As excited as I was for the Cannes films in the Main Competition, I always look forward to the sidebar sections with just as much, if not more, anticipation. “The Chronology of Water,” “My Father’s Shadow,” “Pillion,” and “Urchin” all premiered in Un Certain Regard last year, while Critics’ Week was the home of “A Useful Ghost,” “Left-Handed Girl,” and “Nino.”
This dispatch contains reviews for two films in the Director’s Fortnight Section and one film in Critics’ Week that may go down as not only the best film of the festival, but one of the best films to grace Cannes audiences, period.
One of the many miracles of Marine Atlan’s “La Gradiva” is the way it embodies in its bones, something that only an art form like cinema can do: act as a dinner party to bring past and present to commune together, where frozen histories can come to life and modern angsts can be mythologized in real time. It takes the urn of the teenagers’ clash-trip story and, through naturalistic performances, tender direction, and a clever script, achieves something akin to filmmaking necromancy, turning those tried-and-true ashes into something wholly fresh.
It’s one of the best films of the year, one that redraws the boundary lines of how stories of similar ilk can be told. It’s a story about the mapping of desire across time, the revelations that can come with misunderstanding, and the tragic reality that we are unable to fully understand what’s happening to us as it happens. If we’re lucky, we’re fortunate to look back in reappraisal, but more often than not, the nuances of our lives will be a mystery even to us, destined to be unpacked by loved ones who believe we left this world too soon.
Atlan’s craft and vision bleed through in the very first scene, as we follow high school seniors on a class trip through Naples. Opening on a train, we see James (Mitia Capellier-Audat) in the throes of a passionate hook-up with Angela (Hadya Fofana). Atlan, co-cinematographer Pierre Mazoyer, and Marine Atlan keep the camera close to James’ and Angela’s faces, capturing their passion, while light bleeds from the car windows, marking their bodies in a luminous afterglow. Unbeknownst to the two, James’ best friend, Toni (Colas Quignard), observes them in silence, with Atlan and Mazoyer focusing on the shadows that mark his face. Later, Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin) watches as well, a studious girl who masks her self-loathing with stellar academic performance.
This voyeuristic ritual, of characters flitting between witnessing and awakening, will define much of the haunting magic of this film. Indeed, like a secret that you can keep safe with a stranger, there’s a fleeting sense of protection you get from “La Gradiva” unfolding.
Atlan’s thesis clicks into play during one of the many moments the class trip pauses to observe a historical site, and one of the class teachers, Mercier (Antonia Bursesi), gives a lesson. In one sequence, she explains what happened to the residents of Naples when Vesuvius erupted, describing how the “pyroclastic flow” fell from the sky, raining burning ash and rock on the people below, as “like an engraving in slow motion.” Critically, Atlan moves the camera during this description, moving away from the faces of bored students and even from Mercier’s passionate visage to look at modern Naples. This contrast between Mercier’s violent description and the bucolic countryside is a striking moment: an invocation of history, in all its multifaceted nature, to rest alongside the contemporary.
In another moment, the class observes frescos (large paintings) amidst another set of ruins. What follows is one of the film’s best sequences, one that puts the youthful actors’ talents on full display as they flit between dialogue-heavy moments and powerful silences. As the class moves from simply spewing their initial observations of the painting to understanding the historical exegesis, they learn that the painting, which seems to depict women in the throes of celebration, is actually a picture of a sinister indoctrination into a Dionysian cult. “I don’t think it’s a celebration, I think it’s a catastrophe,” Angela says.
There’s a mix of inebriation and fear that befalls the characters, and one that would be an apt descriptor of these students who themselves are at the precipice of great change. It’s in moments like this where Atlan merges the historical and the contemporary, using one to illuminate the other.
The imbuing of nuance into static histories is tragically at play in Toni’s story as well. Part of what drives Toni is the belief that coming back to Naples is a homecoming; as he tells his family’s story, his grandparents fell in love, and his grandfather died in a 1980 earthquake. His heartbroken grandmother then left for France. Of course, reality is much more complex, and “La Gradiva,” if it’s not about anything else, is about the shattering of mythology.
Throughout Toni’s life, we bear witness to the agonizing pain of building our lives around certain stories, only to learn that those stories weren’t always true, or, at the very least, were uglier than we gave them credit for. His story is also a powerful reminder about the importance of community, of leaning on those around us in our worst moments, when the temptation to do the worst thing to ourselves feels like the only recourse and possible next step.
The entire ensemble is excellent, and even at two and a half hours, I could have watched these youth flirt, fight, and dream for hours more. They’re characters who are so vital and brimming with life that when anything devastating happens to them, it comes as a full-bodied shock. When we’re young, it’s hard to believe in anything other than the here and now, that our lives can be explained away, and that transformation is always within our grasp. “La Gradiva,” with the way it cherishes its characters and their global and personal histories, is a reminder that we’re part of living, breathing stories.
Swapping breezy ash for watery sands, “Dora,” from director July Jung, starts as one type of drama before peeling back its layers to get at something more primal and delicate. By the film’s end, there’s no one who hasn’t had their skeletons removed or their confessions hidden. The process of such unraveling can be difficult to watch, but it’s compelling thanks to July’s refusal to allow for easy villains or heroes. This is a film that rewards patience and can at times punish your empathy, as you witness characters make decisions that you can’t help but understand and critique.
Unfolding with the dramatic thrust of a parable, we meet the titular Dora (Kim Do-yeon), a woman plagued by an oozing rash; she wears the wounds like clothing, with few crevices of her body left unmarked by pus and blood. She and her parents settle in a remote coastal community, where they befriend Japanese neighbor Nami (Sakura Ando), her husband, and their children. The hope is that Dora can take her time to heal, away from the prying eyes of the big city, without feeling alone in her recovery. What transpires next is a Freudian nightmare (or dream?) of scandalous proportions, as Dora is caught in a web of affairs, relationships, and understated and overt passions among Nami and her family.
A concept that Jung shatters early on in the film is the idea that Dora’s exodus is somehow for her benefit. While she and her ailing father need serious medical care, it’s evident that her removal from society is a way for her parents to have more control over her. It’s heartbreaking to witness her come to terms with the reality of her situation, and to see the ways she has little distance from the emotions of the adults around her, who, if they’re not going to hide how they feel, can do a better job of stewarding their crash-outs. Take a moment where Dora’s mother poignantly tells Dora that her father is having an affair with Nami, barely concealing her bitterness. Dora doesn’t know how to fully process this information, other than lashing back out at her mother. It’s clear she lives in a world where she has to be her own savior, and when her back is against the wall, she’ll devolve into replicating the tactics she sees from the adults around her.
This tumult is captured with furor and grace thanks to cinematographer Irina Lubtchansky. That all that transpires takes place on a truly beautiful chunk of land, whose sands are kissed by the ocean at night and by rain by day, underscores the tragedy and beauty of Dora’s life.
Our north star remains the ever-volatile Dora, whose storm of emotions and open-hearted desires anchor the film’s most tragic and beautiful moments. Kim, best known for her K-pop work, shoulders the weight of playing the titular role with poise and power. Her skills in singing and dancing can transfer over so effortlessly to a character like Dora, who projects all her emotions loudly, even the most understated ones, as if she’s in a theater. Kim’s a natural performer who leans into Dora’s angst and the violating injustice of experiencing the worst the world has to offer, but lacking the faculties to properly express them.
Dora has a hunger for life, a desire to sink her teeth into all that is forbidden and taste that which has been denied to her, and as she’s led by such hunger, it’s equal parts harrowing and inspiring, as we see the fallout of her pursuits. It’s a role that is saved from being one-note thanks to Kim’s command of Dora’s interiority; if July’s naturalistic direction, Lubtchansky’s eerie cinematography, and Jang Younggyu’s and Choi Taehyun’s spectral score isn’t enough to convince, watch at the very least for Kim’s volatile performance.
From the way it obfuscates the camera to the extent that it feels like we’re watching a fictional story unfold, to its exploration of the painful, unique bonds between fathers and sons, Maxence Voiseux’s “Gabin” evokes Michał Marczak’s “Closure” from earlier this year. Voiseux’s documentary is a nonfiction stunner, a beautiful distillation of ten years of life into an under-two-hour runtime that never feels slight. Voiseux and his collaborators have mastered the art of distillation, knowing that, in lieu of capturing all the nuances of someone’s life, the best they can do is go into detail a few times, using those anecdotes as springboards to talk about larger happenings.
The focus is the titular child, who would rather play with the animals on his family farm than slaughter them. Unfortunately, for his family, his father, Dominique, has built their lives around the trade in flesh, and their philosophical disagreements form the central tension of the film, in contrast to Gabin’s more tender relationship with his mother, Patricia, who shares her youngest son’s love for wildlife. “I’m sure animals listen to us … They have feelings … They know how to give back to us,” Gabin says at one point.
As the film traces Gabin’s journey from being eight to eighteen, it acts not just as a showcase for the ways dreams can be nurtured under pressure but for the ways reality often disrupts our most open-hearted aspirations. Ample screen time is dedicated to Gabin playing a farm simulator video game; it’s a way for him to both satisfy his father’s dream of taking over the family business and avoid the actual death of animals. The scope of Gabin’s dreams is eclectic and unified: desiring to become a dog breeder, save his mother’s farm, and train a contest cow. As he grows older, though, what may have been excused by youth is confronted by his father once Gabin realizes he has to make decisions about who he wants to be and where he wants to be.
Part of what makes “Gabin” so emotionally poignant is the unflashy, serene camera style that Voiseux employs. It’s observational filmmaking at its least intrusive, with characters rarely staring at the camera (or, frankly, even showing any awareness that it’s in the room with them). Conversations have awkward pauses, taper off, and crescendo the way a normal conversation with a loved one or friend might. Where Voiseux allows himself some personal flourishes is in the loving way he captures wildlife. He frames them the way Gabin sees them: as beings to be on equal footing with, to behold and cherish. Close-ups of cows, sheep, and dogs abound in a film that uses the same visual language to frame its human subjects as it does its animal ones.
Going into this film, I knew nothing of and cared little for the people living in the northern Artois region. But I found myself, as the minutes went on, thoroughly invested in Gabin’s battle between vocation, family, and duty. It’s a testament to Voiseux’s work as a director, his ability to slyly place viewers so directly into the shoes and skin of his subject that we don’t realize until later that our desires, hopes, and fears have become one.
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