By Ali Moosavi.
Selections from Un Certain Regard, Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week, and ACID.”
Often ignored are the side programs of Cannes, including Un Certain Regard, Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week, ACID (Association for the International Distribution of Independent Cinemas) and others. (In addition to these, hundreds of films are shown at the Cannes Market to potential buyers, distributors, etc.) Here are my takes on a few films in the less glamorous programs of this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Un Certain Regard
All to Play For / Rien a Perdre
Sylvie is a single mother with two boys: Jean-Jacques is a teenager and Sofiane a child who is emotionally unstable. Sylvie loves her children. She lives for them. She is musically gifted and is helping Jean-Jacques to improve his trumpet playing. Life has not dealt Sylvie a winning card. She has to work at nights in a bar to support her sons. Sylvie is a kind and loving person, full of life. Though her dreams are unrealized, she finds solace in helping her children achieve things they can be proud of. One simple accident, one night when she is at work, turns her life upside down. Sofiane in trying to make fries, causes a fire and suffers from minor but visible burns. This raises an alarm with social workers who take Sofiane away to a foster home. From here on we enter the Ken Loach territory. Sylvie trying everything and everywhere to regain the custody of her child.
Director Delphine Deloget, who also co-wrote the script, has done an amazing job in transferring Sylvie’s desperate and frenzied state and the chaos she feels around her to the audience. Deloget presents both the justifications put forward by sides in a very eloquent manner, though the audience’s sympathy will mainly lie with Sylvie. We see the cold and unsympathetic way the authorities deal with this situation, largely unaffected by a desperate mother’s pleas.
Virgine Efira, who was unforgettable in the title role in Paul Verhoven’s Benedetta (2021) is simply superb here as Sylvie. She conveys a wide range of emotions, from ecstasy to exasperation, from feeling wild and free to desperation and helplessness, from love to hate. All to Play For toes a fine line between a mother’s love and responsibility and the result would surely gain Ken Loach’s approval.
Omen / Augure
Omen is the first film from the Congo to enter Cannes. Its director and screenwriter is known only as Baloji. Omen deals with the impact of traditional beliefs and superstitions in today’s world and puts these side by side against religious beliefs.
The film begins with a surreal sequence. A woman in black riding a horse in the desert, passes through a number of scarecrows and reaches a water pond. She sits by the pond and pours milk from her breasts into the water, the water turning purple. The colours purple and pink are present throughout the film. Baloji, who is also a fashion and costume designer and art director, uses different colors to give an extra visual identify to the film’s characters.
Koffi (Mark Zinga), who was born in an unnamed African country, was sent to France by his parents to study medicine and come back and marry an African girl according to their traditions. Kofi has disappointed them on both fronts: dropping out of college and now being engaged to a Alice (Lucie Debaly), a French girl who is expecting twins. After being away from his homeland for eighteen years Kofi has returned there with his fiancé for his sister’s wedding and to give his share of the dowry, as is customary there. His father is conspicuous by his absence and it seems that he is not eager to see his son. His mother also gives him the cold shoulder. Kofi suffers from epilepsy and high blood pressure, and when he takes a baby belonging to one of his sisters in his arms, a drop of blood drips from his nose onto the baby’s face. All the family members take this as a sign of bad luck and God’s condemnation and force Koffi to take part in a sort of exorcism ceremony performed by a local exorcist. The ceremony involves the exorcist placing a mask on Koffi’s head and hammering some nails on it. It is a horrifying and disturbing scene, reminiscent of films such as Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). Since Koffi’s head is covered by a grotesque mask, we see the fear and the horror in Alice’s face.
Baloji has set the visit between Palm Sunday and Holy Tuesday, thereby accentuating the importance and relevance of religion in this story. Koffi’s sister has named her son Jean-Paul in honor of the Pope’s trip to Africa. Even the exorcist when carrying out his ceremony recites verses from the Bible. It seems that Baloji is asking the audience: are these exorcisms, voodoos and other acts based on local superstitions depicted in the film, which may seem ridiculous and originate from ignorance and illiteracy, that different to beliefs and ideas emanating from centuries old religions of the world, and which are also not compatible with science and logic? Koffi, who has lived and studied in the West, is still influenced by some of these apparently superstitious beliefs.
Though Koffi is the film’s central character, Baloji has divided the film into several sections, each section being identified by giant letters of the name of one of the film’s characters on the screen, Tarantino style. These include Koffi’s mother, sister and others. Though each scene focuses on the named character, Baloji skillfully links all the individual events together.
Directors’ Fortnight
The Other Laurens / L’autre Laurens
Gabriel Laurens (Olivier Rabourdin) is the kind of private investigator whose bread-and-butter work is finding evidence for spouses being unfaithful. He gets paid, not much, to collect incriminating photos, audios, etc. One day a girl, the femme fatale of the movie, walks into his office and says that she doubts her father died in an accident. She offers the shamus good money to find the truth. Aficionados of Chandleresque movies have seen such a scene in many films. The difference here is that the femme fatale Jade (Louise Leroy) is Gabriel’s niece and her father, Francois was Gabriel’s twin brother, “The Other Laurens” of the title.
Director and co-script writer Claude Schmitz has tried to avoid the usual cliches of this genre. For him the plot and the mystery are secondary. Instead, he has infused the film with an array of colourful characters and some family history of the twins which highlights their differences. Francois was very rich. And very corrupt. He was associated with various criminal gangs. His second wife, an American, seems to be focused on money. Gabriel on the other hand has been looking after their ailing mother who is in a care home. There are a bunch of guys, remnants of Francois’s own gang, who permanently reside in his luxury mansion. A couple of bumbling guys, who introduce themselves as police detectives, seem to be in the movie mainly to provide some humor to the proceedings; not unlike the two cricket lovers in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. Though their conversations are more reminiscent of those between Vincent and Jules in Pulp Fiction.
Gabriel initially views Jade as a spoiled brat, but gradually a strong bond develops between them which is at the core of the movie. There are also echoes of Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) when people start mistaking Gabriel for Francois, specially when he starts wearing his brother’s clothes and get drawn up in Francois’s criminal activities. The Other Laurens is entertaining, though not compulsively so, but I feel that with a few less characters, and a tighter narrative, Schmitz could have still made a movie to have an identity of its own and be devoid of cliches of this genre. A good example is Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975).
Creature / Creatura
In this Spanish film Mila is a woman in her mid-thirties with a voracious sexual appetite. She finds, much to her consternation that those around her find this unusual. Her husband is clearly not in sync with her in sexual activity. These rejections physically manifest themselves as scars on her body. Through flashbacks into her past we see the roots of this sexual awakening. As a young girl she feels that this is a natural feeling but her friends call her a slut and she was reprimanded by her parents. Elena Martin, who co-wrote and directed the film, also stars as the adult Mila. In a no-holds-barred performance she makes no attempt to make Mila a sympathetic character. Creatura is a brave film, visually inventive but quite uncomfortable to watch.
Critics’ Week
The (Ex)perience of Lave / Le Syndrome des Amours Passes
In this Belgium-France co-production Sandra (Lucie Debay) and Remi (Lazare Gousseau) are a couple who want children but have not been able to do so. A specialist tells them that they are not infertile but suffer from Past Love Syndrome, an affliction that can only be cured if both of them sleep again with all their ex-lovers with whom they had sex! Both seem to somehow be OK with this and start the process of contacting their former lovers and put the simple request of sleeping with them again! On paper this seems a wonderful idea for a comedy. The writer-directors Ann Sirot and Raphael Balboni do create some funny moments. An example being that one of Sandra’s ex’s has since found that he prefers men to women and an ex-lover of Remi accidentally double dates their love session with another guy. Remi and Sandra put the names of all their former lovers on a wall with a small light bulb above each name. If successful, the corresponding light is turned on. Sirot and Balboni however don’t seem to be interested in just making a funny rom-com and introduce many jump cuts and visual interludes, some of which look like music videos for Daft Punk. Though adding this surreal element to the story is clearly the directors’ MO and defines their filmmaking style, they don’t get to really milk the potential of the situation in the film’s 89 minutes, both for laughs and also the impact of this situation on the couple’s relationship. It would have been interesting to see how Woody Allen it would have used this central idea.
Inshallah a Boy / Inshallah Walad
In 2016 Theeb (Naji Abu Nowar) became the first Jordanian film to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best International Film category. This year, Inshallah a Boy (see top image) has become the first Jordanian movie to be screened at Cannes.
This is first and foremost a film about the plight of women in patriarchal societies. Nawal (Muna Hawal) lives with her husband and daughter in a modest apartment in a working class district of Amman, Jordan. One day she wakes up to find her husband has passed away. This is just the start of a series of crisis for her. She is told by relatives and friends that in accordance with Islamic traditions she should not go out alone after sunset. Her husband’s brother lays claim to his deceased brother’s pickup truck and a half share of the apartment, and wants to sell both. Nawal works as a nurse in a Christian family, looking after an old lady. The lady’s granddaughter has problems of her own; she is in a loveless marriage which was forced upon her and does not want to have a child by her husband. The old lady’s physio has his eyes on Nawal and continuously expresses his love for her. Nawal is trapped in a vortex where she is faced with a real prospect of losing her home, job and even the right to raise her daughter. The only solution seems to be if she was pregnant and bore a son who would be the foremost inheritor of his father’s belongings. Her friends tell her to have faith but can she expect a miracle to save her from her predicament?
Director Amjad Al Rasheed, who also co-wrote the screenplay, shows that in patriarchal societies women, irrespective of their class or religion, are treated as second class citizens and have to fight for their rights. He creates a world that is entrenched in reality and is helped greatly by Muna Hawal’s superb performance. She is utterly believable as the woman facing seemingly unsurmountable problems. Al Rasheed keeps introducing new twists to the story which prevent the pace to flag.
ACID
Chicken For Linda
With the major technical advancements in recent years in the animation sector by studios like Pixar, independent animators have to show a lot of creativity in order for their film to attract attention. Chiara Malta and Sebastien Laudenbach, who wrote and directed Chicken for Linda together, have been able to do this. The central theme of Chicken for Linda is memory. What do we remember from childhood? What are the events that stick in our memory? We follow a girl named Linda from her birth to growing up and see what events in her life find a place in her memory.
The moment her father has a stroke and dies at the dinner table, they are eating chicken with pepper, which Linda’s father used to make. Linda subconsciously always craves this dish and asks her mother to make it because it brings back a memory of her father. When her teacher talks about the French Revolution and says that the king was beheaded with a guillotine, Linda learns about violence and murder. When her mother explains to her that the people she sees gathered in the streets are on strike and demonstrating, Linda asks why? Her mother says they want more freedom and Linda is introduced to social issues and politics.
When Linda’s mother finds out that she had falsely accused her daughter of exchanging her ring with another girl for a beret, she tries to right this wrong. The obvious solution is to prepare a chicken with pepper dish. But there is a general strike on and it’s not easy to find chickens!
Though Chicken for Linda is primarily a film aimed at families and children, it is set in a very real world. Linda and her mum live in a housing project. There are strikes and each character feels real. Malta and Laudenbach have created a range of colourful characters, each distinguished by a different colour scheme. There’s a failed magician who has become a police officer, a music loving truck driver, and so on. Despite its low budget Chicken for Linda is head and shoulders above many high-budget animations.
Ali Moosavi has worked in documentary television and has written for Film Magazine (Iran), Cine-Eye (London), and Film International (Sweden). He contributed to the second volume of The Directory of World Cinema: Iran (Intellect, 2015).