My relatively brief stopover in Oslo began today around 5:30 pm, when my flight from Stockholm touched down. I was on the street in the center of town an hour later, and it felt cold like mid-March, not to mention windy. My teeth weren’t chattering, but they almost were. Thanks, Oslo!
In the wake of the warm Cannes weather (mid 60s) and even Connecticut’s getting-warmer-by-the-day climate, I felt plunged into a misery pit. Thank God I brought a jean jacket and a big scarf on top of the blazer I was wearing. My Airbnb host says it was warm and placid a day or so ago, and then suddenly arctic air just moved in like an advancing army.
Whatever happened to global warming?
Before catching tomorrow’s 1:10 pm flight to JFK I was going to search around for the spacious home that a good portion of SentimentalValue was shot in, but not in this damn weather! Not just cold but a bit dampish. This is sweaters-scarves-and-ski-parka weather, and it’s almost June, for Chrissake.
So I wouldn’t be totally gobsmacked if they don’t give the Palme d’Or this evening to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value.
They’ll look like stubborn fools if this happens, but juries have been known to argue with consensus opinion. Just to defy it, I mean.
HE arrives in Oslo around 5:40 pm, or an hour before Cannes award ceremony begins.
I was on my train for Nice St. Augustin three hours before power the Cannes power outage.
I sat next to three empty Coke bottles in their early to mid 20s — a foxy girl and two short-haired dudes — at today’s 4K Barry Lyndon screening. Right away I knew they were trouble. Both guys got up to use the facilities right after sitting down, which is what frisky, ants-in-their-pants lowlifes always do.
And then Thierry Fremaux invited Lyndon costar Marisa Berenson to take the stage and share some recollections, which she did. And then the lights finally came down and the film began.
The Coke bottle trio couldn’t handle the unhurried 18th Century pacing along with John Alcott’s exquisitely lighted, old-school compositions. They watched about ten minutes’ worth before bailing. You insects…you miserable know-nothings.
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 WomanandChild, which I struggled through earlier today, is mediocre and overly strident, certainly on the part of lead actress / protagonist ParinazIzadyar. I simply didn’t believe it. Just because it’s an Iranian film doesn’t assure quality. A family-squabbling drama, WomanandChild is way below the level of, say, Asghar Farhadi’s ASeparation, 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 TheHistoryofSound to Brokeback Mountain. Both films are mining very similar turf.
I saw Joachim Trier’s SentimentalValue 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 am desperately, pathetically waiting on the last-minute, wait-and-hope line for this evening’s 7 pm screening of Spike Lee’s Highest2Lowest. The line finally moved after an hour’s wait, but I was denied entrance for not wearing a tux.
AOC and Riley Roberts, her big-foot, beady-eyed, carrot-top boyfriend. When she runs in ‘28, fence-sitting voters will take one look at this behemoth and go “WHAT???”
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.
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?
I just tried and failed to get into a 2 pm showing of Kleber Mendonca Filho’s TheSecretAgent (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 ThePhoenicianScheme 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.
