HE to Tomris Laffly: “Two or three days ago a colleague attempted to shame me for having only seen and reviewed a miserable 22 films in Cannes….a pathetic tally compared to your having bagged 40 screenings….40!. And you reviewed each and every one, right?
“40 films in 11 days = nearly four films per day. Very impressive!! I guess you didn’t suffer the same reservation + access issues I was forced to grapple with. I’m presuming you also caught a couple of extras on Saturday, 5.24.
“And each review was how long exactly? 5 to 7 paragraphs? Shorter? Longer?
“Rest assured, no one is more impressed with your amazing screening stamina…no one is more impressed than myself.
“You earned a demerit, of course, by approving of the Jafar Panahi film winning the Palme d’Or, but then you couldn’t help yourself, I guess, being a wokey and all.”
Altogether I saw 21 or 22 films** during my 11 days at the Cannes Film Festival, although I tried like hell to see a few more. Within the limits imposed by stress, fatigue and the necessity of eating cheese sandwiches and getting five-hour sleeps, I did my best to cover the whole magilla.
The Venice Film Festival, three months hence, is the next big event. Thanks again to those who contributed to HE’s GoFundMe Cannes/Venice travel fund.
For me and in this order, there were five gold-star standouts in Cannes:
1. Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, which I’ve written plenty about. (HE review)
2. Richard Linklater‘s Nouvelle Vague. (HE review.)
3. Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake. Pic wound up winning the Director’s Fortnight Audience Award as well the Camera d’Or. (HE review)
4. Thomas Ngojil‘s Untamable. (HE review).
5. Eva Victor‘s Sorry, Baby. (HE review)
For credentialed, non-elite press people like myself, Cannes is quite the aggressive, move-it-or-lose-it ticket competition.
I was basically shut down in trying to reserve tickets for Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest (which I actually Ubered to see in nearby Cannes la Bocca only to get shut out a second time), Scarlett Johansson‘s Eleanor the Great (waited in last-minute line outside Salle Debussy…ixnay) and Kristen Stewart‘s The Chronology of Water. For what it’s worth none of these films were described in radiant, top-of-the-line terms by critics.
If Lee’s producers and the festival organizers had wanted more people to see Highest 2 Lowest, they would have scheduled a Salle Debussy screening that was concurrent with the black-tie Grand Lumiere screening, or at the very least a next-morning screening at the Salle Agnes Varda. But they didn’t.
HE definitely saw (and in some cases suffered through) the following Competition films:
1. Case 137, d: Dominik Moll.
2. Die, My Love, d: Lynne Ramsay
3. Eddington, d: Ari Aster
4. Fuori, d: Mario Martone
5. The History of Sound, d: Oliver Hermanus
6. It Was Just an Accident, d: Jafar Panahi
7. The Mastermind, d: Kelly Reichardt
8. Nouvelle Vague, d: Richard Linklater
9. The Phoenician Scheme, d: Wes Anderson
10. Romería, d: Carla Simón
11. The Secret Agent, d: Kleber Mendonça Filho
12. Sentimental Value, d: Joachim Trier
13. Sirat, d: Óliver Laxe
14. Sound of Falling, d: Mascha Schilinski.
15. Two Prosecutors, d: Sergei Loznitsa
15. Woman and Child, d: Saeed Roustayi
16. Young Mothers, d: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
17. Urchin, d: Harris Dickinson.
Plus four Directors’ Fortnight films:
18. The President’s Cake, d: Hasan Hadi.
19. Wild Foxes, d: Valéry Carnoy.
20. Untamable, d: Thomas Ngojil.
21. Sorry, Baby, d: Eva Victor.
I really wish I could have seen the Lee, the Johansson and the Stewart. I was really kind of pissed off that I was more or less blocked from seeing them. Didn’t seem fair on the part of the organizers.
I was either forced to blow off (scheduling conflicts) or simply chose not to see the following Competition films:
The Little Sister, d: Hafsia Herzi
Renoir, d: Chie Hayakawa.
The three-hour Resurrection, d: Bi Gan.
The almost universally loathed Alpha, d: Julia Ducournau.
Eagles of the Republic, d: Tarik Saleh .
** 22 films if you count Friday afternoon’s (5.23) empty-Coke-bottle screening of Barry Lyndon.