Cannes Festival Roundup 2022

Triangle of Sadness

 

Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund provided one of the festival’s major talking points with Triangle of Sadness, duly picking up his second Palme d’Or for this outrageous comedy about the luxury cruise from hell. Beginning in the world of fashion before segueing into an ensemble comedy on an exclusive yacht, Östlund’s film has the potential to make a real, Parasite-like splash in cinemas later this year. I wasn’t a big admirer of The Square, finding its art scene satire banal, with cobbled together narrative akin to a half-written Black Mirror episode, despite some brilliant set pieces. But Triangle of Sadness sees Östlund bring the scabrous human insights of 2014’s Force Majeure onto that film’s larger canvas.

Riddled with skin-crawling awkwardness and memorable characters – props go to Woody Harrelson’s Marxist ship captain and a fertiliser magnate (played by Croatian actor Zlatko Burić) who dubs himself ‘The King of Shit’– Östlund eventually dumps his cast, Lord of the Flies-style, on a deserted island. It’s here that Triangle of Sadness’ satire of wealth and class starts to bite, as the social order is rapidly upended. But nothing quite tops the film’s centrepiece, in which the ship’s (largely loathsome) inhabitants suffer a series of seasickness-related indignities during a storm. A flabbergasting sequence worth the price of admission alone, that Triangle of Sadness never loses sight of the human stories within all its bombast distinguishes it from the director’s previous film. Balancing the hilarious and the humane, the touching and the grotesque, the satirical and the personal, this is a sublime, even touching, act of class war.

 

 

 

Aftersun

 

The most exciting British film of this year’s festival was undoubtedly this personal, deeply moving debut from Charlotte Wells. Playing in the festival’s Critics’ Week sidebar (where many of the best first and second features at Cannes can be found), it’s a film full of touching, incidental detail, letting a story of a young girl on holiday with her father in the early 1990s unspool with unshakeable authenticity and melancholy.

Newcomer Frankie Corio plays Soph, who has come to Turkey on a package holiday with her dad (Normal People’s Paul Mescal) who has recently split up with her mother and is clearly dealing with a profound sadness that he is struggling to control. Their relationship is unfussily, convincingly portrayed by the two leads’ extraordinary performances, and Wells gives her film some beautifully impressionistic flourishes, including scenes shot by Soph on a new video camera, and a dreamlike space where Soph is reunited with her dad as she looks back on their relationship later in life. A film about childhood memory being recollected rather than an ‘in the moment’ story, this is a lovely and beautiful work about what we experience when we’re young, and what we come to understand.

 

 

 

Moonage Daydream

 

However fever-pitched one’s excitement might be for a new ‘definitive’ documentary about a musical icon, little can prepare you for the intergalactic splendour of Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgen’s trippy, wonderful journey through the creative mind of David Bowie. Working with the Bowie estate and going absolutely to town with a plethora of private footage, recordings, and live performances, that Moonage Daydream contains a treasure trove of previously unseen Bowie ephemera is only part of the pleasures to be found in this extraordinary film.

Accepting that it’s almost impossible to craft a traditional, linear account of one of rock’s most uncategorisable godheads, Morgen has instead crafted a thrilling audio-visual collage of Bowie’s music and musings, leaping back and forth between time periods to explore different elements of the star’s legacy, music, and consciousness. The result is an almost freeform journey through the Bowie universe, as breathtakingly cinematic as it is illuminating. See it big and very loud.

 

Decision to Leave

 

The director of Old Boy and The Handmaiden returns to the Hitchcockian games that have marked out his recent work in Decision to Leave, a delightfully pungent tale of murder and obsession. Park Hae-il plays a detective who becomes besotted with the wife of a government official who has recently died in mysterious circumstances on a remote mountaintop, embarking on an emotional journey that calls into question his seemingly happy marriage, not to mention his moral compass. But the object of his affections is a richly complex, emotive, contradictory character, with Decision to Leave excelling in all the ways that it isn’t the femme fatale story you expect.

Anchored by a mesmeric performance by Chinese actress Tang Wei (best known for Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution), the tender, manipulative, at times desperate entanglement of Park’s two lead characters takes what could have been rote material into unexpected terrain, offering up everything from thrilling rooftop chases to genuinely moving emotional anguish. A twisting, turning delight, it’s one of the best films of the year.

 

 

 

Return to Seoul

 

This thrillingly kinetic second feature by Davy Chou is a late coming of age drama, carried by a phenomenal central performance. Newcomer Ji-Min Park plays Freddie, a young woman returning to South Korea for the first time since she was adopted by French parents as a baby. Deciding to seek out her biological father and mother, her experience in South Korea will leave indelible marks on her, and Chou’s film is a fascinating study of a character who lives relentlessly in the present to avoid the emotional weight she is secretly carrying.

Unfolding across a series of distinct chapters in which Freddie seems to be adopting different personas in a bid for happiness, Park’s transformation from carefree Euro tourist to Seoul techno punk to clean living businesswoman is superbly navigated, and Chou brings a choppy, edgy rhythm to Return to Seoul whilst never losing sight of his film’s deeply humane, empathetic perspective. The result is a bracing, cathartic exploration of the things we need to go through in order to let go.

 

 

 

War Pony

 

The hard knocks of life on an Indigenous American reservation come in for convincing and humane treatment in War Pony, the debut feature from Gina Gammell and actor-turned-director Riley Keough. A deserving winner of the Caméra d’Or (awarded to the best debut feature at Cannes each year), its setting is the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where the Oglala Lakota people endure a life of scant opportunity, discrimination, and hardship.

Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) is barely twenty-something, navigating an on-again-off-again relationship with the mother of his young son, a plan to start a dog breeding business the latest in a series of side hustles. Matho (Ladainian Crazy Thunder), meanwhile, is a young boy with experience way beyond his years, torn between proving his worth as a man and maintaining some semblance of childhood innocence. Their stories unfold in parallel over the course of a few weeks, as Bill is taken under the wing of a local businessman promising a more ‘respectable’ career path, and Matho becomes involved in a local drug gang after being made homeless.

With a rough, realist aesthetic occasionally punctuated with moments of poetry, this is slightly reminiscent of Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, which starred one Riley Keough in a breakout acting role. But what impresses most is War Pony’s contained sense of scale. Presenting a lived in, convincingly rendered world – created in collaboration with co-writers and Pine Ridge natives Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy – War Pony is loaded with riveting incidental characters, lending the film a weighty authenticity. Speaking to Keough and Gammell’s careful, intimate relationships with their subjects, their approach bears fruit when the lives of Bill and Matho finally intertwine. A moment handled with an almost unbearable kindness, it’s emblematic of this rather special film.

 

Enys Men

 

Mark Jenkin’s lore-stoked 16mm films are some of the most thrillingly unique being made in the UK today, and it was wonderful to see him achieve breakout success in 2019 with Bait. That film was about the impact of gentrification on a Cornish village, a relatively straightforward narrative belied by dreamlike, almost Cocteau-esque images conjured by the texture of hand processed 16mm filmstock, and sheer formal economy.

His new film, Enys Men, trades in Bait’s crinkled black and white aesthetic for bleached, wild stabs of colour, and a plot that’s less linear than circular. Set on a remote Cornish Isle in 1973, it follows a scientist (Mary Woodvine) conducting a mysterious experiment, reliant on the generator that powers her tiny cottage and living out a stultifying, repetitious routine. Things slowly get weirder from there, with the film eventually entering a kind of phantasmagorical space that has seen it widely compared to folk horror. A loopy, sensory experience carried by the texture of Jenkin’s trusted 16mm material, Enys Men’s spectral quality is seemingly beamed not just from another decade, but another planet.

 

 

Armageddon Time

 

Beloved in France but with a mixed reputation at home, American director James Gray finally found something of a mainstream hit with Ad Astra, his existential 2019 science fiction epic starring Brad Pitt. A filmmaker with a distinctly 1970s sensibility, Gray’s fascination with knotty family ties, troubled father-son dynamics and the immigrant experience in films like The Yards, Two Lovers and The Immigrant has clearly always been personal, but never more so than in Armageddon Time, an autobiographical drama based on Gray’s own childhood in 1980s Queens, New York.

This is the era of Reagan’s ‘moral Armageddon’ and the rise of the Trump family, who make a background appearance in what is a remarkably honest, willingly self-incriminating film about a white, middle class boy learning about his own privilege, and how he is protected from the consequences of his actions. Excellent newcomer Banks Repeta plays Paul, an 11-year-old boy whose Jewish and Ukrainian ancestry is exemplified by his beloved Grandfather, played by a wizened, paternal Anthony Hopkins. Attending a local school and frequently in trouble due to his dreamy, artistic nature, Paul meets a kindred spirit in Johnny (Jaylin Webb), an African American classmate from a poorer background who dreams of becoming an astronaut. Their youthful misadventures will eventually prompt Paul’s parents (Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway) to move him to an exclusive local prep school, and what follows teaches Paul an awful lesson about privilege and complicity in America.

Armageddon Time feels like a film that might once have been made by the likes of Arthur Penn or Bob Rafelson in the way that it explores how social injustice is sometimes shrouded in a kind of moral ambivalence. Gray is perhaps the only American filmmaker making these sorts of knotty, open-ended dramas on a studio budget, and watching the scales fall from Paul’s eyes in this thoughtful, unflashy film was a deeply moving experience.

 

The Dam

 

Societal dread and haunted landscapes underpin this striking, mysterious film from Sudan. The debut feature from lauded Lebanese artist Ali Cherri follows a builder who spends most of his time drying mud bricks in the crushing country heat. But at night, he disappears into the woods to build a mysterious monolith, the power and purpose of which remains tantalisingly unclear. Unfolding over 80 pregnant, patient minutes, the voices emanating from the earth, and the seismic events happening a few hundred miles away – The Dam is set in 2019, during the revolution that deposed Omar al-Bashir after more than 30 years at the head of the Sudanese government – speak to the undercurrents of a country, both ancient and contemporary.

 

One Fine Morning

 

The new film from Mia Hansen-Løve is one of the French filmmaker’s best. Already completed despite the recent release of Bergman Island, One Fine Morning stars a magnetic Léa Seydoux as a woman who finds herself emotionally trapped by two men. One is her father (Pascal Greggory), a lauded academic suffering from a neurological disorder mirroring dementia, meaning he will soon need fulltime care. The other is Clément (Melvil Poupaud, also starring in Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother & Sister at this year’s festival), an old friend whom she has not seen since her husband’s death some years ago. Running into one another by chance, there is an instant spark between them, and it’s not long before they are engaged in a passionate affair, one made complicated by Clément being married, and by their both having young children.

These emotional entanglements will threaten to derail Sandra, as she struggles to reconcile the excitement of a new relationship with the knowledge that it potentially has no future; as well as the need to upend her father’s life, with all the turmoil that entails. Utterly of a piece with Mia Hansen-Løve’s other films, all of which explore how tumultuous, lifechanging events are eventually lost to time, it is Seydoux and Poupaud – who bring a warmth and intensity to this emotionally intelligent film – that give One Fine Morning its beautifully soulful dimension. The result is a tender, big-hearted ode to the journey through life.

 

 

 

R.M.N.

 

Romanian heavyweight Cristian Mungiu – previously a Palme d’Or winner with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – returned to Competition at Cannes with this timely, bleak portrait of small-town bigotry and violence. R.M.N. follows Matthias (Marin Grigore) on his journey back to his Transylvanian hometown from Germany, where he was working until a recent workplace altercation. He intends to reconnect with his alienated young son Rudi, as well as his former lover Csilla (Judith State), a manager at the local bread factory. With the town’s working age population having been hollowed out, Csilla is in the process of hiring overseas migrant workers, whose arrival from Sri Lanka causes uproar amongst the locals, and eventual insurrection.

Boasting all Mungiu’s customary formal control, R.M.N. sees the ratcheting up of unbearable tension until inevitable violence erupts. Cleverly blending the ancient and the modern, the riled-up locals have more than a whiff of pitchforks at dawn about them, with the film’s woodland locale a setting befitting both gothic fiction and a modern story of fractured community, one that is more diverse than it appears (R.M.N. contains five different spoken languages), impacted by European free movement, and susceptible to the influence of right-wing Facebook groups. The fractious town hall meeting in which local animosity is laid bare is brilliantly staged, and whilst some of the polemical notes being sounded in R.M.N. will be all-too-familiar to those of us in post-2016 Britain, this is a powerful statement of a film, with a talking-point ending that speaks to a return to animalistic savagery.