Earlier this afternoon I suffered through most of Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, and I want credit, dammit, for toughing it out for just short of two hours. (It runs 149 minutes.)

A hellish, multi-chapter, visually dreary, narrative hop-around from the perspective of a few suffering women and young girls at different times during the 20th Century, Sound of Falling brings the grim and the soul-drain in the usual suffocating ways.

You could say that the soft, muddy, under-lighted cinematography is meant to inject the same shitty, misery-pit, lemme-outta-here feeling the women and girls are experiencing at every turn. Sure, I’ll buy that.

Is Schilinski an auteur — a feisty, willful, go-for-it filmmaker with a persistence of artistic vision and a stylistic stamp all her own (albeit a stamp that brings you down, down, down)? Yes, she is that.

Does her film have something to say? You’d better believe it. It’s saying that 20th Century farm women in northern Germany were miserable as fuck, and that the men were either smelly pigs or abusers or both, and that most of them smoked and a few had massive pot bellies.

Sound of Falling doesn’t make you think about dying before your time, but it does prompt thoughts of escape early on.

On top of which I was sitting in the Grand Lumière balcony, scrunched between two women and with no leg room at all, and my thighs and calves were stuck in a kind of purgatory, suspended between numbness and screaming pain.

But I didn’t leave for the longest time. I wanted to but I couldn’t be the first balcony-sitter to bail. I said this to myself — “no quitting until a couple of viewers go first”.

So I hung in there with the patience of Job, waiting for some intrepid soul to man up and bolt the fuck outta there, but nobody did for the first…oh, 100 minutes or so.

And then a woman got up and walked. And then another. Thank you, sisters, and thank you, my sweet Lord…glory be to God!

I stood up with my bag and retreated to the main walkway, and then decided to watch from a standing position. And then another person threw in the towel. And then another. And then a trio of Zoomers left at the same time. Hey, we’re really livin’ here!!!

I’ve never felt such wonderful kinship with strangers as I did at that moment.

Variety’s Guy Lodge, the bespectacled king of the Cannes filmcrit dweebs, has totally raved about Schilinski’s punisher.

I respect Lodge’s willingness to drop to his knees and kowtow to a feminist filmmaker who has the chutzpah to subject viewers to a drip-drip gloom virus, but at the same time I think he’s either left the planet or had simply decided to praise this fairly infuriating film no matter what.

Average Joes and Janes, trust me, are going to hate, hate, hate this exactingly assembled, artistically pulverizing tour de force.

No time to write anything with a 3 pm screening breathing down my neck…

I was mezzo-mezzo, at best, with Amelie Bonnin‘s Partir Un Jour (Leave One Day), which I saw this morning at 9 am. It’s one of those “going back home and sorting through the past” films. I was there but drifting.

And yet I was seriously and repeatedly struck by a remarkable similarity between the star, Juliette Armanet, best known as a French singer-songwriter, and the late Albert Dieudonne, the star of Abel Gance‘s Napoleon (’27).

They have almost the exact same nose…one of those French honkers you can slice roast beef with.

“I have such close feelings for the Festival de Cannes. Especially now when there’s so much in the world pulling us apart, Cannes brings us together — storytellers, filmmakers, fans and friends. It’s like coming home.” — Robert DeNiro during yesterday’s Cannes tribute event.

HE feels exactly the same way. Really good to be here. Plus it’s warm and sunny with blue skies above.

Jimi Hendrix wasn’t a “black” musician per se or one given to blasting out white rock ‘n’ roll. He was completely defined by and borne aloft by his own genius…a gypsy mystic, a sensual smoothie, a Krishna-like figure, not of this earth, a virtuoso Spirit God.

If Hendrix been less cavalier or thoughtless about which pills he was dropping, he’d be 82 today, and if he’d gone to see Sinners in IMAX he would certainly love the Robert Johnson musical tribute stuff, but he would not be kowtowing and hyperventilating and talking endlessly about identity…trust me. Hendrix didn’t believe in devils and angels, and certainly not in the myth of schlocky Samuel Z. Arkoff vampires. He was way, way above that shit.

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Sound of Falling‘s German-language title (In die Sonne schauen) translates to Staring at the Sun. Any film that shoots in 1.37:1 pretty much has my vote, sight unseen. Farm life is never a bowl of cherries, especially for women and doubly when it comes down to having to fuck those homely Farmer Clem types. I’m getting a little bit of a Padre Padrone vibe from this.

And Cannes is swamped with ugly super-yachts around this time of year. If the guy who designed the Tesla cybertruck had designed a yacht.,,

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The cabin windows are open, the sun is bright and the cloud-free sky is a gleaming light blue as our SAS flight approaches Copenhagen. It’s 8:26 am in Copenhagen, 2:26 am in NYC and 11:26 pm in Los Angeles. I’ve gotten maybe 90 minutes of sleep, if that. HE’s connecting flight to Nice leaves from CPH terminal 3 at 11 am. Nice touchdown at 1:25 pm.

The long-retired Brigitte Bardot, who turned 90 on 9.28.24, is obviously no #MeToo advocate. Earlier today she told BFM that she believes renowned French actor Gerard Depardieu, 76, who will soon face an array of sexual assault charges (13 women have accused him) under the French legal system, should be left alone.

This can only be filed under the general category of eccentric opinions. Bardot and Fanny Ardant aside, no one on the planet earth seriously believes that swaggering, hard-drinking, old-school rich guys known for occasional ornery behavior (like Depardieu) should just be forgiven and cut loose when it comes to allegations of louche or unlawful sexual behavior…nobody.

Several Fairfield County homies (myself among them) during the Nixon administration, posing on the side porch of a large, ramshackle, six-bedroom home in Southport, CT. There was a small barn out back where we’d pass the pipe around. The guy in the striped T-shirt made a 16mm short in which I starred, called Beyond Embarassment. I’ve never forgotten what a friend wrote on the dining room wall: “We are all merely sea men.”