Competition Highs and Lows

The jury has decided to honor Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven with a special mention. As in his previous three features, the Palestinian filmmaker plays a silently observant and somewhat perplexed version of himself. In the new film, he finds that life in France and the U.S. is just as absurd as it is in Palestine. “There is a hint of Jacques Tati in the tone and style of his work, and this new effort, with its tableaux-style mise-en-scène, has a touch of Roy Andersson,” writes Kaleem Aftab at Cineuropa. Heaven, named the best film in competition by the International Federation of Film Critics, isn’t really “a major evolution in his style or approach,” writes A. A. Dowd. “But given how infrequently we actually get a new dose of it, that’s more than fine, maybe even preferable.” Here in the Current, Suleiman tells Bilge Ebiri that he’s “wanted to do this kind of film for a while—one that goes to the edge with the burlesque, and with the choreographic elements. I had been yearning to have this légèreté—to achieve something extremely political and extremely light.”

Rithy Panh presided over the jury that presents the award for the best first feature, the Camera d’Or, and this year’s winner premiered in Critics’ Week. In César Díaz’s Our Mothers, a forensic archaeologist investigates the fates of those who went missing during Guatemala’s long civil war. And the Cinéfondation and short films juries presided over by Claire Denis have given the Short Film Palme d’Or to Vasilis Kekatos’s The Distance Between Us and the Sky, which finds two strangers negotiating a deal one night at a lonely gas station.

On the whole, the decisions made by Alejandro González Iñárritu and his fellow jurors have been met with resounding approval. For Blake Williams, dispatching to Filmmaker, this year’s set of awards is “better than any since at least 2011,” when Terrence Malick won the Palme d’Or for The Tree of Life. Malick, who brought A Hidden Life to the 2019 edition, goes home empty-handed, but so, too, do Jim Jarmusch,Quentin Tarantino,Ken Loach,Corneliu Porumboiu,Diao Yinan, and a handful of filmmakers we haven’t yet mentioned in this year’s round.

Cannes favorite Xavier Dolan, for example, who’s just turned thirty and is a great admirer of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, brought his eighth feature, Matthias and Maxime. Dolan plays Maxime, who’s been friends with Matthias for as long as either of them can remember. It’s only after they agree to perform in a short student film that they realize they’ll be required to kiss. In Variety, Guy Lodge finds that “in its relaxed assemblage of themes and cinematic motifs from previous Dolan joints—a relationship dynamic from Heartbeats here, a swirly visual flourish from Laurence Anyways there—Matthias and Maxime feels comfortable: not out to scout new stylistic territory, but confident in the turf it covers, often gorgeously so.” For the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, the film is “as crisp and tangy-sweet as raspberry sorbet, and Dolan’s most conventional and accessible work to date.”

Arnaud Desplechin returned to the festival with Oh Mercy!, a procedural centering on two cops (Roschdy Zem and Antoine Reinartz) investigating the murder of an elderly woman in Roubaix, a city in northern France scarred by poverty and violence. The partners spend a good half of the film’s running time interrogating two suspects (Léa Seydoux and Sara Forestier), and Variety’s Jay Weissberg finds that Desplechin’s “stated desire to humanize the couple holds less interest than the policemen’s personalities and their interplay with each other and the community.” But for Jonathan Romney, writing for Film Comment, “to suggest that there’s somehow grace to be found on France’s meanest streets may seem a rarefied ambition, and perhaps even an improper one in a film drawn from hard reportage. But it’s something that Desplechin pulls off, with not a jot of his usual cinematic dandyism; for me, it was one of the most welcome surprises of this year’s festival.”

Reviewing The Traitor, most critics have bent over backwards to express their admiration for the work of Marco Bellocchio before enumerating their frustrations with what IndieWire’s David Ehrlich calls “a lively but scattershot and exasperating biopic.” The Traitor sweeps through twenty years in the life of Tommaso Buscetta, a mafia boss-turned-informant, in just under two and a half hours. Bellocchio will turn eighty in November, and his “boisterous spirit is still evident in every frame,” writes Ehrlich, “especially as he depicts the Italian court system like a drunken soap opera at the Coliseum—but his film covers too much ground to navigate any of it with real intention.” Screen’s Tim Grierson, though, finds that Pierfrancesco Favino is “such a commanding presence as Buscetta—imposing but also unknowable—that other concerns almost don’t matter.” And the Notebook’s Daniel Kasman admires the way that Bellocchio “deftly narrates Buscetta’s journey of moral rectitude and personal vengeance by avoiding melodrama in favor of a muscular, straightforward style.”

Hopes were high for Frankie, the first film critical favorite Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange, Little Men) has made abroad. Isabelle Huppert plays a famous actress who’s assembled friends and family in Sintra, the picturesque town on the Portuguese Riviera. Her cancer has returned and she “now fears the worst, although you wouldn’t notice,” as Rory O’Connor observes at the Film Stage. Over the course of a single day, “we’ll see her play piano, crack jokes, and possibly even get some . . . Huppert is great at this, and of course she is. It’s elsewhere that the film falters. This is not by any failing of Huppert’s supporting players, per se, but in a strange lack of chemistry. The family is a hodgepodge of the sort that would make even Royal Tenenbaum blush.” The cast includes Marisa Tomei, Brendan Gleeson, Greg Kinnear, Jérémie Renier, and Pascal Greggory, who appeared in a handful of films by Eric Rohmer in the 1980s. And “for all its naturalistic elegance and lighter-than-air precision,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, Frankie is “an American Rohmer film that doesn’t, unfortunately, feel close to being a major Rohmer film.”

There’s always one film at Cannes that everyone gangs up on, and by nearly all accounts, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo well and truly deserves to be that film this year. To be fair, the film has a few champions in France. In 2013, the Franco-Tunisian director shared the Palme d’Or for Blue Is the Warmest Color with his two lead actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, both of whom would later talk of an arduous shoot. Last year, an actress accused Kechiche of sexual assault, a charge he denies. This context is not irrelevant to the way Intermezzo has been received. Running over three and a half hours, Intermezzo, a sequel to 2017’s Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno, an adaptation of a novel by François Bégaudeau, follows a loose band of young and beautiful people from an afternoon on the beach to an evening at a club that culminates in a now infamous unsimulated sex scene. Overall, the film is “a numbingly obtuse experience,” writes the Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang, “a feat of maddeningly indulgent non-storytelling hiding behind a symphony of bared midriffs and jiggling derrières.” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis argues that “Kechiche’s fetishization of the female body here is as tedious as it is insulting, and the actual filmmaking is flat-out bad; it’s uninterestingly, unproductively ugly, boring, and repetitive.”

Fortunately, we don’t have to leave it there. Hours before the awards were presented, Cannes’s seventy-second edition wrapped with the premiere of Justine Triet’s Sibyl. Virginie Efira plays a psychotherapist, Sibyl, who’s treating an actress (Adèle Exarchopoulos) embroiled in a tumultuous love triangle with the lead actor (Gaspard Ulliel) and director (Sandra Hüller) of her current project. The Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer calls Sibyl “a meta-psychological thriller that’s something like a film within the making-of-a-film within a crime novel within an erotic dream within a therapy session run amok . . . and yet Triet handles the material gracefully and altogether skillfully.” For Variety’s Guy Lodge, Sibyl is “certainly the most purely enjoyable French fancy to play in Cannes’s top tier since François Ozon’s Double Lover two years ago” and it “also seals the arrival of Efira, once pegged as a likable but lightweight comedienne, as a first-class leading lady of consistently expanding range and elan.”

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