Cannes at Home: Days 10 & 11 – The End Is Upon Us

by Cláudio Alves

The last days of the 75th Cannes Film Festival saw the premiere of many buzzy titles, including some that were declared Palme d'Or frontrunners on the spot. Albert Serra celebrates his first stint in the Main Competition with Pacification, a film that might not be for everyone but will undoubtedly satisfy the director's fans. Hirokazu Kore-eda returns after Shoplifters with another found-family crowd-pleaser, Broker. Lukas Dhont's Close reduced many to tears, but I'm not convinced. His debut was similarly acclaimed in Cannes, only to receive much-deserved backlash when seen by wider audiences. Kelly Reichardt seems to have delivered a low-key marvel with the Portland-set Showing Up, starring frequent collaborator Michelle Williams. Finally, Léonor Serraille closed the competition screenings with her sophomore feature, Mother and Son.

Just hours before Vincent Lindon's jury announces its choices, the Cannes at Home miniseries comes to an end with Serra's The Death of Louis XIV, Kore-eda's After Life, Dhont's Girl, Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, and Serraille's Jeune Femme…

THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (2016)

Some actors are more than just performers. They are embodiments of whole concepts, eras, movements. If in his time, Jean Gabin was a living monument to the pre-Nouvelle Vague French cinema, then Jean-Pierre Léaud came to represent what came after. He grew before our eyes as Antoine Doinel, but the symbolic scope of his face goes way beyond Truffaut's series. For long, directors have been casting him in parts that are as much characters as they are film history allegories. Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV takes the dynamic a step further, juxtaposing two simulacrums of man, two kings.

And yet, the Catalonian director doesn't do it in an attempt at glorious aggrandizement. His study is not on the power of personhood transcended. Instead, Serra regards how even those who seem closer to divinity than mankind are nothing but mortal flesh, fated to rot just like everything else. There's not much to the film apart from witnessing decay, both that of the Sun King and the King of Celluloid. However, that simple act of observation can be riveting. It's also a sick joke, inverting the precepts of royalty porn on their head.

Instead of gazing adoringly at Baroque excess, lustily coveting unimaginable privilege, Serra's camera captures the rigid inhumanity of court ritual. Moreover, it finds the point where perfumed silks and powdered full-bottom wigs become vacuous lies standing flimsily in the face of the inevitable. The Death of Louis XIV looks at the exceptional to find the ordinary, the universality of gangrenous flesh approaching the finish line. Each viewer is thus invited to have their own conversation with the film, meditating on the primordial certainty of our end.

You can find The Death of Louis XIV streaming on Kanopy. The film's rentable on some other services.

AFTER LIFE (1998) 

Though he's become known for tender portrayals of family bonds, whether forged in blood or adoptive affections, Hirokazu Kore-eda's first masterpiece exists far from the mundanity of everyday life.

It exists After Life, you might say, fitting into a tradition of metaphysical narratives that imagine the journey of souls post-death as a bureaucratic affair. Indeed, in the context of Japanese media, the premise of After Life might seem closer to serialized anime than our present understanding of Kore-eda as an auteur. However, such rash assumptions would be a mistake. Everything that makes a film like Shoplifters what it is, already exists in After Life. Indeed, it's the very center of its textual bid, the concept at the heart of its game. The story itself is almost dumbfoundingly simple.

After you die, you end up in a facility that acts as limbo. It's an old building that feels like it must have seen better days, itself a relic of something lost. On Monday, you are presented with the week's work – choosing one memory in which to exist for the rest of eternity. The process goes through multiple interviews, and by Wednesday, everyone's memories are restaged and filmed. By Sunday, they are screened for the group. During this movie-watching, the soul drifts away, evanescing into that remembrance, fading into the unknown.

Guided by the director's gentle touch, we're lulled into the film's mysteries, where the camera both saves and condemns, traps and liberates. After Life is shot with humble simplicity, often looking like a behind-the-scenes documentary, full of cyclical shots of interviews and tender leitmotivs on the improvised plateau. The magic of invention is heartily celebrated, but there's an ambivalence to this spectacle, a sense of soft melancholy that exists on the threshold of ecstatic joy, mayhap existential terror.

Here, life is understood as what is defined by its limits, by the ephemerous nature of its own miracles. What gives it purpose depends on the person, and After Life gives no definite answer. Better yet, it lets you choose your truth. Maybe life is worthwhile if you are part of somebody else's happiness. Perhaps it's the pleasure of wearing a pretty red dress, the warmth of not being alone, the serenity of a lonesome afternoon feeling the sun kiss your cheek. The little moments, those graceful notes of uncertain meaning, make up all of us. There's nothing small about them, nothing too negligible. They make up cinema, too. Hirokazu Kore-eda's cinema, anyway.

After Life is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

GIRL (2018) 

At the 71st Cannes Film Festival, Lukas Dhont's debut feature received ecstatic praise. Girl won the Queer Palme, the Golden Camera for the best first film, the FIPRESCI Prize of the Un Certain Regard section, and its respective Best Actor prize. If that doesn't tell you something about the demographic representation of Cannes-attending film critics, nothing will. However, as soon as other audiences got a look at it, that consensus suffered some radical changes. More revelatory was the perspective of actual trans film critics who had a thing or two to say about the film's purported authenticity, its representational merits, and contrived melodrama verging on miserabilist exploitation. 

I won't lie – I find Girl rather execrable and feel ashamed at how much I doubted my initial dislike just because of peer pressure by fellow cisgender critics. I still feel bitter about my arguments over this thing and have little desire to compliment Dhont's vision. Nevertheless, the Cannes at Home miniseries is meant as a celebration, so here go some half-hearted commendations: Before its fixation the protagonist's body turns fully voyeuristic, there's some good synchronicity between the camera and the dancer's acute sense of her physicality. The father-daughter relationship is the script's best element, and Arieh Worhalter's performance is enough to merit Girl mild applause. 

Still, it's hard to get over the calamitous miscalculation of that ending. It feels genuinely offensive, sickening in the worst way, and utterly clichéd.

Girl's on Netflix, and you can also rent it on Apple iTunes.

WENDY AND LUCY (2008) 

Michelle Williams and Kelly Reichardt are a match made in heaven. Look no further than their first collaboration, Wendy and Lucy, to see how their sensibilities mesh, resulting in a low-fi low-key gem with a narrative so gossamer-thin it might as well not be there. Like the director's best films, Wendy and Lucy exists on the margins of mainstream American society, looking at those who are often forgotten and portraying them with equal parts empathy and cinematic brio. Sure, not much happens, and the rhythm is languid going on lethargic, but Reichardt makes it work as only she can, turning understatement into the height of sophisticated storytelling.

Wendy is a homeless woman traveling through Oregon to Alaska, while Lucy is her beloved dog – played by the director's pet. When their car breaks down, monetary shortcomings result in a failed attempt at shoplifting and, more tragically, their separation. Though never appealing to soppy sentimentality, the film delineates how much the pup means to her owner and how their bond is, in many ways, the last barrier against despondency. One can even say Wendy is defined by her barriers, the shields she puts between herself and the world, invisible protection keeping everyone else at a safe distance. Even the camera seems unable to pierce her armor. 

It's a character study in the form of a blank slate, an acting challenge that asks for naturalism via a taciturn register so opaque and vague as to be alienating. In other words, Wendy and Lucy wouldn't work without a formidable actor at its center, and Michelle Williams is the perfect woman for the job. In her reactions, she finds paradoxical specificity, how Wendy holds her body and relates to other peoples' presence. Yet, more than anything, she, like Reichardt, finds beauty in what could have been a dour chronicle of non-stop hardship. Wendy and Lucy can be downright lyrical, capturing the essence of summer's death rattle, the odd hope one can find in moments of overwhelming despair.

You can find Wendy and Lucy on AMC+, Hoopla, Tubi, Kanopy, Redbox, DirecTV, Pluto TV, and Sundance Now.

JEUNE FEMME (2017)

Also known as Montparnasse Bienvenüe, Jeune Femme won Léonor Serraille the Camera d'Or the year before Dhont took home the same honor. Idealized as a vague, terminally French, counterpoint to Baumbach's Frances Ha, the movie starts as a caustic character piece centered on Paula, a broke woman in her early thirties who's just been left on the street with her ex-boyfriend's cat and a bleeding cut on the forehead. She's a hot mess express, so unhinged that another film came to mind during this one's first act. Jeune Femme answers the question: What would The Worst Person in the World look like if it tried to live up to its name?

Paula isn't that bad, mind you. She's just floundering for the time being. As soon as she gets the ground beneath her feet, new facets emerge, revelations of well-hidden affection and a caring personality. The journey there is messy as fuck, but that's life. Jeune Femme doesn't try to twist its protagonist's struggles into the stuff of charming dramedy, eliciting some laughs along the way out of sheer discomfort. Serraille's direction and picaresque script do much to sustain this tricky gambit, as does Émile Noblet's gorgeous saturated cinematography and the splendor cum squalor of Paris.

However, even with those strengths, Jeune Femme could derail at any moment were it not for its incredible leading lady. Delivering a vanity-free tour de force, Laetitia Dosch is an obstinate revelation, bold to the bone and fearless like nobody's business. As if charged by an electric current, she can be manic and mad, a devastating presence one minute, a clown the next. Confronted with such tonal plasticity, a spectator can do nothing but stare in open-mouthed awe. Personally speaking, I can't wait to see what's next for Serraille and Dosch, so promising is their Jeune Femme. 

The is one isn't streaming anywhere right now but be on the lookout for it. Jeune Femme's worth the trouble.

Comments

[akalaem manuel]

Hello I am so delighted I located your blog, I really located you by mistake, while I was watching on google for something else, Anyways I am here now and could just like to say thank for a tremendous post and a all round entertaining website. Please do keep up the great work. CLAIRE DEARING JACKET