I’m starting to disengage on this, the ninth day of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Every longish festival (10 or 11 days) starts to run out of gas after the sixth or seventh day, and after that you think more and more about getting the hell out of Dodge. Ken Loach‘s Jimmy’s Hall (modest expectations) screens an hour from now at 8:30 am, followed by Rolf de Heer‘s Charlie’s Country (starring famed Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, known for his performances in Walkabout, Crocodile Dundee, Rabbit Proof Fence and Australia) at 11 am. The annual outdoor lunch at the top of Le Suquet (i.e, Old Town) runs from 1:30 to 3 pm, and then the 7pm showing of Leviathan followed by Asia Argento‘s Incompresa, an Un Certain Regard selection, at 10 pm. Friday seems like an even weaker day with Sils Maria, the Olivier Assayas drama costarring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloe Moretz, screening at 8:30 am.

A somewhat vested professional woman told me the night before last that Leviathan, the latest film from Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, is quite essential. She claimed this endorsement was relatively unaffected by her business interests. It screens this evening at the Salle Debussy and Salle Bazin at 7 pm and 9:30 pm, respectively. The Wiki page says it’s “about a man who struggles against a corrupt mayor,” and is “a modern reworking of the Book of Job…a story of love and tragedy experienced by ordinary people.” Something in me flinches when I hear that term, “ordinary people.”

Michel Hazanavicius‘s The Search is basically an attempt to wring emotion out of the civilian agonies suffered during the second Chechen War of ’99. The problem with the film, which got booed a little bit this morning, is a determination on the director-writer’s part to deliver uplift moments, come hell or high water. The second problem is the director-writer’s insistence on spelling everything out with blunt expositional dialogue plus an occasional angry rant or two. As usual I could tell this film was a goner within five or ten minutes. I could hear the granules of sand leaking out of the hourglass and scattering on the floor. Too explicit, too on-the-nose, too much of an effort to elicit emotional reactions, too much “acting”…its just not a grade-A effort. From the very beginning it feels like a movie made by a guy who’s trying his utmost but doesn’t quite get how to make the movie that should have come out of this material.

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I’ve been a Berenice Bejo cheerleader since succumbing to her performance in Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past, which she should have been Oscar-nominated for. It was a little deflating to watch her perform as best she could in her husband Michel Hazanavicius‘s underwhelming The Search, which screened this morning at 8:30 am. But I wanted a few snaps anyway so I attended the 11:30 am press conference. The serious pros and particularly the Cannes veterans always make eye contact with this and that photographer while everyone is snapping away before the session begins. I didn’t realize while I was shooting that Bejo was giving me this courtesy.

Berenice Bejo, star of Michel Hazanavicious’s The Search, at the start of this morning’s Cannes Film Festival press conference.

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Being without an iPhone for the last three days has actually been a kind of open-door experience, spiritually-speaking. Not constantly checking texts and emails and doing HE edits let some air into my soul. I realized the night before last that I hadn’t felt this way in a long while. It sounds like a cliche but it’s true — in a left-field sense being without the phone created a kind of Buddhist-retreat feeling. Maybe that’s putting it too strongly but I definitely felt a bit calmer without it. Still the waters, smell the cappucino. Back to the salt mines: The new iPhone arrives today. (Headline & copy from TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider.)

“Damian Szifron’s Wild Tales [is] moviegoing heaven presented as a farcical national hell. The nation is Argentina, as seen in a quintet of stories. The first is set on airplane, the last at a wedding. Each has a pungent sense of tone and dramatic irony, and respective peaks of hilarious surprise. It’s O. Henry phoning in a terrorist threat.

“A lot of movies from Argentina are about Argentina. Szifron’s is one of the craziest, most exciting, best acted, and even better made. He’s distilled an aspect of the national character down to ‘vengeful assholes.’ It’s one vicious note he manages to turn into five different moods that gather in writerly force and allegorical chutzpah.

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This is going to sound perverse if not outrageous to the Cannes dweebs but here goes. A little while ago I happened to watch the clip below — obviously a smartly-written, efficiently shot, no-big-deal scene in a broadly commercial Hollywood Oscar winner. Familiar to one and all. But I swear to God this one little scene delivers more in the way of complex social undercurrents, authoritative acting and emotional intrigue than the entire import of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Two Days, One Night, which I saw this morning. There’s no comparison. The Sting is a shallow studio confection, agreed, but it’s ten to fifteen times more absorbing than watching Marion Cotillard going from co-worker to co-worker asking for their secret vote, etc.