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Cannes 2025: Entroncamento, The Mastermind
Entroncamento In a piece about the documentaries at this year’s Cannes, Slate’s Sam Adams noted the existence of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk but declined to name the section it was in, referring to it only as “a low-profile sidebar devoted to independent productions.” That would be ACID, which—with the possible exception of the CINEF section that shows film school shorts—is, yes, probably the lowest-profile of the Cannes premieres sections. To decide ACID isn’t worth naming is a reminder of the infinite proliferation of hierarchies at Cannes; there are dark rumors that even though the press badges are theoretically tiered by color (yellow at rock bottom, with my humble blue the next step up), there are tiers within those tiers that none of us will ever know about. Theoretically, festivals primarily exist to show movies; in practice, Cannes sometimes seems to exist to make it as difficult as possible to see them. This can provoke wily counter-measures; note the film journalist who, thanks to his cane, was allowed early access to the Debussy Theater, the better to hold court up front before every screening. Once the festival was over, he was seen walking caneless and healed on his way to the airport. A Cannes miracle!
Cannes is most reliable as a place to see the unveiling of hotly anticipated titles by known quantities, but within ACID was my sole pleasant surprise of the festival. Pedro Cabeleira’s sophomore feature Entroncamento unfolds in the titular Portuguese town, a deeply unprepossessing place and the director’s hometown; over the course of a leisurely two hours, Cabeleira explores it through the loose framework of a plot that unfolds like a trap-rap saga minus braggadocio. Laura (Ana Vilaça) arrives in town to stay with her cousin and find work, which she obtains at a restocking warehouse. (I will never understand why locations like this give productions the permission to film within them.) But 450 euros a month isn’t a lot, and Laura quickly begins supplementing her income by selling hash on the side before graduating to robbery and violence; initially meek-seeming, her ruthlessness is one of the film’s surprises.
This is thoroughly immersive low-key social realism; I entered ready to leave at any time but happily stayed til the end. Entroncamento seems to have been made with straitened means, but Cabeleira and his cinematographer Leonor Teles make do, resourcefully filling their widescreen frame with whatever’s around—one scene seems entirely lit by the red lettering of a convenience store at night in a very Soderbergh move. The plot revolves around a series of betrayals so complicated I somehow lost track of who was wronging who but the film isn’t racing to its finale, and some of its most intriguing tangents relate to several characters’ gypsy status. (Also a director herself, Teles has a Romani background, which presumably factored into the production.) In a scene of such overt racism that even the largely French audience audibly winced, a woman goes to her daughter’s school to protest against her child being taunted by her fellow school kids for having a gypsy stepfather. The teacher isn’t sympathetic: isn’t that true, she says, and furthermore, might the kids not associate increased violence at school with a rise in gypsy pupils?
American dispossession comes to the fore in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, a movie I loved and was ready to deem the best-of-fest until the last 20 minutes. Heist movies have two paths they can go down, and it’s normally tonally clear from the beginning which will be pursued: breezy success in the Ocean’s 11 vein or, more often, fatalism and catastrophe. While leaning closer to “fun” than not, Rob Mazurek’s jazz score gives no real indication at the beginning of The Mastermind which way this will go, and Reichardt starts pulling surprises early. Masterminded by schmucky James Blaine Mooney (Josh O’Connor, carrying yet another art film on his financial shoulders), the heist takes place about 20 minutes in rather than serving as the customary climax or midpoint fulcrum. It’s a crime of startling stupidity, involving grabbing paintings from a museum gallery in broad daylight without so much as a disguise, but is nonetheless successful.
But the 1970s setting isn’t mere period dressing but a key to the whole enterprise, which feeds into Reichardt’s didactic political inclinations. This is unfortunate, because I liked the movie much more when I didn’t know what it was, and that period dressing is terrifically textured. People often make local news segments that look fake in movies; Reichardt makes one that looks real for the time period, broadcast on a TV in a suburban neighborhood with Close Encounters of the Third Kind vibes. My favorite detail is a terrible-looking fast-food burger with no toppings on it that Mooney’s young son Tommy (Jasper Thompson) eats in a car, a dead ringer for the atrocious similar burgers eaten in Wanda; Reichardt understands evoking the time extends beyond costumes and music, and that food in America was worse at the time. The movie alternates between comedy of a kind and gripping suspense which emerges from nowhere, which is one of Reichardt’s most reliable and mysteriously-emerging modes; think of the outstandingly tense, completely unexpected Mexican triangle standoff at the end of Meek’s Cutoff.
But there’s a less exciting endgame here, one reached by surprisingly conventional screenwriting means. Early on, Mooney is ignoring the local news (in actuality a clip from Three Faces of Protest, a 1972 Columbia University documentary), in which student protesters complain faculty members who picket are fired, but those who commit violence against students are supported. There’s a straight line from this to the film’s final act, which essentially illustrates this thesis when, having ignored literal signs of protest throughout, Mooney finds himself in a situation where that’s no longer possible. The message is clear: being apolitical in fascist times is not a real option, because if they’re coming for one they’re coming for all, and the real mastermind is not hapless Josh but Richard Nixon, whose glowering visage is seen near the end and whose crimes handily dwarf Josh’s; his biggest sin was simply not getting involved. I don’t even disagree with Reichardt, but her way of dramatising the dilemma is more than a little cartoonish, tapping into the same instincts as e.g. having destitute Michelle Williams busted for stealing at a grocery store by a youth wearing a crucifix necklace in Wendy and Lucy. If I were feeling more charitable, I’d argue that as the film slows and deflates into a more conventionally Reichardtian register than its comic opening acts, an argument is being made about how we can’t amuse ourselves to death; in practice, I kind of wish that were an option, even if I understand why it’s not for a director who remains one of our absolute best.
