Electric Liberation
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With Sundance wrapped and the Berlinale gearing up, Rotterdam is winding down and SXSW has unveiled its complete lineup. On Wednesday, Rotterdam announced the winners of its Tiger and Big Screen competitions. Paraguayan director Paz Encina’s EAMI, the winner of the Tiger award, blends a fictional narrative with testimonies from the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode people threatened by encroaching deforestation. It’s a “sombre, at times grim ethnographic poem,” finds Marc van de Klashorst at the International Cinephile Society.
Special jury awards went to Morgane Dziurla-Petit’s Excess Will Save Us, a portrait of a farming community in France that Stephen Dalton, writing for the Film Verdict, finds to be “a fresh and funny hybrid work, full of dry observational humor and tragicomic melancholy,” and to Gao Linyang’s To Love Again, which centers on Nie (Song Xiaoying) and Li (Li Xuejian), a couple who have been married for thirty years. “Incorporating political traumas of the past that continue to have a profound impact on China’s social fabric, the film movingly reveals their painful legacy on a deeply personal level,” writes Jay Weissberg at the Film Verdict. Mabrouk El Mechri (JCVD) won the Big Screen award for Kung Fu Zohra, a blend of comedy, social drama, and martial arts that reminds somereviewers of Karate Kid.
SXSW’s lineup of ninety-nine features, 111 shorts, plus episodic narratives, XR experiences, and more includes the world premieres of Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, an animated coming-of-age tale set in Houston in the summer of 1969; Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, starring Nicolas Cage as Nicolas Cage; Jeff Baena’s Spin Me Round, with Alison Brie, Alessandro Nivola, Aubrey Plaza, Molly Shannon, Tim Heidecker, and Fred Armisen; and at long last, season three of Donald Glover and Hiro Murai’s Atlanta.
Along with the 100th issue of Senses of Cinema, here’s what caught our eye this week:
- Probably the most essential read of the week is Elif Batuman’s profile of Céline Sciamma for the New Yorker. With remarkable honesty and clarity, Sciamma talks about what she now feels were missteps taken in the making of Water Lilies (2007) and Girlhood (2014), and Batuman goes into considerable depth with Sciamma over what the filmmaker got right in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). “What Sciamma has discovered is a serious, disciplined way of doing what you want,” writes Batuman. “Perhaps Sciamma is on to a secret that nobody else has guessed: you don’t actually have to shoot Chekhov’s gun.”
- A female French director with an entirely different sensibility, Julia Ducournau makes films that “demand second and third viewings,” writes New Left Review assistant editor Caitlín Doherty. “[B]raced this time for the crunch, the snap, the bite, the challenge is to keep one’s eyes open. In doing so, the reward is often comic delight, a conjoined anticipation of and release from the worst possible thing approaching, happening, then being over. And if it is over, if we are still here, could it really have been that bad? Where Ducournau’s films declare a statement, it is this: once lived through, horror loosens its grip; our compulsion to repeat a trauma is akin to picking a scab, we don’t do it just to hurt ourselves, we do it because it feels good.”
- With last year’s Titane, Ducournau became the second female director to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes. The first, of course, was Jane Campion, who won nearly thirty years ago with The Piano (1993). “The political significance of Campion’s festival-circuit ascent can’t be overstated,” writes Adam Nayman at the Ringer. “Just by being programmed regularly against the alpha-male European auteurs of Cannes, Campion was taking on the mantle of a cultural warrior.” Film by film, beginning with the 1982 short Peel—another winner at Cannes—Nayman walks us through the oeuvre. “With the confidence of an artist who’s not only open to interpretation but happy to be misunderstood,” he writes, “Campion chips away at conventions and reduces the connective tissue between her scenes until it’s just dangling strands; the beauty is in the loose ends.”
- Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, opening today in both the UK and the U.S., is “an electric liberation story,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. A single mother in Chad aims to secure an illegal abortion for her fifteen-year-old daughter. “I wanted to be on the side of women,” Haroun tells Cath Clarke in the Guardian. At the Film Stage, Jordan Raup asks him about the films that have influenced him most. Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945) was a revelation when he was a teen, and he took lessons on composition from Ford and Kurosawa. Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) “has this simplicity of telling the story with details,” says Haroun. “This is what I’m trying to do.”
- Film Comment’s Devika Girish gets Joachim Trier talking about movies, too, but here the emphasis is on guilty pleasures. He just might get you seriously considering a watch (or a rewatch) of Joel Silberg’s Breakin’ (1984), Luc Besson’s The Big Blue (1988), or maybe even Ryan Murphy’s Eat Pray Love (2010). Trier’s The Worst Person in the World opens today, and for the NYT, Valeriya Safronova profiles Renate Reinsve, who won the best actress award in Cannes for her performance as Julie, whom A. O. Scott describes as a “footloose resident of Oslo skipping and stumbling into her thirties.” Reinsve tells Safronova that in the current climate, “you’re supposed to have a strong opinion about everything and know who you are. But then you miss out on so much of the process of becoming the you that would be a more happy being.”
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