Great Cannes so far
Reporting from (my first) Cannes: Not everything has been a banger — or even particularly good, looking at you Parallel Tales and Butterfly Jam — but the great movies are REALLY great.
I am thrilled that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma lives up to everyone's high expectations and then some — a bit of a tonal swerve from I Saw the TV Glow (it's very, very funny!) but similarly remixing millennial pop culture artifacts into something that works like fond homage and an entirely new vision simultaneously. It's genuinely sweet, sincere and trenchant about the experience of being a transgender or gender nonconfirming person finding themselves too anxious or in their own head to enjoy sex. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson are exactly as good as you hope they are. It's packed with wonderful gags and cinematic references and in-jokes (there's a reference to the slasher "classic" The Burning that got me), but it adds up to this wonderful unique experience that once again feels like Jane pushing the entire medium into exciting new territory. Give them a blank check to make whatever crazy passion projects they want, I say.
And I saw All of a Sudden this afternoon — it's a masterpiece. Ryusuke Hamaguchi uses a nearly 3 hour and 20 minute runtime to delve into the lives of his two central characters in novelistic detail — and for a movie essentially about palliative care, and the challenges of living and dying with dignity in the era of late-stage zombie capitalism, it's very sweet and life-affirming? I was hooked on it from the beginning, from a first hour that's essentially a procedural story about running an elder care facility, to a second hour that's a brilliantly smart Linklaterian series of absolutely gripping conversations, into a third hour that's better if you discover for yourself. If I see a better performance than Virginie Efira's this year, it'll be an excellent year indeed. Hamaguchi should win the Palme (though there are still like 17 competition movies yet to premiere, so... it's POSSIBLE I may regret that statement), all the Oscars, and the Nobel Prize while we're at it.
Fatherland is juuuust a notch below those two, but if you like the formal precision of Ida and Cold War, this is another absolute treasure. Pawel Pawlikowski and Lucasz Zal are a really special collaboration; this movie is absolutely gorgeous. Go ahead and pencil it in for Zal's third best cinematography nomination. It might help a BIT if you know a little about post-war German politics, but it's not absolutely necessary, in my opinion, because on its own terms it's intellectually exciting and sneakily moving. Sandra Huller, as ever, rocks the house; she has a few real standout moments. What a year it's shaping up to be for her.
Headed to the 12:30 am (ugh) premiere of Yeon Sang-ho's Colony in a bit; I also have tickets to see Hirokazu Kore-eda's Sheep in the Box, James Gray's Paper Tiger, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner, Na Hong-jin's Hope and Cristian Mungiu's Fjord in the next few days. I've written off even TRYING to get into the Nicolas Winding Refn film, which doesn't screen that many times and sold out like instantly... I'd probably get in if I stood in the standby line like three hours early (MAYBE) but I'm probably not going to do that for a movie that comes out in July. And I'm hoping to snag tickets for the morning screenings of Almodovar's Bitter Christmas and Zvyagintsev's Minotaur at 7 am in the morning... it's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it...