Cannes reviews

[Sabin]

I haven't thought about the Awards Daily crowd in a bit. Is that still how they are?

[dws1982]

As usual, folks at Awards Worthy are over the moon for victories by movies they haven't seen (and for all they know they'd hate if they did).

Titane was popular with them because 1) female director and 2) "genre" (which is apparently today's euphemism for horror). The film will obviously get its day in the sun, especially with Neon distributing, but I will always be skeptical about such a film making its way to anything like the Oscars (remembering how Hereditary and Us turned out). I still haven't watched Raw, but maybe now I need to give it a look.

I suspect there will be much anger from the same groups when France inevitably does not select this as their International Film submission--just from the Cannes competition lineup, I would suspect that the Ozon and Audiard films both have a leg up on it as more conventional, mainstream films, and this doesn't even take into account French films that will appear at Venice, etc.

[Mister Tee]

As usual, folks at Awards Worthy are over the moon for victories by movies they haven't seen (and for all they know they'd hate if they did).

Titane was popular with them because 1) female director and 2) "genre" (which is apparently today's euphemism for horror). The film will obviously get its day in the sun, especially with Neon distributing, but I will always be skeptical about such a film making its way to anything like the Oscars (remembering how Hereditary and Us turned out). I still haven't watched Raw, but maybe now I need to give it a look.

Contrarily, they hated the Caleb Landry Jones win because "I heard it was like Joker/toxic masculinity." The excellent reviews in the trades evidently count for nothing when the subject matter doesn't line up with agendas.

I wonder if the Red Rocket shutout (especially in what was, till today, universal best actor prediction) repeats the lesson of the 2020 presidential primaries, that Twitter isn't real life. The idea of a former porn star ascending to Oscar nomination always struck me as unlikely, and failure to win over even more flexible Europeans doesn't seem a strong omen.

Scuttlebutt on Trier's movie since its premiere was "too audience-friendly/will never win anything at Cannes" turned out false, as well. I wonder if this might bring Trier the kind of commercial breakthrough he didn't quite get with Reprise.

Of the others, the Murakami connection has me most interested in Drive My Car. But I'm open to all of them when they finally get to these parts.

[Sabin]

Mister Tee wrote
Actually (I watched on streaming), he was asked to announce what the first award was (which should have been Best Actor), but he seemed to interpret the question as "What's the top award?", and he blurted out most of it before the others could shut him up. Really an amateur night performance -- has he never watched an awards show before?

He also missed a perfectly good opportunity to to give the top prize to Do the Right Thing.

[Mister Tee]

Okay, so Spike Lee apparently mentioned that TITANE won the Palme d'Or at the start of the ceremony. He came out with the list of winners and started at the top or something.

Actually (I watched on streaming), he was asked to announce what the first award was (which should have been Best Actor), but he seemed to interpret the question as "What's the top award?", and he blurted out most of it before the others could shut him up. Really an amateur night performance -- has he never watched an wards show before?

Someone tweeted out a list of winners earlier that was pretty much 100% (except it omitted the Compartment No. 6 tie). So there wouldn't be much suspense at this point, anyway.

[Sabin]

CANNES WINNERS AS THEY ARE ANNOUNCED:

Okay, so Spike Lee apparently mentioned that TITANE won the Palme d'Or at the start of the ceremony. He came out with the list of winners and started at the top or something.

https://www.indiewire.com/2021/07/canne ... rm=1703334


Palme d’Or: TITANE (Julia Ducournau)
(NOTE: Spike Lee apparently accidentally dropped that Titane won the Palme d'Or early; he walked out)

Grand Prix: (TIE) A HERO (Asghar Farhadi) & COMPARTMENT NO.6 (Juho Kuosmanen)
Jury Prize: (TIE) AHED’S KNEE (Nadav Lapid) & MEMORIA (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Best Actress: Renate Reinsve (THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD)
Best Actor: Caleb Landry Jones (NITRAM)
Best Director: Leos Carax (ANNETTE)
Best Screenplay: Ryusuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe (DRIVE MY CAR)
Camera d’Or: Antoneta Almat Kusijanovic (MURINA)
Honorary Palme d'Or: Marco Bellocchio

Aaaaand everybody out of the pool. Sean Baker and Wes Anderson go home empty-handed.

Wow, Tee's insider buzz was dead on.

[Sabin]

Mister Tee wrote
For those who love buzz -- based on "inside knowledge" and observation of people arriving at the ceremony -- these are the films alleged to figure in this year's prizes:

TITANE (Julia Ducournau)
MEMORIA (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
DRIVE MY CAR (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
A HERO (Asghar Farhadi)
AHED’S KNEE (Nadav Lapid)
NITRAM (Justin Kurzel)
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Joachim Trier)
COMPARTMENT NO.6 (Juho Kuosmanen)
ANNETTE (Leos Carax)

They're not a fan of Red Rocket?

[Mister Tee]

For those who love buzz -- based on "inside knowledge" and observation of people arriving at the ceremony -- these are the films alleged to figure in this year's prizes:

TITANE (Julia Ducournau)
MEMORIA (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
DRIVE MY CAR (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
A HERO (Asghar Farhadi)
AHED’S KNEE (Nadav Lapid)
NITRAM (Justin Kurzel)
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Joachim Trier)
COMPARTMENT NO.6 (Juho Kuosmanen)
ANNETTE (Leos Carax)

[anonymous1980]

Predictions:

Palme d'Or – A Hero, Ashgar Farhadi
Grand Prix – The Divide, Catherine Corsini
Prix du Jury – Drive My Car, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Prix d'interprétation féminine – Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World
Prix d'interprétation masculine – Adam Driver, Annette
Prix de la mise en scène – Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch
Prix du scénario – Julia Ducournau, Titane

[Sabin]

Peter Bradshaw's forecast.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/j ... who-should


Cannes 2021: who will win the Palme d’Or – and who should

As a very strange edition of the festival draws to a close, our film critic predicts who will walk away with the Palme d’Or and other prizes – and awards his own alternative Braddies
Fri 16 Jul 2021 12.00 EDT

So it actually happened – the Cannes film festival defiantly took place in the era of Covid, and two months later than usual, in sweltering July. More tourists, but fewer actual festival-attenders from the media. Some streets were eerily quiet and the legendary bar, Le Petit Majestic, usually packed with movie-world people, getting drunk, exchanging cards and crowding densely out into the street every night until three in the morning, was doing hardly any business.

Masks were worn throughout all films, though not on the hallowed red carpet, and every 48 hours we had to report to a special tent for Covid testing: it was not possible to enter the Palais without having the vital QR code for “Negatif” on your phone. The whole business was a bit laborious and discombobulating but this was a great logistical triumph for the festival. The only Covid casualty was the French star Léa Seydoux, who couldn’t come, having tested positive.

And the competition films had some real gems: Japanese director Ryu Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car was a wonderful adaptation of a Murakami short story, a film pregnant with ideas and emotion about a celebrated theatre director who finds himself confiding in the young woman who has been hired as his driver. The Thai artist and film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul gave us something uncompromisingly strange and sinuous and slow with Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton: bizarre tableau-scenes and unbroken takes that promise to swing open the doors of perception. Australian director Justin Kurzel made Nitram, a very disquieting film about the disturbed young man responsible for the horrific Port Arthur massacre in 1996 – and the bizarre “Harold and Maude” relationship he had with a rich heiress in the years leading up to the outrage.

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch was a visual and verbal treat in his very distinctive and eccentric style, though some critics turned up their noses, on the grounds that they have seen too much like it from him before. I have to say that, on this form, I can’t see enough or get enough from this very funny and original director.

Sean Baker gave us Red Rocket, the very entertaining and bleak satire-comedy about a porn star who has suffered a Trumpian disaster in his career and is now plotting his return to greatness on his home turf of Texas, rather as the unloved and unmissed C-in-C is brooding on a comeback in Florida.

Most people here were unimpressed by Sean Penn’s big heart-on-sleeve drama Flag Day, with Penn as a real-life 90s swindler and counterfeiter who broke his daughter’s heart with his inability to go straight. Some here found it a bit of a vanity project because Penn both starred and cast his own daughter Dylan as the character’s daughter. But I thought it was very watchable and Penn is such an old-fashioned Hollywood star turn.

Elsewhere, the Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier, renowned for his challenging and tough movies, somehow conjured up an absolutely gorgeous relationship comedy: The Worst Person in the World, something to compare with Nora Ephron or David Nicholls.

There were some films I couldn’t quite get on with: Paul Verhoeven’s preposterous nunsploitation drama Benedetta, taken from the true story of a 17th-century lesbian nun, had people giggling over his supposedly intentional and meaningful ironies. I’m not convinced. But Verhoeven is certainly benefiting from the fact that his initially derided sex drama Showgirls was then praised by contrarian sophisticates. So people don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of history. There was serious critical support for Julia Ducournau’s gonzo body-horror romp Titane, but I found it silly and macho.

Perhaps the two most passionate films, and the films I responded to most, were outside the competition, in the Director’s Fortnight strand: Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical The Souvenir Part II was an engrossing self-portrait of the artist as a young woman. And Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava was a wonderful love story in the manner of Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss.

Here are my predictions for this year’s Cannes prizes, and I have also included my imaginary prizes (AKA “Braddies d’Or” for categories that are not officially rewarded).

Predictions
Palme d’Or: Drive My Car
Grand Prix: Memoria
Jury prize: The Worst Person in the World
Best director: Sean Baker for Red Rocket
Best screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius for Paris, 13th District
Best actor: Amir Jadidi for A Hero
Best actress: Achouackh Abakar for Lingui

Imaginary Cannes awards – AKA Braddies d’Or
Best supporting actor: André Dussollier for Everything Went Fine
Best supporting actress: Essie Davis and Judy Davis for Nitram
Best cinematography: Robert D Yeoman for The French Dispatch
Best music: Ron and Russell Mael for Annette
Best production design: Adam Stockhausen for The French Dispatch

[Sabin]

Memoria, the latest from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, seems well-received. It's certainly possible that Apichatpong Weerasethakul would be the kind of filmmaker to win two Palme's. Had we a fest last year and were this film included in the selection (I don't feel like doing the research), it would've been the ten year anniversary of his first win for Uncle Boonmee. Also, worth noting that Tilda Swinton has never won Best Actress at the festival.

Erik Kohn of IndieWire gives it an A-
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/07/memor ... 234651430/

Peter Bradshaw gave it *****/five.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/j ... da-swinton

Hollywood Reporter likes it.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... ium=social

[Sabin]

Mister Tee wrote
I kind of have this idea Sean Baker is going to be one of those directors who's constantly touted by critics, but, because of his subject matter/propensity for casting amateurs, never truly has a breakthrough to the mainstream. As far as festivals, however -- his films are always going to be in the running, and this is no exception.

This looks like a potential winner to me.

According to IndieWire, Spike Lee is a big fan of The Divide although the reception is very mixed.

https://www.indiewire.com/2021/07/canne ... 234649961/

[Mister Tee]

I kind of have this idea Sean Baker is going to be one of those directors who's constantly touted by critics, but, because of his subject matter/propensity for casting amateurs, never truly has a breakthrough to the mainstream. As far as festivals, however -- his films are always going to be in the running, and this is no exception.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 234981807/

https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/r ... 235019398/

[Sabin]

“Well-received but not ecstatic” seems to be the name of the game thus far.

[Mister Tee]

Farhadi back with a seemingly well-received effort.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 234981151/