POMO

If you don’t read anything about Anora in advance or see the trailer, it is flawlessly unpredictable not only in terms of plot, but also in terms of genre. The situation in which the protagonist finds herself easily varies in its degree of seriousness, shifting from tensely comedic to cruelly dramatic. The film masterfully straddles this thin line, eliciting hearty laughter while holding us in suspense and apprehension. Sean Baker is the Steven Spielberg of independent film, an extraordinarily imaginative screenwriter and director with a unique feel for sociology and the ability to tell the stories of people and their souls like no one else. Anora is both an exceptional comedy and a drama that bares the heart from a perspective that you wouldn’t expect. An absolute knockout with extraordinary emotion. Thank you. [Cannes FF]

Don’t be put off by the shallow premise and the B-movie stylisation. The reflection of the rules of television show business is deliberately superficial. Those past their prime must be replaced with young people with perfect bodies. And because of that, celebrities are willing to do anything to their own bodies. For roughly the first one hundred minutes, I didn’t want to believe that such a cheaply stylised trash flick could appear in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival. Of course, Coralie Fargeat has a grander plan for us and takes it in unexpected directions with the inner psychological conflict of the main character and, in terms of genre, with a nod to Peter Jackson’s early splatter flicks. This is taken almost to the point of a transcendental body horror spectacle in which the director doesn’t shy away from humorously using the music of Herrmann from Vertigo and Strauss from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Demi Moore is cast perfectly in the role of a fading celebrity, and Margaret Qualley excels as the up-and-coming star of a television show.  Qualley, incidentally, is enjoying a truly golden period in her career, as she also appeared in Lanthimos’s new film Kinds of Kindness in this year’s Cannes competition. Tarantino deserves thanks for discovering her! If the film hadn’t worked so clearly and predictably with B-movie elements in those first hundred minutes, I would have given it five stars! ___ It occurs to me that female directors are starting to show far more female nudity in their films than their male counterparts. I can cite two examples of this phenomenon just from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, namely Les Femmes au balcon and this film, The Substance, where we see both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s breasts up close, not to mention their curves in leggings. Yum! [Cannes FF]

An entertaining portrait of young Donald Trump as a go-getting property developer with an enormous appetite for business. Not as a politician. Trumps first wife, Ivana, his father, mafioso Tony Salerno, Andy Warhol and especially attorney Roy Cohn, who helped Trump break into the real-estate elite of New York – the important characters in Trump’s life are depicted with refreshing authenticity and documentary-style veracity, in 4:3 television format, often even with VHS tape noise in the picture, giving us that exact feeling of the eighties and nineties that we haven’t had in any feature film for a long time. Director Ali Abbasi takes the characters on a journey through the megalomaniacal American Dream, without pointing a finger at any of them, but rather taking them as people with their own specific priorities and weaknesses. Sebastian Stan is good as Trump and Jeremy Strong is excellent as Cohn. Just don’t expect Scorsese, who’s better suited to the glamorous veneer of Casino. The Apprentice has the nature of a made-for-TV movie. [Cannes FF]

A stultifying and unappealing directorial debut. Needlessly drawn-out scenes with feeble directing (half-baked details in the actors’ behaviour), empty and restrained psychological moments with the main character’s monologues, which don’t take anything anywhere and only to serve to further drag out the film. Trying for a mysterious atmosphere where there is none, dream sequences that we’ve already seen from David Lynch, copying of Memento. And an unoriginal plot with an uninteresting main character. [Cannes FF]

Sorrentino’s visual poetry paying tribute to Naples and feminine beauty (what else?). The first third of the film offers a nice exposition of the characters, from which the writer played by Gary Oldman stands out not only in terms of acting, but also in terms of his nature. Later in the film, there are more and more fragments of emotion whose context and significance in the plot elude me, thus diminishing the enthusiasm for the form of their presentation. What the hell was that “beauty and the beast” character of the ugly priest fingering Parthenope in the church supposed to mean?? Two and a half stars. [Cannes FF]

A young, novice actress’s whining that shooting an intense scene for a butter commercial with Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando ruined her life. Without mentioning that it also made her a global star (which she definitely didn’t want). The first half of the film with Matt Dillon as Brando provides an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the filming of Last Tango in Paris. In the second half, however, Being Maria is a boring, artificially dramatic film that uses a well-known event from the history of cinema to raise the profile of its creator in the post-Me-Too era. The only thing that we learn in the second half of the film is that Maria Schneider let another guy tempt her into heroin and that she found refuge in a lesbian relation (which wasn’t her first). [Cannes FF]

A sex-packed would-be thriller/drama with a dysfunctional romantic motif. When the main characters aren’t having sex, donkeys are mating in the yard or one of the dozen couples or threesomes are going at it in a by-the-hour hotel, where half of the film takes place. And if not that, at least the sound of intercourse is heard from the televisions in the hotel rooms. Heavy breathing can be heard in the background in all of the scenes set in the hotel, even when the main characters are just talking. While there is an abundance of sexual elements to marvel at, there is zero emotion and somehow no joy in the filmmaking. I find that disconcerting coming from Karim Aïnouz, whose The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmao was for me the greatest surprise of Cannes 2019. Two and a half stars. [Cannes FF]

A crime film in a European setting, like Refn‘s Pusher, but with younger gangsters, a gay relationship between the main male characters and the sister of one of them, who serves as our guide through the film. The linking of the film to an RPG, which provides an alternative life for her and her brother, is surprisingly conceptual and gives the film a distinctive dimension and sense of drive. The armed heroine in the game is the sister’s alter ego and fills out the depiction of her real-life emotional states. The frequent intercutting of the game with the dramatic action of the film is also a parallel to the perception of reality through the eyes of teenagers who are not fully aware of the seriousness of their criminal behavior (producing and selling drugs). The content of the film is indicative of the youthful creativity of screenwriter and director Caroline Poggi, next to which her imaginativeness and feel for taking an unusual approach to storytelling stand out even more. [Cannes FF]

A werewolf-like theme of nocturnal transformations into a murderous animal, this time a bull. Seriously. And there doesn’t even have to be a full moon. Despite a lot of night-time scenes and slightly bloody killings, Animale doesn’t work as a horror movie at all. It’s rather a drama with a strange “animal energy”, taking place in the countryside in the environment of bullfighting and raising bulls, with which the protagonist finds a mental connection. The narrative doesn’t lack a light artistic touch and the story offers a surprise in explaining why the transformations into a bull happen. But don’t expect a powerful movie experience, because Animale is rather just a curiosity. Two and a half stars. [Cannes FF]

A gangster movie done differently and done well! The main character is a teenage girl and the  main motif is her relationship with her father, the head of a mafia crew. In a quiet rural setting, the situation seen from her perspective involves a threat to the crew and thus to the only family that she has. There is a sorrowful undertone of the impending inevitable outcome in parallel with getting to know the characters who, like anyone else, love those closest to them in spite of their own criminality. The Kingdom punches above its weight in the sunny Corsican atmosphere. The fate of a legacy that cannot be avoided. [Cannes FF]