By Ali Moosavi.
The difficult, tumultuous relationship between Celine and Margueritte is at the core of Love Letters, while Félix Dufour-Laperrière delivers Death Does Not Exist.“
The films in the main competition section of Cannes Film Festival are the ones that get all the limelight and media coverage. Cannes however has a number of other sections which offer quality films, the best of which more than often outshine some of the films in the main competition. Here I’ve written about some of the films in the Un Certain Regard, Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sections.
I Only Rest in the Storm from the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho is a tale of a stranger in a strange land; a European in an African country, an honest man in a place where corruption is the name of the game and most of the non-locals are the worst kind of expatriate community. Sergio (Sergio Coragem) has been sent by an NGO to Guinea-Bissau to complete an environmental impact report after his predecessor has mysteriously disappeared. The strangeness of the environment is established in the first scene where Sergio is driving through the desert to reach Bissau. He is stopped by a young African police officer who after checking Sergio’s documents, asks him to turn off the car. Our initial reaction is likely to be that director Pinho is using an old cliché to show us corruption. However, the policeman asks Sergio whether he has a book he can give him to read while minding the passing cars!
Strange thigs keep happening. After checking at a very modest hotel, Sergio ventures out to the local market. In the market, a woman steals some items and, while being chased by the storekeeper, gives the items to Sergio to keep for her. Upon his return he is informed that all his belongings have been moved to another room as his room has been given to a “longtime resident”!
Sergio’s stay in Bissau, clubbing and drinking with the locals, makes him realize his own sexuality to an extent that perhaps he hadn’t realized before. While he bonds with the locals, his expatriate colleagues become weary of his behaviour. While driving with an expatriate colleague in the desert, the body of an African man is lying on the ground next to his bike. Sergio pleads the driver to stop, but his colleague insists that it’s a con to extract money. Pinho doesn’t show us who was telling the truth, making us share Sergio’s confusion. The disparity between what the locals need and what the western outsiders think is good for them is highlighted in a scene where visiting NGO officers proudly show some villagers a latrine that they’ve installed for them so that they would not get in rainy days in the woods. Looking with bewilderment at the latrine, a local woman asks the officers, “you want us to pour our drinking water into this?!”
Pinho paints a thought-provoking picture of a post-colonial capitalistic landscape. At 217 minutes he takes his time to do so. While never boring, I felt that some trimming of the scenes between the secondary characters would have given the film a sharper focus. We do, however share the confusion and anxiety that Sergo feels. When he refuses to have sex with a sex worker that his expat colleagues have paid for, and tells the woman that he doesn’t care that he can have sex for free, the woman retorts: why are you here? What do you care about? Life of a sex worker? human trafficking? clean water for everyone? No answers are to be found.
In Caravan, from the Czech Republic, Ester (Ana Geislerova) is a single mum with an autistic teenage son David (David Vodstrcil) who also has Down’s Syndrome. Ester is happy to receive an offer to spend a short vacation with friends at their villa in Italy. However, David’s erratic behaviour upsets the hosts and they ask Ester and David to sleep in a camper van in their drive. When, one night, Ester overhears her friends saying they’ve had it with her son, she makes the sudden decision to just take the camper and drive out with her son. From hereon we have a road movie. On their aimless drive they meet Zuza (Juliana Brutovska) a young, free-spirited Czech woman, who asks to ride along with them. Director Zuzana Kircnerova uses the people they meet and their adventures on the road to explore sexuality and sexual desires of these three, very different, individuals. David’s intellectual disability has not affected the normal sexual awakening of a young teenager, but he is unable to be subtle about it. This does cause embarrassment to Ester on occasions. Ester herself has sexual desires of her own. When, looking for work, they accept to work in a small farm. The farmer, when alone with Ester, starts slowly touching her breasts and we see that Ester returns the favour in a sexual way. Zuza who catches a glimpse of the man starting to have sex with Ester, is horrified and immediately “rescues” her and David and they drive away. Ester tells Zuza: he didn’t do anything wrong, I liked it.
Davis starts to have a crush on Zuza, who does not want to hurt him. These are three lonely people alienated from the society at large. We see them being rudely evicted from private beaches. Caravan is a very personal film for Zuzana Kircnerova, who also has a child with autism and Down’s Syndrome. She has used her own experience to make a film that is at once both utterly believable and quietly affecting, without resorting to any cliches.
Of the films that I have watched in this year’s Un Certain Regard, The Great Arch offers the greatest commercial prospect, both because of its subject and its cast. In 1982 at the behest of the French president Francois Mitterrand, a competition was organized for the design of a monument to mark the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The winning design, that of a cubic structure, was by the Belgian architect Otto von Spreckelsen (Claes Bang). The Great Arch covers von Spreckelsen’s struggles to build his beloved project exactly as he had designed it. This proved a far more difficult task that he had imagined. In addition to the notorious French red tape, the fact that a foreigner had been selected to build a monument to mark a significant French historical event did not go well with the locals and every possible hurdle was put in Otto’s way. The only supporter he had in France was in fact the president himself, otherwise one doubts whether the project would have ever got off the ground. Otto is shown as a man of integrity and singular vision, not prepared to make any compromises on his design and construction methods. He has left all the contractual side to his wife Liv (Sidse Babett Knudsen, from the TV series Borgen). Everyone wants a share of the pie and to have their name associated with this prestigious project. There are also big property developers who see the potential for big money to be made if they can persuade Otto to expand the design to allow for offices to be built in the cube. Then there is that old problem of money and finance. A lot of pressure is put on Otto to make compromises in this regard, changing the use of expensive Italian marble to a cheaper one. Though Otto is intransigent as far as his design is concerned, he is forced to bring in the French architect Paul Andreu (Swann Arlaud) as a partner in the project. The Great Arch bears some similarities with The Brutalist in their theme and treatment of their subjects. Both of these films also exhibit great acting by the main cast, in The Great Arch’s case by Claes Bang and, in particular, Sidse Babett Knudsen. The Canadian director Xavier Dolan (Mommy) also has an amusing role as the person entrusted by the President to bring the project into fruition.
Meteors belongs to a genre oft used in cinema. Two buddies, forlorn and alienated from mainstream life, often with big, unattainable dreams. Daniel (Idir Azougli) is a drug addict and an alcoholic. He doesn’t have a job but has a big dream of getting away from their small town to a beautiful island. Mika (Paul Kircher) is more level headed and has a job at the local Burger King. His plan to gain fame, and perhaps a monetary reward, is to find and recapture a big and rare fish stolen from the local lake by a couple of Scottish visitors who have subsequently proudly displayed it on the social media. Daniel wants some money now. He steals a prize winning cat, which puts both of them in trouble with the law. Their only way of finding a regular job, which could help their legal case, is to work for their friend Tony (Salif Cisse) who has a nuclear waste disposal facility. Despite having misgivings about the potentially adverse effects of exposure to nuclear waste, at Daniel’s behest Mika accepts Tony’s offer and they both work in the facility which, with its narrow, high concrete blocks resembles a giant maze.
Writer-directors Hubert Charuel and Claude Le Pape have created a very believable environment in which the main protagonists feel alienated and hopeless. There are no black and white characters, and everyone has a justifiable reason for their actions, whether they end up being good or cause destruction. The acting is uniformly excellent by its young cast. Paul Kircher who I first came across in Winter Boy (2022), for which he won the Best Actor prize at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, has matured even more and is set to become a leading actor in French cinema. The one misgiving I have about the film is its rather Hollywood ending. I would have preferred the film to end just before that and, I believe, it would have had more impact and remained in the memory longer.
In Peak Everything, Adam (Patrick Hivon) is a kennel owner. He is overstrung, always worried and in a state of high anxiety and depression. He is constantly worried about climate change, global warming and the fear that an apocalypse is due to come and end the world as we know it. He is also very kindhearted; a trait that others take advantage of. Romy (Elizabeth Mageren), who does part-time help with running the kennel, brings her boyfriend to use Adam’s office to have sex!
Adam has purchased a therapy lamp to cope with his anxiety. The lamp comes with a phone number fort a support line. When the lamp breaks, he calls the number and at the other end of the line is Tina, who sounds very kind and helpful. My first thought was that Tina is going to be an AI generated person. It seems that Peak Everything’s Canadian writer-director, Anne Emond had guessed that many in the audience will think this. So, as soon as the thought entered my mind Adam asks Tina, are you AI generated?!
These phone conversations carry on for some time until Adam hears a sound akin to that of an explosion and the line to Tina is cut off. Being very worried about Tina, without ever having seen her, Adam sets off to find her. I felt that after he finds Tina and goes to her house and meets her husband, the mystery element of the film, which was the main driver of the narrative, went out of the window and the film came off the rails. I thought Tina, heard but unseen was more interesting.
Interestingly, the film is partly based on writer-director Emond’s own experience. She was suffering from depression, eco-anxiety, feeling of emptiness and fear of future and even bought a therapy lamp, which came with a support number! Peak Everything is certainly original in concept, but I just wish that the second part of the film had followed a different course.
“Militantropos” (see top image), we are told, means soldier-human. It is a documentary which tries to show how Ukrainian people are coping with the Russian invasion. Militantropos’s three directors, Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi, known as the Tabor Collective, have used images, and to a greater effect sound, to create the environment of Ukraine under constant attack. We see the blue skies covered with black smoke, rows of civilians, young and old, volunteering for the army and being trained how to fight and defend their country. Training is not done in barracks but in streets, alleys, farms, wherever possible. Sound is a key factor in the film, the continuous sound of sirens, explosions, guns firing in the background. A woman has a daily routine of writing I Am Alive on a wall, as a riposte to the Russians. We see trains evacuating people to Vienna, with some refusing to go and choosing to stay and fight.
In such cinematic works there is a fine line between observing life and actions as truthfully as possible and that of manipulating them to create maximum impact to gain sympathy. I felt that Militantropos just managed to stay on the right course and fight the temptation to stage things for the camera, instead of unobtrusive observation. Of course, in a case like this one can understand and sympathize with the filmmakers if they did a little manipulation. There are scenes that are raw and filmed as seen and which are truly horrifying; such as people busy digging mass graves and writing the names of the dead on walls; soldiers in the trenches with the ever present sound of gunfire and people singing Carols at Christmas “to honour and thank our soldiers”. One just hopes that such films reach those people who can make or influence decisions about peace and war and impact them in the correct way.
The adult animation Death Does Not Exist starts with a group of young revolutionaries / terrorists carrying out an armed attack on the mansion of very wealthy people. The attack goes horribly wrong as the wealthy people are well protected by armed bodyguards. Helene, the group’s leader, flees back into a forest. Hereon the film becomes an odyssey, more in tune with Alice in Wonderland than a Homeric one. Manon, one member of Helene’s group suddenly turns up. He becomes both an inquisitor, asking Helene why she abandoned her friends and ran away; and an advisor, providing more moral than practical advice. A number of animals also turn up, each reflecting the state of mind of Helene.
Writer-director-editor Félix Dufour-Laperrière uses colours to signify various aspects of characters and events. Often the main character and the general background are the same colour but something in the background stands out. This can be the red colour of blood. Death Does Not Exist is a very violent film, and Dufour-Laperrière has successfully managed to depict the horrific nature of the violence; be it at the armed attack in the beginning or Manon hunting and cutting the head of a rabbit in the forest.
The themes examined here include the impact of the choices we make, friendship, commitment. Death Does Not Exist can be interpreted in many ways by audiences. I think it is equally plausible to deduce that Helene was killed in the armed attack and what we see is what she imagined just before dying, or that Manon only appears in Helene’s imagination. Whichever way one may analyze the film, it should not detract from the fact that Dufour-Laperrière has made a highly original animated film which engages both the eye and the mind and poses many questions to its audience.
The animation, Dandelion’s Odyssey, a France-Belgium co-production from Japanese director Mokomo Setto is one for all the family. It starts off by a dazzling picture of heaven on earth, colourful flowers surrounded by a lake and mountain. This paradise is suddenly destroyed by a nuclear explosion and earth, as we know it, is destroyed. Four seeds of a dandelion however survive this apocalypse and we follow their journey, through the core of the earth, to a frozen planet immune from the explosion. The journey is not without danger, attacks from butterflies and falling in a wild river being a couple of the obstacles that the dandelions must overcome.
What we then witness is a rebirth, a new evolution. We see the shoots growing out of a potato, waterfalls developing, silkworms and frogs among the first organisms coming to life. Setto provides a dazzling kaleidoscope of colours which are a feat of the eye, while at the same time keeping a firm grip on driving the narrative forward. This 75-minute film has the potential of being further developed and expanded into a longer feature with more adventures added in this magical, colourful world.
In Love Letters, Celine (Ella Rumpf) and Nadia (Monia Chokri) have been married since same-sex marriage became legal in France. Nadia is expecting their first child through IVF. In order to legally have the child they need testimonials from 15 people, friends and family, testifying to this couple’s suitability to be parents. Though Nadia is the one carrying the child, Love Letters’ focus is on Celine. She is not sure whether she is ready to take on this responsibility. This uncertainty is rooted in her relationship with her mother Margueritte (Noemie Lvovsky) who is a famous pianist. Margueritte had put her career ahead of her motherhood duties and travelled all the time giving concerts and being away from Celine. It appears that even now, she does not fully appreciate her neglects. When Celine visits her, after many years of separation, to ask her to write a reference, Margueritte assumes that she has come to ask for money.
Writer-director Alice Douard has used her personal experience of having a child by IVF to explore several themes in the film. These include parenthood in same-sex marriages, the homophobia which exists despite all the changes in the laws, difficulties and choices relating to motherhood when pursuing a career. The difficult, tumultuous relationship between Celine and Margueritte is at the core of the film. The performances, specially by Noemie Lvovsky, are excellent and a bonus is small part for Felix Kysul, memorable in Misericordia (2024).
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).