“Ma’ Rosa” [Review]
It’ll be very interesting to trace the trajectory of Brillante Mendoza‘s harrowing little tale from Manila, now that Jaclyn Jose pulled off one of the bigger upsets in Cannes’ history of acting categories. She blends into the bleak background of “Ma’ Rosa” so unnoticeably that you hardly feel her performance, until the moment it squelches you into a little raisin. Looking like it’s shot through a Nokia phone from the late 90s that got dropped one too many times, “Ma’ Rosa” uses Mendoza’s cinema verite stylistics to follow one family’s plight over the course of 48-or-so hours, after Rosa (Jose) and her husband Nestor (Julio Diaz) get caught by corrupt police officers. For all its pale sunlights and a mise-en-scene that drowns in empty crates, torn newspapers and broken bottles, “Ma’ Rosa” quietly creeps up on you and continues to resonate well beyond the final credits.
“Aquarius” [Review]
Running at a slightly exhausting two and a half hours, it’s a wonder that Kleber Mendonca Filho‘s “Aquarius,” essentially the story of a cranky woman’s stubbornness in the face of displacement, manages to be so absorbing for most of its hefty length. That wonder has a name, and it’s Sonia Braga . Brazil’s gorgeous, glamorous celeb hasn’t made a big wave in the West since the 80s – if there was ever a time to revisit “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” that time is now — but Filho has written the kind of role for Braga that should make the whole film world spin on its axis. She plays the charismatic, sometimes cantankerous widow Clara with an infinite amount of nuance, grace and spirit; the great love she feels for her life, friends and family coursing under her hard-shell surface and contagiously pulling us closer and closer to her. She almost overshadows the whole film, but thanks to some invigorating techniques and a finale you’ll never see coming, “Aquarius” manages to even rise above its central, phenomenal, performance.
“The Handmaiden” [Review]
Park Chan-wook‘s heavy, luxuriant, incense-laden aesthetic proves itself a sumptuous accompaniment to this very silly, hotly enjoyable potboiler about duplicitous lesbians in 1930s Korea. Unfolding with an attention to period detail, costuming and set design that is so tangible it’s almost edible, Park’s take on Sarah Waters‘ Victorian London-set “Fingersmith” retains all the novel’s twists and turns and perspective shifts, but gains a kind of aromatic Orientalism in the transposition to Japanese-occupied Korea. And that definitely works in its favor, with even the film’s surprisingly graphic sex scenes being shot with such stunning style and gloss that it goes a fair way toward addressing the potentially problematic issue of a straight male director depicting lesbian lovemaking. Gorgeous to look at, fun to follow through its myriad kinks and twists, and all in the service of a mischievously pro-woman anti-man agenda, it’s not deep but it is probably one of the most purely entertaining films to play in the often rather stuffy Cannes Competition.
“Loving” [Review]
Probably the most obvious recipient of that slightly snobby Cannes edge of “Oh, well, it’s really more an Oscar film than a Cannes film” the potential awards-worthiness of Jeff Nichols ‘ “Loving” shouldn’t suggest to anyone that the film is not good. In fact it’s the best possible version of this type of story — not radically reinventing the period biopic format the way, say ” Neruda ” does (see above) but quietly, and with supreme intelligence and confidence, co-opting those elements that are useful for the telling of this story, while jettisoning the rest of the formula. The story of Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) and their long battle against the desperately inhumane Virginian state laws governing interracial marriages, this is less a legal drama than a story of a solid, unshakeable and ongoing love affair, and in Negga it has one of the first Oscar-worthy performances of the year that is also genuinely in with a shot at a nomination.
“The Salesman” [Review]
With the stunning, near-perfect “A Separation,” Asghar Farhadi set the expectations bar so high that his subsequent films hardly have a chance of clearing it. But after the slightly disappointing “The Past,” he returned to the competition with another unexpectedly genre-tinged drama — if “The Past” had elements of murder mystery, “The Salesman” has touches of revenge thriller. It’s, again, not up to the peerless standard of his very best work, but then almost nothing is. But “The Salesman” which picked up Best Actor for Shahab Hosseini and Best Screenplay for Farhadi in the awards yesterday, is nonetheless an exceptionally gripping human drama in which the minutest details — a glance, a forgotten key, an unlocked door — can carry such crushing weight that even a stable marriage can buckle into suspicion and mistrust beneath them. Cleverly, obliquely paralleled by the amateur production of “Death of a Salesman” that the central couple are playing in, it’s a complex and knotty melodrama that still never feels less than authentic.