WILD DIAMOND (2024) Agathe Riedinger
The first two days of competition screenings have whipped up a storm at the Cannes Film Festival. Things started normal enough with Agathe Riedinger's Wild Diamond, this year's only feature debut vying for the Palme. Reactions were a tad tepid, but the same can't be said about Magnus van Horn's Girl with the Needle, which has horrified some viewers. All hell broke loose on the second day of competition, when both Andrea Arnold's Bird and Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis had their world premieres. The British auteur earned general praise, though some found it confounding. As for the American master's long-awaited opus, opinions are so divided that a chasm seems to have broken open across the Croisette. Some say it's a catastrophe of epic proportions, while others see value in its epic mess. Whatever the case, it sounds like a fascinating watch, even as reports from the troubled shoot have enmeshed the picture in controversy.
Since Riedinger has no previous features, she won't be included in the Cannes at Home fest. For the other filmmakers, let's revisit Sweat, Red Road, and Apocalypse Now…
SWEAT (2020) Magnus von Horn
Labor comes in many shapes, from physical to psychological, and every possibility in between. Every day, new types of work emerge from the capital-crazed minds, with exploitation only half a step behind. Yet, culture, including cinema, tends to look down on certain aspects of a working life. When the occupation is built upon new technologies and its related social mores, dismissal is even more pronounced. This state of affairs means that films taking a different approach shine all the brightest, elevated by their curiosity. Such is the case of Magnus van Horn's Sweat, where fitness influencer takes center stage.
She's Sylwia, played by Magdalena Kolesnik in one of the 2020s cinema's most essential characterizations. Neither vilified nor softened, the social media star is a constantly curated presence for whom the limits of private and public life are hard to define. It's as if she's a project under perpetual construction, to the point where the woman struggles to operate beyond those parameters. In search of intimacy, or just some companionship, one starts to recognize a great abyss of loneliness beneath that happy façade. Indeed, happiness is often just another projection, another facet of the non-stop labor of someone who sells her life and thus lives a life that's like a product.
If you denote moralism in my words, it's misplaced. There's little judgment in this Polish gem, whose very form plays within terms of proximity, testing the viewer on how much they feel close or distanced from the protagonist. In Magnus von Horn's work, empathy comes barbed and bloody, unraveling a story of uneasy consent in tandem with its purview of social media, its portrait of a woman and a nation caught between economic ideas. Without gratuitous shock or crassness, without over-elegance or forced grace, Sweat feels vital as both a document of our times and a psychological inquiry into someone whose depth is easily overlooked.
Sweat is streaming on MUBI. You can also rent and purchase it on Apple TV and Amazon.
RED ROAD (2006) Andrea Arnold
After Milk and Dog, Andrea Arnold won an Oscar for her third short film, Wasp. It was a deserved honor, a signal that a new vital voice was emerging within the British industry, and by 2006, she was ready to jump into features. Her first project of that ilk started as part of a trilogy devised by Gillian Berrie, Lone Scherfig, and Anders Thomas Jensen. Sprouting from a conversation between those producers and Lars von Trier, the Advance Party series would back novice directors and have them work from a set of characters with predefined backstories. Like Dogme 95, with which this idea shared a lot of dictums, Advance Party would collapse before it could change cinema.
However, it produced Red Road, a dark diamond with shades of dried blood, as brilliant as it is besotting. It's also fairly upsetting, unafraid to look into its characters' ugliness, their souls as rotting corpses ready for dissection. Jackie is at the heart of it, a CCTV operator who monitors the Red Road Flats in Glasgow, obsessing over the lives she glimpses through her little screens. This is no Rear Window scenario, though. Instead, it's something altogether odder. By mixing grief with self-destructive vengeance, Arnold and leading lady Dale Dickey have concocted an experience that, at times, feels inclined to propose Jackie as a twisted twin to her makers, perchance even her audience. Power imbalances here, festering wounds there, Red Road traps you with its anti-heroine. You can practically feel its vice grip around the throat, cutting off air as it pushes you down into a mess of humanity.
Moreover, the director has developed her audiovisual chops from the short film work, operating on Dogme 95-like rules without letting them constrict her aesthetic possibilities. I'm particularly impressed by the cinematography, through which Robbie Ryan delivers a masterclass on how a repulsive image can be more valuable than a pleasant one. Consider his color stories, the gangrene and grey sludge that follow Jackie across mediums, from CCTV footage to hand-held voyeurism. At times, watching Red Road is like staring at a fading bruise. You may think it's healed, but there's a shock of pain awaiting if you dare press it.
Red Road is streaming on Kanopy and Metrograph.
APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) Francis Ford Coppola
Though it's hard to imagine Megalopolis nabbing the Palme d'Or, Coppola fans have no reason to whine about it. After all, the old master won two of those in his youth. First came the maddening paranoia of The Conversation in 1974. Then, a mere five years later, Coppola returned to the Croisette with a much messier project, and though there were naysayers aplenty, he still won gold. Indeed, as much as the stories surrounding the Megalopolis shoot are concerning, they've got nothing on the living hell that was making Apocalypse Now, a process documented brilliantly by Eleanor Coppola in her documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.
For those not in the know, that title may sound hyperbolic, but it is no such thing. Even more impressive is how Francis Ford Coppola's celluloid folly manages to live up to its infamy, rising above the legendary behind-the-scenes drama to confirm itself as one of the 20th century's most essential war movies. Or movies in general, to be perfectly honest. Rather than depicting the carnage through a disaffected lens or some sort of Hollywood dream, the director constructs his Joseph Conrad adaptation as an ever-deepening vortex. Step into it, and you'll drown. You'll probably go mad, as well, the character's insanity a contagion capable of transcending the screen.
Like the director infamously stated, Apocalypse Now isn't about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. What a ludicrous thing to say, and yet how right it feels in the moment one is lost in the movie's sauce – probably poison. Perchance, Coppola was even nearsighted and conservative in his estimations. Apocalypse Now's interest in Vietnam is limited, its actual subject something much bigger, closer to the cosmical. Going through the Odyssey of Capt. Benjamin L. Willard, down the jungle river into earthly Pandemonium, one comes face to face with the cruelty in its purest form, savagery distilled. One also arrives at an ending that's invariably frustrating. No conclusion could do the journey justice, but the alienating effect Coppola provokes feels worthwhile. It's a fault turned feature, a final note of cacophony in a symphony of demons howling away into the moonless night.
Apocalypse Now is available to rent and purchase on most major platforms.
Which of these directors' new features are you most eager to see?