I am writing this week’s column in the balmy rosé-and-Nurofen glow of the Cannes film festival, where Pedro Almodóvar’s jury is about to dish out its prizes. If things go as they usually do, critics will feel alternately vindicated and perplexed by the winners, and a masterpiece or two will go entirely ignored and be just fine anyway – just ask Toni Erdmann (Soda, 15). This time last year, Maren Ade’s ingenious, elastic twist on the parent-child comedy earned the most ecstatic reviews of the festival, while George Miller and his jurors gave it nada.
Trust the critics on this one. Running from dizzily absurd farce to laceratingly honest heartbreak across nearly three exhilarating hours, this story of a tightly wound businesswoman torn between severing and mending relations with her lonely, singularly eccentric father is wholly original in shape and tone. Yet the feelings it wrenches from its characters are achingly recognisable. Peter Simonischek and Sandra Hüller are interdependently extraordinary. The latter (pictured right), among other achievements, reaches an all-time summit in onscreen karaoke with an edge-of-the-abyss Whitney Houston number. “The greatest love of all is easy to achieve,” she belts; Ade’s lovely, weird, wise film knows otherwise.
Among the films pipping Ade’s at Cannes (and the Oscars) was Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman (Curzon Artificial Eye, 12), a characteristically well-constructed, well-acted social drama from the Iranian auteur that has nonetheless barely crossed my mind since I first saw it. Farhadi peaked with the bruising emotional realities of A Separation, but this Arthur Miller-referencing tiptoe into suspense territory, following a married thespian couple in the nervy aftermath of an assault, isn’t quite in the same league. A few too many narrative contrivances peek out from beneath its intelligent questions of character.
I wonder if Farhadi will ever take his piquant political sensibility to the States, the way the brilliant Chilean formalist Pablo Larrain has done in Jackie (eOne, 15) – an astonishing, inside-out revision of the Kennedy mythos that can instantly be filed among the greatest of all White House biopics. Examining and cross-examining Jacqueline Kennedy in the days following JFK’s assassination, it’s at once a skin-grazingly intimate study of a glittering facade’s wrecked interior, and a wider, more searching consideration of how historical legacies are built, maintained and potentially dismantled. Assisted by the icy, stealthy gaze of Larrain’s camera and the eerie, keening strings of Mica Levi’s score, Portman’s unabashedly heightened portrayal redesigns an icon as an alien.
Two special films this week illuminate opposite ends of the queer experience. Barak and Tomer Heymann’s gentle, tender documentary Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (Peccadillo, 15) follows a gay Israeli Londoner, Saar Maoz, as he belatedly attempts mending relations with his estranged kibbutz family – while finding emotional solace and support in the London Gay Men’s Chorus. It’s as warm and hopeful as Austrian director Händl Klaus’s remarkable Tomcat (Matchbox, 18) is dark and disquieting. An unusually sharp, splintery portrait of gay marital life, it exposes the latent, violent tensions in a bourgeois middle-aged couple’s enviable existence when one partner, out of the blue, deliberately and inexplicably snaps their beloved tabby’s neck.
While the inclusion of new, Netflix-produced films from Noah Baumbach and Bong Joon-ho in the Cannes competition lineup has kicked up a fuss among cinematic purists, the streaming giant threw their big, brash War Machine, starring Brad Pitt, online this week without any Croisette premiere. That seems surprising until you see the film itself. A notional Afghan war satire with a thin, patchy sense of humour and no clear political point of view, it’s a major disappointment from Animal Kingdom director David Michôd, and frankly a puzzling choice for Brad Pitt, barking in all senses as a brazen, out-on-a-limb military general. As I’ve said before, there’s no dishonour in direct-to-Netflix, but this doesn’t do the badge any favours.
