Category Archives: Cannes film festival

A Hero review – Asghar Farhadi’s realist tale is just too messy and unsatisfactory

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Plot holes trip up the Iranian director’s drama of a slippery man’s desperate efforts to trick his way out of debtors’ prison

Asghar Farhadi has made a tangled film about the tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive, in that calmly observant, realist yet information-withholding style with which this director made his name. In way, A Hero is a slice-of-life story, in which the “i”s and the “t”s are not necessarily dotted and crossed like a regular screenplay; it has the unsatisfactory, unclear messiness that real life has. There is plenty of interest here - and yet I have to admit to slight reservations about the melodramatic contrivances, which stretch credulity a little.

A Hero is a film that works because of a clever and subtle performance from Amir Jadidi as Rahim, a divorced father who has just been released from jail on a two-day parole, having been imprisoned for debt. He is a man with a bright yet strange, desperate smile, like one of the poor relations in Dickens. He is looking forward to being reunited with his girlfriend, his supportive sister and his beloved son – a gentle, sensitive boy with a speech impediment. Rahim is a man who believes that some sort of charming niceness might still get him get out of a jam. But he has a very specific plan for cancelling his prison sentence. His girlfriend has found a handbag in the street containing what appear to be gold coins: if they could sell them to a gold dealer, might that not raise enough for a deposit to persuade his creditor to forgive the debt?

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La Fracture review – gilets jaunes fable breaks under weight of its metaphors

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A lovelorn woman lies in a Paris hospital as violent protests rage on the streets. It’s all very symbolic … but is it any good?

The fracture of the title is, ostensibly, the nasty broken arm suffered by ditsy lead character Raf (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), a comic-book artist in Paris who slips and falls over having had a traumatic and possibly metaphorical breakup with her partner Julie (Marina Foïs). But there is another metaphor level to come.

Related: Stillwater review – fictionalised Amanda Knox drama is so bad it’s bad

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Between Two Worlds review – Juliette Binoche goes undercover in the gig economy

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Emmanuel Carrère’s drama – based on Florence Aubenas’s bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham – fails to probe fully the injustices faced by low-paid workers

Novelist and film-maker Emmanuel Carrère has contrived this earnestly intentioned but naive and supercilious drama about poverty and the gig economy, starring a tearful Juliette Binoche. It is adapted from the French non-fiction bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham from 2010 by investigative journalist Florence Aubenas, published in the UK under the title The Night Cleaner.

In it, Aubenas describes her experiences “going undercover” and working in the brutal world of cleaning in Caen in northern France, where desperate applicants have to burnish their CVs with fatuous assurances about how passionate they are about cleaning, in return for dehumanising work with pitiful pay, grisly conditions and no job security. The grimmest part of the work is scrubbing lavatories and cleaning cabins on the ferry between Ouistreham and Portsmouth. The book is in the undercover tradition of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Polly Toynbee’s Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain.

Perhaps what might have been valuable would have been a documentary fronted by Aubenas herself, about what has and hasn’t been achieved for gig workers in France since her book came out – or, arguably, a Loachian fiction based on the real lives of these workers. What Carrère has done is create a drama in which it is the fictionalised Aubenas who is the centre of an imagined gallery of toughly courageous workers – her new best friends. The real dramatic crisis comes with Aubenas’s awful dilemma when she has to confess to them she has been fibbing all this time, and using their lives as raw material for her book, which she will write as soon as she returns to her wealthy and fashionable life in Paris. Some of her soon-to-be-jettisoned pals will forgive her when they see how important her book is. Some may not.

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Spike Lee: ‘You hope that black people will stop being hunted down like animals’

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The director has spoken about race at the Cannes film festival, where he is the first black president of the Palme d’Or jury

Spike Lee commented on the US’s current racial justice crisis in typically forthright fashion at the Cannes film festival on Tuesday, saying he hoped the time had come that “black people will stop being hunted down like animals”.

Lee, who is the president of the jury that will pick the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, was speaking at the jury’s press conference on the first day of the festival. Having been asked a question about his 1989 film Do the Right Thing, which contains a scene in which a black youth, Radio Raheem, is killed by police, Lee responded: “I wrote it in 1988. When you see brother Eric Garner, when you see king George Floyd murdered, lynched, I think of Radio Raheem; and you would think and hope that 30 motherfucking years later, that black people stop being hunted down like animals.”

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Kim Ki-duk: punk-Buddhist shock, violence – and hypnotic beauty too

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The South Korean director, who has died of Covid, was at the forefront of a new wave of uncompromising cinema

Of all the film-makers of what might loosely be called the new Asian wave of the 21st century, perhaps the most challenging and mysterious – and probably the most garlanded on the European festival circuit – was South Korean director Kim Ki-duk. He made movies which were shocking, scabrous and violent - yet also often hauntingly sad and plangently beautiful and sometimes just plain weird. But they were strangely hypnotic. In 2011, I was on the Cannes Un Certain Regard jury which gave the top prize to his opaque docufictional piece Arirang, and though I struggle a bit now to recapture the mood of certainty that led us to that decision, there is no doubt about that Kim’s work had a commanding effect.

In fact, Kim himself might be a more prominent figure himself were it not that he was involved in the #MeToo controversy – three actors accused him of sexual assault which resulted in a fine for the director and inconclusive recrimination in the civil courts.

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It Must Be Heaven review – Palestine’s holy fool lives the dream

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The latest satire-fable from Elia Suleiman is as droll as ever, but while there’s a kernel of seriousness here it too often lapses into elusive mannerism

The Palestinian film-maker Elia Suleiman, dishevelled yet dapper at all times and never without his hat, saunters across continents in this new movie, fixing the amusingly surreal tableau scenes he comes across with a mildly perplexed gaze. He doesn’t talk and smiles just once, when a tiny little bird (a digital creation) flies into his hotel room and drinks water from a cup while is working at his laptop. Suleiman is the holy fool who is no fool.

The premise for this film that he is playing himself: travelling abroad from Nazareth, coming first to Paris and then to New York, trying to speak to producers about getting his latest film made. (In real life, he must surely be more diplomatic and persuasive than his alter ego here, the Suleiman who maintains an enigmatically satirical silence in the face of one producer’s obtuse idiocy.) Everywhere he looks, often in eerily deserted streets – surely Suleiman was shooting on very early summer mornings – he finds scenes of choreographed absurdism, gently but pointedly ridiculing the pomposity of uniformed officialdom. The title itself sounds like some lost Talking Heads track describing a place where things happen in a dream.

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Matthias & Maxime review – Xavier Dolan’s heartfelt tale of male longing

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Two friends’ playful kiss rekindles suppressed feelings in a film swept along by rattling dialogue and simmering tensions

Xavier Dolan’s unstoppably garrulous, sweet-natured new movie is a coming-of-age film, or possibly an approaching-thirtysomethinghood film. Or perhaps it’s a portrait of a bunch of friends for whom things would never be the same again after that summer. It is not exactly a sexual awakening tale because the sexuality in question never really went to sleep. But it is a love story.

Related: Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood review - Tarantino's dazzling LA redemption song

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Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood review – Tarantino’s dazzling LA redemption song

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With Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt playing a TV actor and stuntman who cross paths with the Manson cult, Tarantino has created outrageous, disorientating entertainment

Quentin Tarantino’s exploitation black-comedy thriller Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood finds a pulp-fictionally redemptive take on the Manson nightmare in late-60s California: a B-movie loser’s state of grace.

It’s shocking, gripping, dazzlingly shot in the celluloid-primary colours of sky blue and sunset gold: colours with the warmth that Mama Cass sang about. The Los Angeles of 1969 is recovered with all Tarantino’s habitual intensity and delirious, hysterical connoisseurship of pop culture detail. But there’s something new here: not just erotic cinephilia, but TV-philia, an intense awareness of the small screen background to everyone’s lives. Opinions are going to divide about this film’s startling and spectacularly provocative ending, which Tarantino is concerned to keep secret and which I have no intention of revealing here. But certainly any ostensible error of taste is nothing like, say, those in the much admired Inglourious Basterds. And maybe worrying about taste is to miss the point of this bizarre Jacobean horror fantasy.

Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers – and conversely, of course, to shudder at the horror and cruelty and its hallucinatory aftermath.

Our first non-hero is Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a failing cowboy actor and alcoholic going to seed in the autumn of his career and in moments of bad temper beginning to resemble Jack Black. His best friend – pathetically, his only friend – is Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt in his Ocean’s-Eleven mode of easygoing competence and imperturbability. Cliff is Rick’s stunt double and has an awful secret in his life: a grisly event for which he may or may not be guilty. Cliff has to drive Rick everywhere because he has lost his licence, and he is Rick’s best pal, assistant, factotum, and the person who has to straighten Rick when he bursts into boozy tears of self-pity.

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Cannes festival in row after director and baby blocked from Palais entry

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British film-maker claims she was denied access to Marché du Film, then told to pay fee for baby and wait two days for it to be processed

The Cannes film festival has been criticised for its treatment of mothers and babies after a female director claimed she and her child were prevented from entering the festival site.

British director Greta Bellamacina, whose film Hurt By Paradise is screening in the market section of the festival, said the festival had displayed an “outrageous” attitude after she attempted to enter the festival with her four-month son.

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