Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Cannes 2023: The Pot-au-Feu, Portraits of Ghosts
To celebrate Cannes is to celebrate film history itself—or at least so the fest would have it. But while there’s certainly meaningful and genuine overlap, any self-venerating mythology is going to breed unwelcome byproducts, as at the premiere of Jean-Luc Godard’s “final” film, Trailer of a Movie That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars.” (Its actual finality status is TBD, as Goodfellas has more of his work, in whatever form, still to sell.) The short was preceded by a French TV documentary, Godard by Godard, which was fairly useless in part because it ignores half of his life and work while playing the […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 29, 2023 -
Cannes 2023: Anatomy of a Fall, Fallen Leaves
Sandra Hüller enters Justine Triet’s Sybil midway, as the hilariously frazzled director of a European co-production who keeps barking in English while trying to keep the set moving. Hüller’s appearance is unexpected in several ways: a film about a therapist-client relationship suddenly shifts focus to The Shoot From Hell, and while the expected reference point for a European movie shot on an island would be Contempt, Triet instead pays homage to Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli. Nor is this the film’s final narrative slight-of-hand, as Sibyl‘s final act is a drama about alcoholism—throughout, the thematic emphases are always slightly off from where you’d […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 26, 2023 -
Cannes 2023: Lisandro Alonso on Eureka
Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, which premiered as a Special Screening at this year’s Cannes, begins as a parodic reworking of the filmmaker’s last feature, 2014’s Jauja. There, Viggo Mortensen played a Danish captain crossing inhospitable Argentinian territory in the 1880s with his daughter (Viilbjørk Malling Agger), while encountering what from his perspective are “natives” to be fearfully avoided; Eureka renders that feature’s “not without my daughter” elements as a black-and-white Western set in an indeterminate any-Western-town of America. Mortensen and Agger are once again father-and-child, but this time he’s a considerably dirtier and more disreputable cowboy type. In impeccable academy-ratio black-and-white with rounded […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 24, 2023 -
Cannes 2023: Asteroid City
The negative talking points around Wes Anderson—too twee, airlessly production-designed, an aesthetic in search of emotions—have metastasized thanks to a wave of AI-generated trailers of movies “in his style” (Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Star Wars—no, I’m not linking!) that seemingly prove computer fake can be just as bad as the real thing. I wish I could credit the tweet I saw (and should’ve fav’d) which pointed out that maybe part of the reason Anderson’s aesthetic is the only one being repeatedly run through the AI mill is because even a barely-film-literate coder can figure out its basic components, as codified in […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 23, 2023 -
Cannes 2023: About Dry Grasses, The Sweet East
Cannes official competition has grandfathered-in filmmakers—Pedro Almodóvar, the Dardennes, Arnaud Desplechin—who will keep being included no matter what, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose every feature since 2002’s Distant has premiered here, is definitely among them. After receiving the Grand Prix for 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan introduced his “three-plus-hours only” mode with 2014’s Winter Sleep and 2018’s The Wild Pear Tree, and reception was what you might call “respectfully muted.” Outside the festival, his reputation seems to have fallen off: it’s a long way from the 2007 Coen brothers short World Cinema, in which a cowboy played by Josh Brolin goes to see […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 21, 2023 -
Cannes 2023: The Goldman Case, The Delinquents
On trial in 1975 for three robberies, plus a fourth in which he’s accused of also killing two people, Pierre Goldman (Arieh Worthalter) makes his opening statement, explaining that he’s declining to call any character witnesses because he wants to be judged on the facts rather than emotional appeals. “I will stand before you in my sole innocence,” he declares, “without the pomp or theatricality” that normally accrue themselves to trials, “which disgust me.” This is very funny given that what follows is a true-story courtroom drama of nonstop rhetorical flourishes and screaming matches between opposing counsels, witnesses, the jury […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 19, 2023 -
Cannes 2023: Occupied City
Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux is not good at playing defense. When asked at Monday’s pre-opening day press conference about an open letter published by (retired) actress Adèle Haenel accusing the festival of protecting “its rapist chiefs,” among them Roman Polanski and Gérard Depardieu, Frémaux responded that “if you thought that it’s a festival for rapists, you wouldn’t be here listening to me, you would not be complaining that you can’t get tickets to get into screenings.” “Festival for rapists” is a clunkily phrased self-own for Frémaux and his subsequent leap to ticketing problems is equally ungainly—but the access problems […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 17, 2023 -
Visions du Réel 2023: Nights Gone By, Linda and Irina, This Woman, Chagrin Valley
Visions du Réel is so punctilious about its nonfiction festival identity that the program booklet explicitly labels the few titles not fitting that (honestly very broad) categorization as “Fiction,” a tag only deployed this year for sidebar retrospectives of Alice Rohrwacher and Lucrecia Martel. For myself, I wanted to attend less because of any particular predilection for nonfiction and more because VdR seems full of stronger iterations of a type of movie I tend to enjoy, roughly categorizable as “relatively well-financed art-leaning European (co)productions”—i.e., I was primarily interested for aesthetic reasons, with the filmmakers chosen for this year’s sidebars illustrative […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 3, 2023 -
Visions du Réel 2023: Follow the Water, Zimmerwald, Knit’s Island, Human, Not Human
I’d enjoyed watching films from Visions du Réel online over the last three years, but in-theater is always better and this year that became possible. “I’m very interested in the festival, not so much the idea of ‘visiting Switzerland,’” I kept insisting in the weeks leading to my first IRL attendance—historically I’m left cold by the splendors of nature, don’t ski and have no large or illicit banking transactions to perform (to my regret!)—but that statement needed revision after arriving. On my first morning in Nyon, I walked to Lake Geneva and realized it looked uncannily familiar from Goodbye to […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 25, 2023 -
The Future Is Burning: Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós on Dry Ground Burning
Beginning with 2011’s Is the City Only One?, Brazilian filmmaker Adirley Queirós has considered the history of his hometown of Ceilândia in sci-fi and western-inflected narratives made in close collaboration with nonprofessional performers. Dry Ground Burning, co-directed by the former soccer player-turned-filmmaker with Joana Pimenta (the DP of his 2017 Once There Was Brasilia), was shot over 18 months and took two years of post-production to complete, and that labor shows in the most expansive and ambitious of these films yet, each of which builds on and echoes its predecessors. Is the City Only One? foregrounds the experiences of workers […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 16, 2023
