Speaking of soap operas: Jaime Rosales follows Farhadi’s plunge into the vernacular of Spanish culebrones with a complementary appropriation of melodrama in Petra, an achronological chronicle of one woman’s search for truth, history and her own identity. Starring Bárbara Lennie (who, funny enough, also appears in a significant supporting role in Everybody Knows), the movie intrigues from the outset, playfully opening with a title card announcing Chapter II, along with a concise summary of the key narrative information this chapter will provide (“How Petra enters Jaume’s world”), a strategy that each subsequent chapter also employs. At his characteristically unhurried tempo, […]
by Blake Williams on May 11, 2018One’s valuation of a film—really, any piece of art—is inseparable from the conditions in which it was experienced. The time of day or overall mood and health at the time of the screening (or link-watching) inform my appreciation of a movie just as much as anything else (save for aesthetic preference and sensibility, perhaps), and this extends to festival contexts—to the ways a film participates in the narrative arc of the nine or ten or twelve days of the event, to the impatience stemming from a lack of masterpieces (or good movies, period), and so on. I bring this up […]
by Blake Williams on May 9, 2018For the third year in a row, Cannes’s Main Competition jury — this year comprised of jury president Pedro Almodóvar, German filmmaker Maren Ade, and several celebrity industry professionals whose tastes in cinema had never previously been of much concern to anyone — awarded the Palme d’Or to a movie I didn’t much like. Considered by some to be True Cinema’s answer to the Oscars, the medium’s actual most prestigious prize has suffered some blows to its reputation in the last two years after being handed to mediocre films (Dheepan in 2015 and I, Daniel Blake last year) that weren’t […]
by Blake Williams on May 30, 2017Cannes, like virtually every other major international film festival showcasing feature-length filmmaking, is largely devoted to cinema that participates in a primarily theatrical mode — dialogue- and performance-driven works that feature subjects with whom we are meant to empathize to some degree. This is an expectation, fused into the medium’s DNA when it was still young, that is embedded in the layout of the festival itself; it’s the world’s largest film market (and therefore tilts mainstream, toward things that can make money), and the prizes it offers — honouring exemplary screenwriting and thespian turns rather than, for example, montage, photography, […]
by Blake Williams on May 26, 2017At some point the past year, Rive Gauche icon Agnès Varda and French photographer JR went on a road trip through rural France documenting whatever locals they encountered and, lucky for us, decided to make a movie about it. The main activity of their excursion involved producing pieces for JR’s ongoing Inside Out project, wherein he takes portraits of the subjects he happens upon (or lets them enter into his van-cum-photobooth to capture their own images), prints them out at a scale somewhere between life-size and mammoth, and then pastes the images onto a building or transportation vessel that is meaningful […]
by Blake Williams on May 22, 2017It’s fitting that the Cannes film festival, presently celebrating its 70th incarnation, would choose to open this edition of shameless and unbridled self-reflexivity with a film that does the same. Arnaud Desplechin’s latest, Ismael’s Ghosts, is pure, saturated Desplechin (at least when he isn’t tipping his cap to Hitchcock’s Marnie and Vertigo), perhaps to a fault. Detailing a years-spanning love triangle set to its maker’s characteristic whip-pan rhythm, this is a vision so consciously expressive and overloaded with formal decoration (time jumps, iris-ins, rear-projection montage, direct address to camera and so on) that it finds itself explicitly likening its manically layered […]
by Blake Williams on May 18, 2017I won’t spend too much time bemoaning the Competition prizes handed out last night by George Miller’s jury. Their decisions sucked, just as the Coen brothers’ jury’s did, just as Campion’s did, just as Spielberg’s kinda did, just as Moretti’s very much did, and okay fine I’ll stop there. The best film way more often than not goes home empty-handed from these things, and it rarely matters. Maybe a few less people sought out Holy Motors because Nanni Moretti thought Leos Carax didn’t spend enough time developing his characters, or a few more people were curious to discover whatever the […]
by Blake Williams on May 23, 2016The best thing about Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World: 35mm. Take whatever jabs you will at the 27 year-old Québécois (he’s certainly taken his fair share this year as the first of several punching bags in the Competition slate), but he is as mindful as any active filmmaker — young or old — about basic formal decisions like aspect ratios and the textural differences between digital and celluloid images. The only new film in the entire festival to be projected from a film print (Cannes Classics has two: Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital and Roger Corman’s The Pit and […]
by Blake Williams on May 20, 2016I really ought to have more faith in Jim Jarmusch. Here’s an artist who, despite routinely delivering cinematic UFOs time and again, is still capable of surprising me with works that feel sui generis not only with regard to world cinema, but to his own filmography as well. Paterson, which is not even close to the “slight” or “minor” effort early reports claimed were threatening to land it in a sidebar (low key, sure, but so what?), manages to restate a number of Jarmusch’s pet motifs and themes in a tenor I’d not yet experienced in his work—at least not […]
by Blake Williams on May 17, 2016Cristi Puiu’s enigmatically titled (and spelled) Sieranevada was the first and longest Palme d’Or hopeful to be screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for the notoriously impetuous press corps. Puiu, whose The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) is often thought of as the foundational ripple that set off the ongoing so-called Romanian New Wave, has a reputation as being his country’s most uncompromising and rigorous player, and his latest three-hour appointment furthers the trend in an equally pale if far less misanthropic portrait of contemporary Romania. Sieranevada is a self-consciously long, loquacious, and unstructured film, bloated and macho and […]
by Blake Williams on May 16, 2016