Jeffrey Wells On this, my last day of Cannes ‘25, I’m shooting for four screenings.
That’s not counting the 2 pm showing of the 4K Barry Lyndon, which I want to attend because I’ll never again have a chance to see this 1975 classic projected upon a big, bountiful screen in one of finest theatres in the world. I’m figuring I can watch about 75 minutes’ worth.
I’m very sorry but Woman and Child, which I struggled through earlier today, is mediocre and overly strident, certainly on the part of lead actress / protagonist Parinaz Izadyar. I simply didn’t believe it. Just because it’s an Iranian film doesn’t assure quality. A family-squabbling drama, Woman and Child is way below the level of, say, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, to name but one example.
Paul Mescal, one of HE’s least favored actors (not in the least due to his sure-to-be-ruinous casting as Paul McCartney), scores again with this press conference declaration. If Mescal is starring, you can be sure that the film in question will be open to squishy, sensitive and vulnerable.
And no, it’s not “lazy” to compare The History of Sound to Brokeback Mountain. Both films are mining very similar turf.
I saw Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value last night at 10:30 pm, exiting around 12:40 am. I was afraid it might not live up to expectations, but no worries — I began to feel not only stirred and satisfied but deeply moved and delighted by the half-hour mark, and then it just got better and better.
For my money this is surely the Palme d’Or winner. I wanted to see it again this morning at 8:30 am. Yes, it’s that good, that affecting, that headstrong and explorational. A 15-minute-long standing ovation at the Grand Lumiere, and all the snippy, snooty Cannes critics are jumping onboard.
But what matters, finally, is what HE thinks and feel deep down, and that, basically, is “yes, yes…this is what excellent, emotionally riveting family dramas do…especially with brilliant actors like Renata Reinsve (truly amazing…she really kills) and Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning topping the ensemble cast”
But I was really too whipped to tap anything out when I returned to the pad at 1:15 am. I managed a grand total of 4.5 hours of sleep, and am now at a Salles Bunuel screening of Eugene Jarecki‘s The Six Billion Dollar Man…beginning in a few.
Sentimental Value (why do I keep calling it Sentimental Gesture in my head?) is a complex, expertly jiggered, beautifully acted Ingmar Bergman-esque family drama that feels at times like Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters but with less comic snap…it’s more of a fundamentally anxious, sad, sometimes very dark but humanist dramedy (a flicking comic edge, a Netflix putdown or two). A film that’s completely receptive and open to all the unsettled cross-current stuff that defines any shattered, high-achieving family, and this one in particular.
Emotional uncertainty and relationship upheavals are in plentiful supply.
Set in Oslo, it’s basically about an estranged relationship between Skarsgard’s Gustav Berg, a blunt-spoken, film-director father who hates watching plays, and his two adult daughters — Reinsve’s Nora Berg, a prominent stage and TV actress who’s a bundle of nerves, anxiety and looming depression, and Lilleaas’s Agnes, Nora’s younger sister who’s not in “the business.”
Gustav’s career has been slumping but now he’s returning to filmmaking with a purportedly excellent script that’s partly based on his mother’s life (although he denies this), and he wants Nora to star in it. She refuses over communication and trust issues, and so Gustav hires Fanning’s Rachel Kemp, a big-time American actress, to play Nora’s role.
I could sense right away that Kemp would eventually drop out and that Nora would overcome her anger and step into the role at the last minute. And I knew the film would explore every angle and crevasse before this happens.
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And it really digs down and goes to town within a super-attuned family dynamic…steadfast love, familial warmth, sudden tears, extra-marital intrigue, stage fright, film industry satire, thoughts of suicide…nothing in the way of soothing or settled-down comfort until the very end, and even then…but it’s wonderful.
I have to attend the Sentimental Value press conference at 12:45 pm…breathing down my neck.
A producer with a shaved head wore these atrocious, tent-sized tuxedo pants prior to this afternoon’s Directors Fortnight screening of Lucky Lu.
I suffered through several mild annoyances while watching Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, although there’s no disputing that it’s a respectably “good” film in its own curious, unhurried, dark-fantasy way…a meandering, almost lethargic dream trip about living through a climate of political terror in 1977 Brazil.
It’s a half-solemn, half-eccentric ensemble drama set in Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco and a sizable beach town, during Brazil’s heinous military dictatorship (1964-1985).
Story-wise it’s about Wagner Moura‘s Marcelo, a university researcher looking to reunite with his son while gradually getting wind that he has reason to fear for his life.
Alas, he doesn’t learn that a pair of assassins are after his ass until just before the two-hour mark, and that, in my view, is not an especially good thing for the audience.
The last half-hour of The Secret Agent (bad guy assassins, dodging bullets, blam blam) certainly qualifies as a Hithcockian suspense thing as well as an action thriller, but for the first 120 minutes we’re basically stuck with Marcelo, whose actual name is eventually revealed to be Armando, as he sniffs and laments and roams around and recalls his past and discusses the general state of things with this and that friend or former colleague.
The first two hours, in short, are basically an absorption and a capturing of Brazil’s unsettled mood during that anxious era, but with an occasional focus on gay sex and blowjobs (including the straight-person kind!) in particular, not to mention sharks and Jaws and a hairy severed leg.
It must be said that David Rooney‘s 5.18 Hollywood Reporter review of The Secret Agent has overpraised the shit out of this film. Rooney got me so pumped last night, only to feel crestfallen as the actual film unspooled.
“Enlivened by a populous, almost Altman-esque gallery of characters — way too many to mention — played without a single false note, and by the strong sense of a community pulling together for safety from the oppressive forces outside, the movie luxuriates in an inebriating sense of time and place that speaks of Mendonça Filho’s intense love for the setting. It’s a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year“….calm down, bruh.
Oh, and I hated the color scheme…bleachy-looking in daytime scenes with heavily saturated yellows and oranges and paint splashings of fierce green and teal-blue…I was hating on this all through the 159-minute running time. Mendonça Filho’s mixture of oppressive yellows plus orange-teal splotchitude had me twitching with discomfort.
At an early Sunday screening of Harry Lighton’s sexually graphic, dominant-submissive Pillion, Lighton said he wants the film to “make you laugh, make you think, make you feel and make you horny.”
Translation: He wants Pillion to inspire erections.
Alexander Sarsgaard’s portrayal of the dominant Ray apparently earns him gay-friendly cred; Harry Melling plays Colin, a shorter “bottom”.
So Pillion is a gay Babygirl, only more boner-y or thrust-worthy or whatever?
From Ryan Lattanzio’s IndieWire review:
I just tried and failed to get into a 2 pm showing of Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent (which I have a ticket to see late Monday morning inside the Grand Lumière), and now I’m seated inside the Salle Agnes Varda to see Raul Peck’s George Orwell doc at 4 pm.
But I won’t be able to see the whole thing (it runs two hours) as I have a ticket to see Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme at 6pm. If I want to avoid the agonizing Debussy balcony I’ll need to line up by 5:30 pm.
And yet, to be honest, I have a vague “problem” with the Varda. Or my eyelids do. The red Varda seats are so soft and cushy that I may wind up drifting off. I’ve caught a couple of great sleeps here before so don’t tell me. The body wants what it wants.
HE continues to maintain that Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake is the finest film to play at Cannes ‘25 so far, although Richard Linklater ‘s Nouvelle Vague, which I was knocked out by last night, is surely a very close second.
Today’s Nouvelle Vague press conference included Linklater and costars Guillaume Marbeck (Jean-Luc Godard), Zoey Deutsch (Jean Seberg) and Aubry Dullin (Jean Paul Belmondo).
1:08 update: Just shook hands & exchanged cursory pleasantries with the great Guillermo del Toro.
There isn’t a single aspect of Richard Linklater Nouvelle Vague — a concise, boxy, black-and-white, you-are-there reenactment of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking Breathless, 66 years ago on the streets of Paris….there isn’t a single scene or line or shot that didn’t strike me as wholly, deliciously authentic and note-perfect.
Thank you, Mr. Linklater, for nailing this…thanks for getting it exactly right.
For Nouvelle Vague is pure pleasure. By my sights, at least. Plus it looks, talks, feels, charms and shuffles around like Breathless itself, of course, and is about as joyful and immaculate as it could be in this regard — a genetically fused companion piece.
The handmade, little-film atmosphere shared by Breathless and Nouvelle Vague is the selling point of course…same vibe, same moves….both feel sharp, nervy, tight but impetuous, nimble, unpretentious — and are both focused, of course, on the same influential chapter in cinema history.
Guillaume Marbeck, Zooey Deutch and Aubry Dillon deliver perfect inhabitings of Godard, Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo…they wear their characters well and fully, which is to say with grace, relaxation and confidence to spare.
Will your fundamentally clueless Millennial and Zoomer know-nothings give a shit about any of this? How many under-45s out there have even heard of Breathless, much less seen it?
Or roughly eight hours, start to finish. The Ramsay tops the list, of course, followed by the Linklater and the Peck.
As I only got about four hours of good sleep last night (awakened at 3 am by snoring), I’m heading upstairs to the press lounge. Maybe I’ll find a place to lie down for a bit.
