The 69th Cannes Film Festival came to a close last night, with an awards ceremony that, more even than most recent years, turned up a slate of winners that surprised and disappointed many critics. Not only was critical darling and firm Palme d’Or favorite ” Toni Erdmann ” shut out entirely, but the choices that were made for the bigger prizes felt confusingly non-representative of one of the finest, and most progressively inclined Competition lineups in years. It was a stunning year, for example, for complex, provocative stories about complex, provocative women, but with the exception of Andrea Arnold‘s Jury Prize (her third time receiving the third-place spot!) for “American Honey,” that was hardly a central theme of the winners.
But trying to account for why a jury’s picks might deviate from our own is fairly futile (especially when Justin Chang of the LA Times does it so elegantly here ), so instead of carping about decisions we didn’t agree with, let’s lay out the festival highlights and lowlights as we saw them — the former vastly, vastly outweighing the latter, it should be noted.
The 15 Best
“Toni Erdmann” [Review]
German director Maren Ade ‘s astonishingly inventive comedy apparently gained the highest-ever score on the prestigious Cannes critics grid run by trade mag Screen International. And it’s not hard to see why — both loose-limbed and tightly controlled, surreal and real, very funny and piercingly sad, ‘Toni Erdmann’ is a triumph, albeit (as was a recurring theme of the competition this year) just a little overlong. Largely a two-hander between a mischief-making father played with a shambling sadness by Peter Simonischek and his highly strung daughter played by a terrific Sandra Hüller with an utter command of the film’s impossibly singular tone, it’s a brilliantly observed congruence of elements that anywhere else would sound like faint, compromised praise. You just have to believe us when we say that phrases like “the funniest German comedy we’ve seen” and “the most touching use of Whitney Houston ‘s ‘The Greatest Love Of All’ ever” are actually high compliments.
“Paterson” [Review]
Perhaps because it played midway through the second week of Cannes, when attention and enthusiasm was beginning to lag a little, Jim Jarmusch ‘s beautiful little poem of a film felt almost like film critic therapy. Magically avoiding tweeness despite being about the traditionally cutesy theme of finding beauty in the everyday, ‘Paterson’ is the kind of endlessly rewatchable, instantly appealing movie that even as you see it for the first time, you are looking forward to the next. Featuring a lovely, lively but not flighty performance from Golshifteh Farahani as Laura, Paterson’s wife (she’s not a manic pixie so much as what happens when you marry the manic pixie and come home to her every day with affection undimmed) and a really outstanding turn from Adam Driver , who deserved the Best Actor award for the quiet, intensely likeable everyman dignity he brings here, it’s Jarmsuch’s simplest but most warmhearted film.
“Sieranevada” [Review]
The longest film in competition, nearly tipping the scales at 3 hours, and coming from a Romanian New Wave pioneer whose “The Death of Mr Lazarescu” partially established that movement’s reputation for dour, depressing drama, the lively bustle of Cristi Puiu’ s ‘Sieranevada’ was a surprise and a relief. It’s a provocative, multilayered family melodrama, as sprawling in reach as it is contained in execution, as it mostly takes place in one cramped, overflowing apartment in which the members of an extended, grieving family cannot help but collide and crash into each other. The wit, wisdom and weirdness given off in these collisions is what powers the film’s helter-skelter rhythms while the innovative and clever camerawork gives the viewer the feeling of looking through the somewhat amused, somewhat detached eyes of another guest at this particular memorial. With interpersonal familial relationships caught in slamming doors and signalled in frantic gestures behind someone else’s back, it feels as true and absurd as real family life.
“Elle” [Review]
If “Toni Erdmann” was the Cannes critical darling of 2016, Paul Verhoeven ‘s invigorating and maddeningly absorbing “Elle” is surely the mistress. Isabelle Huppert possibly pulls off the crowning performance of her career as Michelle – a woman who gets brutally raped then goes about her business like someone who’s just been in a car accident – and considering how lush her career is with psychologically complex performances, that’s enough to elevate “Elle” into insta-classic status. As directed by the genre-master of the seedy, fantastical psycho-sexual variety, and written by David Burke (based on Philippe Djian ‘s novel ” Oh… “), the film is a gamut of layers where each scene appears to reveal something new, unpredictable, often sarcastic and sardonic; enlightening us about the magnificence of Michelle’s resilience and adding something wholly unique to the sub-genre of the rape-and-revenge thriller. Orchestrated by three men behind the scenes and led by one incomparable woman, “Elle” has that wonderfully rare quality of shining a new cinematic light while adding (and not redacting) from the au courant gender narrative in gloriously empowering ways.
“The Neon Demon” [Review]
Imagine cinema as one big rave, with deafening loud beats rattling your ribcage, lavishly decadent decor all around you and lasers aiming to burn a hole through your retina. And then, for a brief moment, picture yourself becoming totally fixated by a totally silly glowstick. ” The Neon Demon ” is that glowstick. The best thing about it – and what sets it far apart from Nicolas Winding Refn ‘s previous malformation ” Only God Forgives ” – is that on some sick, subterranean level, ‘ Neon Demon’ has compelling ideas about the superficiality of beauty in the world of L.A. fashion. Fantastically refracted through statuesque performance by Elle Fanning , Jena Malone and Abbey Lee ; ‘Neon Demon’ splatters horror on grossly black humor and is a wonderful showcase for DP Natasha Braier ‘s opulent cinematography. It may just be a plastic tube with toxic chemicals in it when you see it in daylight. But, come the night, Refn’s knack for no-holds-barred indulgence may just increase your cinephilic high.