We are day 8. There are still four days left here at Cannes, and plenty of movies left to be seen.
Today I’ll be catching Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” Marco Bellocchio’s “Kidnapped,” Jessica Hausner’s “Club Zero” and I’m very tempted to watch the first two episodes of Sam Levinson’s “The Idol.”
The current Palme d’Or frontrunners seems to be Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” and Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” There are still plenty of masters waiting to be screened: Bellocchio, Anderson, Moretti, Loach, Wenders, Breillat, Rohrwacher.
The critics polls, a 20+ year tradition at Cannes, seems to conclude similar findings. The Screen Grid has a top 4 consisting of Kaurismaki, Triet, Glazer and Bing. Le Film Francais’ poll isn’t as kind to Glazer, French critics didn’t like his film as much as the US/UK contingent, their top 4 is composed of Kaurismaki, Triet, Haynes and Hausner.
It’s been a good festival, much better than last year’s more muted edition. Yesterday I saw three excellent films Felipe Gálvez‘s “The Settlers,” Aki Kaurismaki’s “Dead Leaves” and Victor Erice’s “Close Your Eyes.”
Yes, Erice delivered big time. It’s a love letter to cinema, but done via the story of a disappeared Spanish actor. He vanished during the filming of a movie. His body never found. The police concluded that he suffered an accident at the edge of a cliff. His best friend believes he might have ran away. It’s 169 minutes, a slowburn with talky dialogue that somehow builds to an emotionally resonant final scene.
Kaurismaki’s film is what you’d expect from the Finnish filmmaker. It’s his first full-on love story and uses the same type of dead-pan humor he injected in such films as “The Man Without A Past” and “Le Havre.” Slight, but very lovely.
One of the true finds of the fest is Gálvez‘s neo-western which follows three horsemen hired by a rich landowner to empty his land of its native population and open the route to the Atlantic. Nastily rendered violence collide with the shameful past of Chile, one which seems to have been erased from the history books.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.