke values, and laments the harsh persecution of rightwing Christians.
Fjord, as noted, is not completely cut and dried. There are notes and shades of uncertainty and ambiguity here and there, but the social progressives are definitely the asshats in this thing.
Directed, written and co-produced by Cristian Mungiu, Fjord toplines Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a Romanian-Norwegian couple, Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, “who face scrutiny after moving to the wife’s remote Norwegian hometown.”
Boilerplate: “The Gheorghiu clan has moved to Lisbet’s birthplace. There they befriend the neighboring Halberg family. When the Gheorghius are suspected of disturbing behavior regarding their children, their lives are thrown into chaos as they become the center of scrutiny.”
I was reluctant to catch Laszlo Nemes’ Moulin because I knew that Nemes (Son of Saul, Orphan), though artful of eye, doesn’t shrink from grim depictions of besieged, war-torn situations. It therefore seemed conceivable that he might show what Barbie (“the butcher of Lyon”) actually did to Moulin.
Wiki excerpt: “According to witnesses, Moulin and his men had their fingernails removed using hot needles as spatulas. In addition, his fingers were placed in the door frame of the interrogation cell, with the door then repeatedly closed until his knuckles were shattered. They increasingly tightened his handcuffs until they penetrated the skin, breaking the bones in his wrists. He was beaten until his face was unrecognizable and he fell into a coma.”
As it turns out Nemes has soft-pedalled the Barbie torture accounts (no hot-needle fingernail removals, no door slammings). But what he does show is still fairly brutal. Moulin is savagely beaten to a pulp, bruised and bleeding. It gets so bad that at one point he tries to kill himself by leaping off a balcony. We’re also shown a beaten-to-a-pulp guy whose right eye has been plucked out.
For what it is and what it’s going for, Moulin is grade-A solid…grimly believable, appropriately haunted and paranoid in a “who can you trust?” sense of the term.
Gilles Lellouche is sufficiently invested and commanding in the title role.
Costar Louise Bourgoin is quite affecting as a French resistance member who, being attractive and all, indulges in some vaguely erotic wordplay with Moulin.
Lars Eidinger brings the Barbie like a malevolent pro, of course — playing baddie-waddies has become his specialty. I was surprised to note that Eidinger, who had a bulky appearance in Personal Shopper and Jay Kelly, has lost a fair amount of weight. This, to me at least, always warrants respect.
While Uber-ing over to Cannes La Bocca at 8 am in order to catch an 8:45 am Cineum IMAX screening of Laszlo Nemes’ Moulin, I was reminded what a costly, time-consuming drag this option is. Plus the wifi is anemic once you’re there — all but worthless inside the theatres.
The second half of Moulin, which is mainly about Klaus Barbie’s interrogation and torture of French resistance martyr Jean Moulin, conveys a dungeon-like horror vibe, and as I was walking through the Cineum plex after the screening I still felt the malevolent dungeon atmosphere — the somber medieval interior literally feels like a house of horrors.
And then came the horrific bus ride back to Cannes…took forever, packed in like sardines, the bus stopping and lurching. Perhaps not a horrible experience, but certainly a grim one.
Few will argue with any sincerity that Chris Nolan‘s confirmed casting of 42-year-old Lupita N’yongo as The Odyssey‘s Helen of Troy is anything short of ludicrous.
But until last weekend I somehow hadn’t picked up on the absurd rumor that Elliot Page, whose general Odyssey casting has been common knowledge for several months, will play Achilles, the role that Brad Pitt played in Wolfgang Petersen‘s Troy.
N’yongo-as-Helen is one thing, but Nolan wouldn’t dare cast Page as Pitt’s replacement…he just wouldn’t dare. I read somewhere that Page plays some kind of half-pint crew member or mascot on Matt Damon‘s ship. This makes more sense.
I’ve just fast-forwarded through yesterday’s 60 Minutes segment on The Odyssey, and unless I’ve missed something Scott Pelley didn’t even ask Nolan about the N’yongo and Page castings. Do I need to watch it more thoroughly?
Posted on Sunday, 5.17, roughly 2 pm: I’ve just snagged a last-minute ticket to tonight’s (7 pm) screening of Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean! I’d tried reserving a seat days ago at the proper time but the system said no.
11:25 pm update: Barnaby Thompson’s Maverick is a purely pleasurable, right-down-the-middle, devotional movie-buff documentary about the life and legend of the late, great David Lean.
I felt constantly wowed, massaged, comforted, reminded, elevated, amused. The doc does everything you want it to do. It takes care of the flock. And that final Lawrence of Arabia smash cut to the closing credits? Perfect.
There was a block of at least 45 or 50 unfilled seats when the doc began…curious.
Romantic-sexual sidenote: By any measure Lean’s romantic life was episodic, fitful and even turbulent — never quite stable or settled. Thompson doesn’t shrink from the fact that Lean was a serious hound (the sexual conquests were allegedly in the hundreds) and that he wasn’t much of a stayer.
Lean apparently lived for those first-bloom hormonal highs, but once the relationship settled into the usual humdrum, up-and-down, we-need-to-put-in-the-work phase, he was always sniffing around for the next one. Or so it seemed.
This didn’t go down too well with some women in the seats.
Narrator Kenneth Branagh reads two or three love letters that Lean wrote over the decades, and the last one (a heartfelt confession, penned in the early ‘80s to the much-younger Sandra Holtz) suggested that Lean was something of a serial cad, crooning the same old sentiments decade after decade.
This prodded an audible reaction inside the Salle Bunuel — women coughing, groaning, clearing their throats, chuckling. You shoulda been there.
I have one mild beef with James Gray‘s Paper Tiger, which I caught last night at 10 pm.
I felt completely throttled by Gray’s partly fact-based, family-history street drama, which isn’t so much a Queens-and-Brooklyn crime thriller as a middle-class film noir tragedy.
Like Gray’s Armageddon Time, Paper Tiger is set in suburban Queens, where Gray was raised in the ’70s and ’80s, and in Russian-mob-infiltrated Brooklyn and especially featuring the super-polluted Gowanus Canal, which I’d never even heard of until last night. (I’d now like to forget it.)
Set during the mid to late ’80s, it’s basically a “don’t fuck with the Russian mob psychos” deal, as well as a “life can be horrifically unfair” thing as well as a boilerplate serving of turbulent brotherly conflict.
The main characters are Gary Pearl (Adam Driver), a somewhat flamboyant ex-cop and flashy opportunist, and his younger brother Irwin (Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller), an upstanding, straight-arrow reservoir engineer who’s a father of two teenage boys, Scott and Ben, and a dutiful husband of Hester (Scarlett Johansson).
There’s a third-act action sequence that I’ll never forget, set within what initially looks like a dense, elephant’s-eye cornfield straight out of Fred Zinneman‘s Oklahoma!, but instead of Gordon Macrae singing “oh, what beautiful morning” you’ve got a key protagonist along with four or five Russian goons tramping through the weeds, all with guns drawn.
Paper Tiger, as noted, is not an action-and-suspense thriller per se, but a riveting gloom-and-doomer. It’s a stunningly somber arthouse thing. I was reminded at times of Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. I’m telling myself that it’s Gray’s most jarring and absorbing film ever. It leaves you with a “whoa” feeling…a real bent-over, stomach-punch sense of shock.
My beef is something that I can’t make especially clear as I don’t want to spoil.
It basically comes down to the dramatic rendering of justice, which is a basic audience requirement in a drama. Joe and Jane Popcorn don’t necessarily need a happy ending, but they will defintely feel thrown if a major character — good or bad, noble or cowardly, gentle or cruel — doesn’t meet with some form of appropriate Biblical response.
Put another way, malevolent criminal characters (bullies, murderers, cruel dads, crime family bosses) who cause terrible things to happen to a film’s mostly sympathetic protagonist[s] need to be disciplined at the very least, or, more preferably, suffer some kind of eye-for-an-eye slapdown. I’m not saying that a major shithead character in Paper Tiger evades God’s terrible swift sword but…okay, I actually am saying that. And it’s still bothering me.
How would you have felt after seeing The Godfather, Part II…how would you have felt if Lee Strasberg‘s Hyman Roth had just walked away at the finale with a fresh slice of birthday cake?
Let no one even briefly dispute that several big-name directors have earned reputations for occasionally behaving in a snippy or bullying manner with their actors and crew, or at the very least exuding crusty impatience, and sometimes even treating them with restrained cruelty.
Fitful, erratic eruptions, I mean…Otto Preminger, David Lean, Eric von Stroheim, William Friedkin, Michael Bay, David O. Russell, Michael Curtiz…allegedly Oliver Stone and James Cameron in their hormonal heydays…ditto John Huston and, on an allegedly random, bad-day basis, John Ford (ask Henry Fonda about the Mister Roberts shoot).
In Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s grade-A, exquisitely acted, brilliantly layered The Beloved, which I was totally wowed by on Saturday afternoon (5.16), Javier Bardem plays such a director…the mid-50ish, Oscar-rewarded Esteban Martínez, who behaved in decidedly loutish or tyrannical ways in his younger days. Esteban has since mellowed, as older guys tend to do, but with a certain lingering, simmering undercurrent within, especially regarding Emilia (the excellent Victoria Luengo), his somewhat estranged, mid-30ish daughter.
Esteban has hired Emilia for a supporting role in his latest film, Desierto. He’s told journalists and others that she was hired purely on her acting merits, but the real agenda, of course, is that Esteban, who abandoned Emilia and her mother a couple of decades earlier for a new lady or a fresh marriage (or both), is looking to heal or nourish their relationship.
This is The Beloved‘s core situation, and the principal emotional trigger, as we’ll soon learn, is Emilia’s avoidance of or resistance to Esteban’s subtle emotional overtures. The more she dodges these, the more slighted the headstrong Esteban feels, at first only faintly or slightly but then more and more so.
And then, during the shooting of an outdoor dinner scene involving Emilia and several actors, Esteban’s irked emotions explode into icy fury. He becomes more and more frustrated at this or that aspect of the scene not being quite right, and gradually becomes angrier and angrier. It’s a great showstopping scene…the kettle boiling over.
But after this eruption (which is certainly unpleasant but far from horrific), Esteban is frozen out by nearly everyone. He quickly realizes the Desierto shoot is in trouble.
Feelings are more more sensitive these days among younger actors and crew members (this is an emotional realm in which Millennials and Zoomers are notoriously intolerant…”if you don’t cease your abusive behavior we will rise up and destroy you, boomer or GenXer..we will go to the mattresses over this shit!”) and the chastened Esteban, he quickly realizes, has nearly incited a mutiny.
This sets the stage for a deep-down reckoning between himself and Emilia — a finale that is dramatically necessary, of course, but which feels a tiny bit undercooked.
It could be argued that in The Beloved, Bardem gives his strongest (some would say scariest) performance since No Country for Old Men. Then again Anton Chigurh was an unmitigated, murdering, pellet-gun psychopath while Esteban Martinez is simply an egoistic director whose refusal to be more emotionally honest (not just with Emilia but himself) about an underlying paternal agenda leads to serious trouble. Esteban blows it by under-estimating the emotional pushback among the wokeys within the Desierto crew.
These little candy-asses would faint, of course, if they worked for Preminger or von Stroheim or the Friedkin who forcefully directed The Exorcist a half-century ago.
This is what I would quietly confide to these little pussies if I was on the Desierto set…”Esteban overstepped, yes, and he should do the hard thing by explaining and apologizing. That would be the manly thing to do. But you guys should also acquire some crust…I’ve been yelled at by some real pros in my time and sometimes you just have to shake it off and let the water droplets roll off your backsides.
Put another way: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your woke behavior etiquette manual.”
Michael Che last night: “Speaking of giving little boys juice, Michael won the box office again this weekend, and since a few members of the Jackson family are actually in the audience tonight, I wanted to take a moment to tell everybody what I really think: Michael Jackson did nothing wrong! He was right to molest all those kids! And they were lucky. I would have paid him to do it, and I did. That’s right — when I was 10 years old, Michael Jackson molested me. And the only thing it gave me was a fetish for middle-aged white women.”
Friendo: The Real Time studio audience was conspicuously quiet for this one. Very little laughter, and (disturbingly) very little applause. The reason? I’m guessing many of the ideas and attitudes Maher is condemning here are ones they themselves hold. Regardless, this was — for me — one of Maher’s finest hours. And arguably his bravest.”