Cannes at Home: Days 9 & 10 – Champions of Festivals Past

by Cláudio Alves

Just as the favorites for the Palme d'Or seemed to have settled, here comes another barrage of rave reviews to muddy the waters. Not only is it impossible to predict what Östlund's jury will choose, but it seems like, every day, the critics elect a new title to champion. On the ninth day of the festivities, Trần Anh Hùng's Pot-au-Feu dazzled many with its gastronomic love affair, making comparisons to Babette's Feast. Then came Nanni Moretti's A Brighter Tomorrow, less acclaimed but blessed by enthusiast defenders. On the 10th day of Cannes, it was time for Wim Wenders' Perfect Days to ignite Best Actor speculation, while Catherine Breillat's Queen of Hearts remake became another instant frontrunner for the big prize. Will Last Summer take the Palme? 

For the Cannes at Home series, the focus shall be on these auteurs' past festival successes. The Scent of Green Papaya earned Hùng the Camera d'Or and Vietnam its only Oscar nomination. Moretti won the Best Director prize at Cannes '93 with Caro Diario, and Wim Wenders was the Palme victor of '84 with Paris, Texas. Finally, there's Breillat's hyper-controversial Fat Girl, a prizewinner from the 51st Berlinale…

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Cannes: Nanni Moretti's "A Brighter Tomorrow"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Cannes...

It is not easy being coherent with your work when you have as strong moral compass as Nanni Moretti. The Italian director and Palm d’Or winner (The Son's Room, 2001) has built a career around his political beliefs and precise reading of reality. In Moretti’s world, everything is black or white, with some Communist Red. Compromising is surrendering to the enemy.

His new picture Il sol dell’avvenire  (English title: A Brighter Tomorrow) is a tale of how difficult it is to be alive in a world in which everything you love and believe in is either dying or betraying you. It is a movie within a movie with a half dozen other movies tied up in it (for me, a certain Tarantino picture came to mind but more on that later). After the disappointing Tre Piani, Moretti returns to what he does best: playing a fictional version of himself on screen, and letting the mask slip when necessary to reveal his pain...

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Cannes Diary #07: The French Dispatch, a Boomer, and a lot of "I liked it, but..."

by Elisa Giudici

Three Floors (Nanni Moretti)

Cannes Film Festival has a color coded hierarchy. The lowest of the low are Yellow pass holders. With their slightly less powerless Blue cousins, they spend a lot of time (aka hours) in queue, hoping for a miracle. Pink journalists arrive later, having a high priority pass that lets them sleep a little more. At the top of journalist hierarchy, the aristocracy of pass holders: legendary Le Blanche, aka White pass holders. They can arrive at the last minute, waving their credentials to open every door.

The tales say so though I've never witnessed this with my own eyes. This year, with the (still not that reliable but definitively improved) ticketing system, things were a bit different. Even I, a humble yellow pass holder, was able to see almost every single movie on my list. Here are the four competition films I saw today...

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Cannes at Home: Day 6

by Cláudio Alves

We hit our halfway mark with was a hectic day at the Cannes Film Festival. Mia Hansen-Løve, Nanni Moretti, and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi all premiered films vying for the Palme d'Or. That last one is an especially curious case since, earlier in 2021, Hamaguchi already won big at the Berlinale, taking home a Silver Berlin Bear for his other 2021 movie, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Beyond those three, attendees were spoiled for choice. In other programs Clio Barnard, Radu Muntean, and Sergei Loznitsa presented their latest. Even in the realm of retrospective screenings, the offer was rich, with JFK, Mulholland Drive, and the Palme d'Or victor Black Orpheus getting another day in the sun.

For simplicity's sake, this home-viewing program shall focus only on past work from the three competition directors…

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NYFF: Mia Madre & No Home Movie

Manuel on an unlikely double feature he’d like to dub “How I Mourned Your Mother.”

In his TIFF coverage, Nathaniel mentioned that film festivals sometimes offer you random thematic threads born out of unlikely juxtapositions. This was the case when I caught Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie almost back to back. Both films are concerned and inspired by the death of the respective filmmakers’ mothers. The results are as widely different as you’d imagine and fascinating for wildly different reasons.

Moretti’s Mia Madre opens with a scene of laborers rioting against their factory’s owners. Workers chant and fight against armored policemen in riot gear. And then Margherita (an effectively understated Margherita Buy) yells “Stop!” She’s shooting a film, as it turns out and she’s not too happy with the framing she was getting. We slowly learn her personal life is taking a toll; she’s broken up with her boyfriend and her mother is slowly dying at the hospital. You can almost imagine the press about that shoot (“Director’s Personal Issues All But Ruined the Production”). [More...]

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