▶ Review from the 2021 Festival de Cannes.
The death of cinema has been so frequently declared during the relatively short life cycle of this medium that the concept has now become a cliché.
Still, the death knell was sounded with new strength. Last year's Festival de Cannes was finally cancelled after many delays and many objections, a decision that was particularly emblematic.
▌ "Annette" sings the storm of love, desire and lamentation.
The Festival de Cannes shines with the opening of Leo Carracus, a dramatic, mercurial musical starring Adam Dreifer and Marion Cotillard, two actors who interpret their art in two very different ways.
If the 2021 Cannes Film Festival represents a glorious rebirth of cinema, then this new film directed by Leo Carax is just right as the opening film. Each of the director's works is a celebration and reinvention of the art form.
In fact, as early as the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, the famous film critic Serge Dane regarded the then 23-year-old Carax as the savior of the film.
Dane was impressed by his exceptional cinematic prowess, which also became a hallmark of Carax as his films continued to draw openly and freely on genres and masters of the past.
Annette was his sixth and first in English, and was supposed to be a musical that brought the movement that could be seen in his work to a climax.
Scenes such as Denis Rawan running with David Bowie's "Modern Love in Mauvais Sang" and the tape-up of Lovers of the New Bridge (1991), where Lavan and Juliet Binoche jump on the Pont Neuf in Paris, and the sky erupts in countless colors amid the fireworks of Bastille Day, have shown a strong affinity for musicals.
And Sacred Carriage (2012) is made up of a series of spectacular scenes that make it easy to construct a story. This potential is emphasized at the end, when Kylie Milo suddenly sings a Disney-style lyric composed by Carax, pushing the narrative to an emotional climax.
The soundtrack to Hallowed Carriage also included Spark's "How Are You Getting Home," a band made up of brothers Ron and Russell Meier, who later sent Carax a musical processing idea and about 20 mockups, which eventually became Annette.
The intimacy between the band and the director is not surprising, as they are both pioneers of pop music in their respective fields, reveling in the combination of superb technique with quirky, often silly, humor.
What it produces is a play whose dialogue is made up of lyrics full of dull rhymes, although much of it is carried out in the way Jacques Demi recites it.
In the first scene, the couple alternately sing "We Love Each Other So Much" until they climax with the song, while the second scene is a frenzy that cuts from the ecstasy of orgasm to the ecstasy of childbirth (doctors and nurses join the chorus).
The binary lovers Of Adam Dreifer and Marion Cotillard exemplify this interaction between high and low.
Henry was a stand-up comedian and Ann was an opera singer; he wore green and she wore red; "I killed them," he said of his audience after a show, while she said "I saved them."
This dialectic also extends to the form of the film, where Carax uses an ultra-modern aesthetic to tell a romantic story that ranges from pastoral to tragic showbiz.
Carolina Champertier's emphasis on digital photography, with its saturated tones that make even real locations artificial, allows the film to effortlessly move from the streets of downtown Los Angeles, to the Cocteau-esque Enchanted Forest, to the raging ships caught in a storm, to concerts attended by tens of thousands of people in a stadium rendered entirely by the CGI.
Of the many bizarre plots, the most outrageous must be that Henry and Ann's youngest daughter, Annette, is played by an unsettling puppet with joints like Pinocchio, hair like Chagi, and a face like Anomalisa (and a pot ear like her father's).
It's always fun when parents hold this grotesque little monster and sing and pamper her like angels.
The imbalance in the film is that Carax shows interest in his main cast and their respective characters (as is the case with all of his feature films except Lovers of the New Bridge).
Cordia's singing voice is assisted by professional mezzo-soprano Catherine Trottmann, who performs little in opera scenes and appears unattractive because Ann is a saint, corresponding to the increasingly demonic Henry.
Dreifer, on the other hand, can show his body in place of Denis Rawang, twisting himself through two superb stand-up performances.
Once Henry kills Ann halfway through the film, it actually becomes a solo show. (There is another character in the series, a conductor and lover played by Simon Herberg, but he is hardly a supporting character.) )
Anyone unfamiliar with Life in Carax probably won't notice a short episode in the prelude: he's in the studio with the Sparks band, and he asks a teenage girl named Natsya to join his console.
Her identity becomes clear in the finale, seeing Henry in prison, through makeup, with a striking resemblance to Carax.
Annette comes to visit him, and after becoming a real girl (Devin McDowell), she confronts him in a duet that exposes the pain of his egocentrism.
It's the only song that abandons banter and focuses on emotion, and it offers a new, devastating perspective on the spiral darkness of the second half of the film.
Karaks's partner, actress Catherine Golubeva, died in 2011 when their daughter, Nastya, was just 6 years old, and it didn't matter.
Of course, it would be foolish to take Annette's death as an apology. However, it is remarkable that Carax fought his demons so openly. We are honored that he has been able to do so all the time.
▌ "All Goes Well" is François Oujon's most gentle work.
The hard-working French director takes a sparse, thoughtful approach to telling the story of an old man who is tired of life and his strained family relationships.
After making the touching but almost high-concept film of "Midsummer '85" (2020), the prolific French director François Oujon's "All Goes Well" (adapted from Emanuel Bernheim's novel) returned to a more solid and realistic theme.
The writer, who died in 2017, wrote screenplays for Ou Rong's Under the Sand (2000), The Pool Murder (2003), Love Appreciation Period (2004) and Ricky. And the director's love for this frequent collaborator, even in the most heartbreaking moments, undoubtedly permeates the film with tenderness.
This tenderness is actually at the heart of the tension that inspires the work, and it belongs to the quieter, softer side of Ou Jong's various film productions, even when it involves incredibly dramatic life events.
Sophie Marceau (radiant even if she catches a cold) plays author Emmanuel Bernheim, who recounts in the book how she copes with the consequences of her father's stroke and his subsequent struggle for will to end his life.
The 85-year-old in the film is grumpy, sometimes cruel, sometimes violent. In Emmanuel's own words, he was "not a good father."
But she loved him, and as André Dussourier portrayed, his dark humor and frank charm did manifest itself. Emanuel said: "I would love to be his friend. Between people's expectations of family and less painful requests for friendship, Euron chose to wander.
The stroke paralyzed her father's right half, and he asked Emanuel to help him die naturally, reminding her of her childhood and the time she spent with her father.
But the few flashbacks in the film are not nostalgia for happy times, but emotional abuse and indifferent nurturing, and Emanuel, who is now growing up, is clearly still suffering from these fundamental traumas.
However, this is not a movie about a daughter settling old accounts with his father before his death. It was not so much evidence against him, a dying balance against his good and evil deeds, but rather these glimpses in the rearview mirror were more like old reflexes and paranoia, and although she could still feel their stinging, Emanuel knew that it did not capture the whole truth.
For a director who we know can adopt a rather emphasisful style, the details of the family's past feel intentional and refreshing.
Euron paints a difficult but loving picture with a few strokes, a picture that is clear enough for the viewer to understand the complex emotions that run through Emanuel, from anger to disappointment, from sadness to frustration, from deep love to bitter hatred.
Ou Rong was careful not to portray his sick father as an overbearing satire, and he always precisely broke the tension with laughter and gentle moments.
While "you can't turn anything down from him" is true, this man is not a monster, and both Emanuel and her sister are mature and intelligent enough to understand the importance of respecting his wishes.
This refusal to step out of the gray area, while commendable, does create some duplication, as the father keeps reiterating that even if his health improves, he wants to put an end to it all.
But Euron's films often have a desirable quality, and "All Goes Well" is no exception; beautiful sweaters, the Parisian lifestyle of intellectuals, the reception of the art gallery and the delicacies of expensive restaurants form a comforting backdrop to this painful story of letting go, a basis of luxury that can always be relied upon in the film's less appealing moments.
One could argue that the emotional restraint of the film's protagonists, and their dignity in dealing with such a major event, is also desirable.
But Marceau's performance, her character's own health problems, her mother's deep depression, and a mysterious man who hints at her father's other semi-secret life suggest that there may be deeper traumas plaguing the family that feel it is either too late or too dangerous to face them now.
As a result, the film's title is both sincere and bittersweet, a summation of deep feelings and a compromise of the often worrisome yet loving family ties.
▌ The Virgin is transformed by religious and sexual ecstasy.
There are sacred film nuns such as audrey Hepburn's role in The Sisters (1959), Valerian Borovchik's 70s blasphemous nuns in The Story of the Monastery (1978), and the nuns in the comedy Sisters Are Crazy (1992).
And Paul Verhoeven's The Virgin seems to have a touch of every genre.
Maybe it's not that dramatic. After all, no one can read the news: The director of The Showgirl (1995) is adapting a book called "Misdeeds: A Nun in the Italian Renaissance" and is looking forward to the release of "The Bells of St. Mary.".
To be clear, although the title of the book was published by Judith Brown in 1987, it is an academic research work that uses original documents to tell the true story of the nun and provides Van Hoeven and his co-author David Burke with their narrative framework.
Benedetta, a devout religious child, was sent to the Italian town of Pescia, where she would be admitted to a monastery.
After haggling for the dowry that her father had to pay, the abbot accepted her as an apprentice, where she had to learn that "your greatest enemy is your body."
Verhoeven's attitude toward the church is similar to his attitude toward the army in The Galactic Squad: he satirizes ideology while also enjoying the paraphernalia and aesthetics.
Lamplin's deaness was a pragmatic politician who said "it was a monastery, not a charity" and was skeptical of Benedetta's miracles, even if she had a stain on her.
The film is becoming more and more like 1992's Instinct, with Benedetta as Catherine Trammell. Jeanne La Poiséry's camera captures a relatively clean 17th century, creating a captivating orange and turquoise picture even when young women sit on the toilet.
The sex scene in candlelight is reminiscent of an early 90's thriller, when a comet dyed the sky a horribly purple, it was like a neon girl in Las Vegas. Anne Dudley's music is transformed between instruments, hymns and ornate sheet music from real periods.
It's hard to judge how to take this movie seriously and how the movie takes itself seriously.
If there's a serious mystery at the heart of the film, it's how strong we think Benedetta's beliefs are.
Is she a saint or a liar? A crazy woman? Or was her fraud approved by God and proved by it?