DD: Last year the 77th Cannes Film festival might as well have rolled double 7s: Anora went all the way to the Palme D’Or and the Oscars. And it was joined by Emilia Perez and The Substance, all three mixing up body, gender and mob membership all the way to the Oscars. Our film critic, Harlan Jacobson, is at the 78th Cannes film Festival, which closes Saturday night with the awarding of its coveted Palme D’Or.
HJ: Cannes edition #78 is a whole nuther kettle of soupe de poisson / fish soup from last year. it’s as if Thierry Fremaux, the delegue general, director of programming, compiled a list of films from Totalitarian Hell—all different angles on what happens when the bad guys take over. Certainly, Fremaux and company lightened up here and there with some films with heroes either saving or reinventing the world as it should be.
If nothing else, Austin based director Richard Linklater gets the Medal of Honor for taking on Jean Luc Godard, the lodestar of New Wave French filmmaking, in his new film Nouvelle Vague, New Wave and bringing it in Competition to Cannes, center of the known universe for cinema. There is no US equivalence for audacity, maybe a French guy showing up at Yankee Stadium swearing he can hit 70 home runs. All the giants who revolutionized cinema are in this film about Cahier du Cinema film critic Jean Luc Godard making his first film, A bout de souffle known as Breathless in 1960, that is the touchstone for the new stories and craftsmanship of filmmaking ever since. It’s more than just a cameo parade of characters, though they’re all here – Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer, for starters. But it's film critic fun to watch Linklater show Godard, then 29, played now by a thin and vaguely menacing Guillaume Marbeck, turning the camera on Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) as waif and ex-boxer Jean Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) as the petit criminal. And doing it all on the fly.
Shot mostly in grey and white, more than black, and in French and English, Linklater’s film sparkles with energy, just a little more controlled than Godard’s Breathless. Watching his Godard think outside the box and chuck out years of ironclad limits, rules and conventions in a country that lives and dies by them, I had the odd thought that in Linklater’s telling, what Godard did in going rogue on Breathless was what the French always thought was American: jump the fence, innovate and keep moving. Unlike some countries we know, French institutions remain in place, and their cheese, wine and bread have also held for a thousand years. Will Nouvelle Vague play in the US? Yes, but probably not in a mall near you.
Spike Lee has been coming to Cannes since She’s Gotta Have it in 1986 and Do the Right Thing three Years Later. His fifth film with Denzel Washington (Mo Betta Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game) and after an 18-year break since 2006’s Inside Man, is Highest 2 Lowest. It’s based on a 1963 Akira Kurosawa policier. Starring in Othello on Broadway, Denzel jetted in on his off day to attend the premiere get an honorary lifetime Golden Palm, see a sizzle reel of his body of work showed to the opening night red carpet crowd, and then duck out as the house lights were going down to get home for Tuesday night’s show. The whole of it was more of a triumph though as an event than as a film.
Denzel plays David King, mogul of Stackin’ Hits Records, who prides himself on having the best ears in the business, a Dumbo penthouse, a foxy wife played by Ilfenesh Hadera, who likes the lifestyle maybe a little too much and which is upended when their son is kidnapped for a $17.5 million ransom by a wannabe rap thug, Young Felon, played by A$AP Rocky. The kidnapper-rapper thinks he’s concocted the perfect marketing scheme for which King ought to thank him. There’s a mix-up, however, that involves the son of King’s aide and childhood friend, played by Jeffrey Wright, which forces Denzel’s record mogul to travel a moral arc from the highest point – King’s glass penthouse in Dumbo to the lowest point , a basement apartment, A24, in the Bronx, which just happens to be the name of the feisty powerhouse film company that will release the film in August.
Highest 2 Lowest is more Grimm’s fairy tale than masterpiece, with Denzel as King sidestepping the ineffectual NYC cops to take up the chase around the city, where Spike lives and loves to film. Here Spike and Jeffrey Wright respond at a press conference to our question about the proposals for a national tax incentive and those controversial tariffs you’ve heard about to bring back runaway film and TV production:
Denzel chases Young Felon all over the Bronx, in and out of subway cars, rocketing past Yankee Stadium in what is Spike’s version of Mission Impossible.
Contrast that to Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning which Paramount showed, also out of competition here, to goose its release stateside this weekend. Unlike Top Gun 2, which started here, where you could ignore the thin plot to enjoy Tom Cruise flying jets at something like Mach 100 upside down and sideways, you can skip this installment of Cruising. There’s endless yak-yak and set up to explain all the things that agent Ethan Hunt has to do to save the world. There’s a thing, and Cruise has to retrieve the thing from a lost Soviet submarine beneath the polar icecap before ultimately hanging off the struts of a Piper Cub and punching out bad guy, Esai Morales, whose job is to mainly laugh maniacally. A piper Cub stunt, that’s what this was all about? Well, surprise, piper cub wrecked, world saved.
Check out more serious cinema from Cannes at WBGO.org and talkcinema.com
