In the first half of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the films were often, understandably, downright apocalyptic. After all, the world is in dire straits and cinema, as well as any art we make, has always reflected this.
But unlike many festivals, Cannes does not frontload its schedule with most of the high-profile titles in the first few days. With this in mind, it was in the second half of the 12-day event where some of the best, most exciting films premiered, making the festival one of the better in recent memory by closing on a high note.
The late-breaking films also helped Cannes find a tone that, while still frequently grounded in pain, was often defined by a sliver of cautious hope. Things were still frequently bleak, but there was also a beauty to these films that proved to be genuinely moving as they explored the enduring power of cinema, community, and our shared desire to dream in a world of nightmares.
One of the films that encapsulated this was Joachim Trier’s outstanding, Grand Prix-winning “Sentimental Value.” A subtle yet soaring film about cinema and one family’s relationship to it, it is unabashedly a work about the complicated, connective power art can have in our lives. Specifically, it centers on a father and filmmaker, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), who is trying to reconnect with his daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), who is an actress of the stage rather than the screen. As he tries to get Nora to star in what may be his last film, the fault lines of their relationship are brought to the surface just as Trier dives in deeper to explore questions about how it is that we can connect.
The filmmaker fully explores the fraught path towards reconciliation without smoothing over its rough edges. In lesser hands, a film about how art heals all wounds could easily fall into being saccharine. Not so for Trier, who shows how wounds remain, forever felt in our memories just like the shouting echoes through the house to which the film is largely confined. This only makes the eventual moments of love the film finds that much more earned. A final look exchanged between father and daughter, both finally now seeing each other, is one of the most indelible images that will endure from the festival. As Trier said during the film’s press conference, “tenderness is the new punk,” and this slightly dorky, yet still delicately sincere, guiding ethos sums up what it was that made the best films of this festival stand out.
This also extends to one of the most divisive yet significant films of the festival: “Alpha.” The latest from Julia Ducournau, who won the Palme d’Or for “Titane” just a few years ago, it’s a reflection of her own experience of when she was a child growing up during the height of the AIDS crisis. This, along with Ducournau leaning less into body horror and more into drama, ended up becoming a critical point of contention. While it faced an initial negative wave of reactions, it’s precisely the more unexpected tonal register that it taps into which makes it all the more significant.
It’s a deeply sad film, yes, but it’s also an earnest one about memory and loss. Its central visual motif, which shows those we love decaying before our eyes just as they become monuments to themselves, proved to be one of the most striking images of the entire festival. There is no getting around the horror, which is underplayed yet still present in every scene, but Ducournau interweaves it with gentle moments of grace that prove shattering. Loss is inescapable yet “Alpha” finds beauty in the pieces of our broken world.
Sometimes, this beauty is more humble in nature, though this only makes it more impactful and essential. There is a beauty that is felt in the eyes of the characters of Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning humanistic triumph “It Was Just an Accident.” It’s a film that feels like the embodiment of the phrase “in every person, a universe” as it takes us into the lives of a group of people still reeling from the trauma of being interrogated in prison during Iran’s brutal crackdown on dissidents.
When they think they have a chance at getting justice, or at least some sort of revenge, against the man they believe to be their interrogator, they’ll go on a darkly humorous journey trying to prove that he is indeed the torturer they believe him to be. It’s something that’s deeply personal for Panahi, who was himself imprisoned by the Iranian government and once banned from making films (though was able to attend the festival this year in what proved to be one of the most moving moments off the screen). As always, the filmmaker remains deeply interested in people, their pains and their potential for kindness, making “It Was Just an Accident” a deeply felt portrait about their humanity just as it carries with it a simmering rage against injustice. The two not only go hand in hand, but show how it is people that are the most beautiful parts of the world and cinema.
There were many more films that tapped into this beauty, including smaller works that could easily go overlooked like “A Useful Ghost,” “Death Does Not Exist” and “Drunken Noodles,” or the ones that got some of the bigger awards like “The Little Sister” (whose first-time lead Nadia Melliti rightfully won the Best Actress award), “Resurrection” (a dizzying sci-fi epic that won a Special Award), and “Young Mothers” (which won Best Screenplay). Though it went unrewarded by the jury, one final film was not just the best of the festival but the most incisive in how it explored this: Kelly Reichardt’s magnificent “The Mastermind.”
Though Reichardt has never gotten the love that she deserves from Cannes, she has consistently made the most quietly moving and thoughtful films each time she’s part of the programming. Her latest is no different. A deconstruction of the heist film starring a never-better Josh O’Connor as J.B., a man who hatches a poorly thought-through plan to steal art from his local museum while the Vietnam War and the protests against it play out in the background, it brings Reichardt’s emphatic attention to detail and thoughtfulness about people. It’s another wryly funny film for the director, carving out plenty of sharp humor in seeing how everything comes apart in ways big and small, though it also shifts into being deeply, beautifully, reflective the longer it carries on.
After accountability comes knocking for O’Connor’s titular mastermind (an ironic title if there ever was one), he takes off on the run without any real idea of what his future will look like. In one conversation he has with an old friend, perfectly played by Reichardt’s longtime collaborator John Magaro, he is told that he could go up to Canada to be part of a commune. When J.B. balks at this, derisively saying he doesn’t want to be alongside draft dodgers, Magaro then delivers a playful, yet earnest, rejoinder. saying, “draft dodgers, dope fiends, radical feminists…..good people.” It’s the line that’s been rattling around my mind most from the festival. This is not only because of how gently funny it is, but because this humor is bound up in what so much of Reichardt’s project has been about: finding the beauty in people.
These are ordinary people, all just trying to make their way in the world, and they are often deeply flawed. Yet Reichardt brings a care for each of them, finding beauty in the smallest of scenes that then become something much larger in her hands. The evocative ending of “The Mastermind” brings the pain crashing down, but just for a minute, you feel an ache to go off to join the commune of good people up in the north. The world will continue to be full of pain, but the best, most stunning, works of cinema at Cannes this year were the ones like “The Mastermind” that find the beauty in these people all the same.
