Love, Chaos, and the Divine
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The only audience award in Cannes is called simply People’s Choice, and it was launched last year by the Directors’ Fortnight—an otherwise noncompetitive program—in partnership with the Fondation Chantal Akerman. The first winner was Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, and attendees’ favorite this year is Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake. Baneen Ahmed Nayyef delivers what Tomris Laffly, writing for Variety, calls “an impossibly soulful performance” as nine-year-old Lamia, the unfortunate winner of a classroom lottery.
The prize is being tasked with baking a creamy dessert for Saddam Hussein’s birthday—despite the scarcity of basic foodstuffs in 1990s Iraq. “From the pastoral beauty of its opening sequence to the gut punch of its last,” writes Sheri Linden in the Hollywood Reporter, “Hadi’s film is an exceptional screen debut, as perceptive as it is kinetic and, with one eye on the bombers overhead, brimming with life.”
Two Fortnight partners also present awards, and Valéry Carnoy’s boxing drama Wild Foxes is the winner of both the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film and the SACD Coup de Cœur des Auteurs prize for best French-language feature. “A boarding school for young sports stars provides a perfect setting to explore a swirl of issues around peer pressure, male friendship, and the bruising expectations of masculinity,” writes Screen’s Allan Hunter.
Samuel Kircher stars as seventeen-year-old Camille, a fighter on the up and up—until a minor injury has him questioning whether he wants to climb any further. “Returning to Cannes with two movies (this one and The Girl in the Snow) after making his debut in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer back in 2023, Kircher—son of actress Irène Jacob and brother of actor Paul Kircher (The Animal Kingdom)—carries the movie in compelling ways,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer.
The Viennale, in the meantime, sprang a surprise announcement on Friday morning. Christian Petzold, whose latest feature, Miroirs No. 3, has just premiered in the Fortnight, will be taking on the role of festival president, replacing Eric Pleskow, who passed away in 2019. For Viennale Director Eva Sangiorgi, it’s “a great honor” to usher Petzold into his new position, while for Petzold, the Viennale is “always the most beautiful narrative of a movie year. And perhaps it’s the best-curated festival—but I’m not supposed to say that.”
This week’s highlights:
- Tuesday marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the premiere of In the Mood for Love in Cannes, where, according to director Wong Kar Wai, a single press screening may have “saved the film.” Sight and Sound’s Sam Wigley gets Wong talking about his use of Shigeru Umebayashi’s “Yumeji’s Theme” and songs by Nat King Cole, his memories of Hong Kong in the 1960s, the contributions of cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, and the evolution of the lead characters played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. At the end of this rich conversation, Wigley asks Wong about AI. “Technology is just a tool,” says Wong. “AI can replicate, but can it yearn? Can an algorithm understand the weight of a glance between two people who can’t express their feelings? Can code capture the way memory distorts and reshapes our past? These are the questions that interest me, and I don’t think machines have the answers yet.”
- “Love’s whims and ambiguities are the lifeblood of Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me (1984),” writes Beatrice Loayza in the essay accompanying our recent release. Rudolph tells Jason Miller in BOMB that “in a vague way,” his film is “about lies, truth, persona, and isolation. I always felt LA was really about those things.” Geneviève Bujold stars as a radio host with a split personality, Lesley Ann Warren plays an impulsive former sex worker, and Keith Carradine’s Mickey is a man of mystery. “All three actors come from very different disciplines,” notes Miller. “You trust the actors,” says Rudolph. “They’re the key to everything. The most important work I do as a director would be before we start shooting, in the brief conversation with the actors . . . It’s unpredictable. That fuels what I do.”
- The Film at Lincoln Center series Kira Muratova: Scenographies of Chaos carries on through the weekend. “From the beginning of her career,” writes Sophie Pinkham in an excellent survey for the New York Review of Books, Muratova “offered probing, often painful investigations into edge states: life on the borders of political, economic, and social systems, of gendered expectations, of madness, of old age and death. Her characters are always tipping toward both laughter and violence, their relationships nourished on hostility. Her men are often rebarbative, her women tightly wound or grotesquely coquettish. . . . Muratova’s films are both riveting and repulsive, brutally honest and utterly mysterious.”
- Jonathan Rosenbaum is the latest guest on Guide for the Film Fanatic, the podcast devoted to deep dives into a single film with hosts Jason Bailey and Mike Hull. Rosenbaum’s selection is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), which Alex Lei happens to have written about this week for Splice, calling it “an epiphany about how art and religion, and our conceptions and critiques of the two, are one and the same.” In an outstanding 2008 essay, Rosenbaum wrote that what he and many others had “originally taken to be deep-seated and rigid religious beliefs on the part of Dreyer were actually calculated challenges to belief and nonbelief, believers and nonbelievers, alike.” Rosenbaum wraps with a call to “celebrate Dreyer’s deceptive form of enlightenment and his enlightening form of deception whenever and however we can, even as we continue to quarrel with it. There is surely no other experience in cinema that comes close to it.”
- Dag Johan Haugerud, who won the Golden Bear in Berlin for Dreams, will preside over the Giornate degli Autori jury in Venice later this year. Dreams wraps a trilogy of films set in contemporary Oslo, and it will arrive at Film Forum in New York in the fall. Sex will open in June, and Love is playing now. “Love examines the erotics of conversation: talking as turn-on, listening as lubricant,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns. “Love might be thought of as a series of two-handers; most of the film consists of discrete, occasionally overlapping, segments revealing a dyad immersed in discussion. What makes these disquisitional pas de deux so fascinating is Haugerud’s—and the actors’—acute understanding of conversational choreography: the pauses, verbal mirroring, and disclosures necessary to keep the words and feelings flowing.”
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