The 5 Worst
“From the Land of the Moon” [ Review ]
Marion Cotillard didn’t have the greatest Cannes showing, which remains one of the bigger puzzlers considering she’s one of the greatest French actresses around. In the case of “From the Land of the Moon”, most of the blame falls on Nicole Garcia and Jacques Fieschi ‘s pedantic screenplay, which drowns in melodrama while holding exactly zero volume of water. Cotillard plays a woman afflicted with the idea of wanting to love intensely in the French countryside of the 1950s. She feels nothing for her farmer-husband Jose (Alex Brendemuhl, the film’s only salvageable player) and gets placed into a spa treatment for kidney stones. The film drudgingly stumbles towards its absurd and infuriating conclusion when she falls for a wounded and boring soldier called Andre (Louis Garrel). Whether you see the film’s twist coming or not, Garcia really mocks our intelligence by thinking we’d emotionally connect with a woman this shallow.
“Dog Eat Dog” [ Review]
Every year in Cannes there are breakout genre hits — “It Follows,” “Green Room” and so on. Often they come from the sidebar sections, and often they have a kind of edgy, genre-with-a-twist feel to them, party conferred by the honor or bowing in Cannes at all. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a slapdash, trashy take on an unreconstructed genre B-movie is just that and no more. Less a comment on or a subversion of the classic pulp crime movie than simply an unconvincing version of one, Paul Schrader‘s “Dog Eat Dog” does boast an impressively barking (!) performance by Willem Dafoe, and a bit where Nicolas Cage plays a whole dialogue in a terrible Humphrey Bogart impression, but other than that is so shoddy in execution that it’s difficult to stay engaged long enough for the more shocking moments to land. And this is a fundamental problem as it’s a film that really, really wants to shock — but what’s one more graphic death or random civilian casualty when you’ve checked out long before?
“It’s Only The End Of The World” [ Review ]
Perhaps the biggest critical upset of the awards night was Xavier Dolan‘s overwrought, hectoring family melodrama picking up the Grand Prix, the festival’s second biggest prize — even Ken Loach ‘s Palme d’Or win was regarded more as a slightly disappointing, oddly “safe” choice than an actual wrong decision. Not only does this mark this remarkably self-indulgent misfire out as the second best film in a year when a good three-quarters of the competition would have been more deserving, it even places it, in awards terms, above Dolan’s own wonderful “Mommy,” which shared the third-place Jury Prize two years ago, which is even more off-base. A maudlin, misaligned drama, starring a high-profile cast(Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard, Nathalie Baye, Lea Seydoux and Gaspard Ulliel) who are mostly wasted in one-note roles, ‘End of the World’ was widely criticized after its bow, occupying the lowest spot on the Screen International critics’ grid. Until, that is ” The Last Face ” came along…
“The Last Face” [ Review ]
Sean Penn ‘s disaster may have redefined that very special it’s-so-bad-it’s-good film category. Around the time you see Charlize Theron angrily getting out of the car and shouting at Javier Bardem about Red Hot Chili Peppers lyrics, you start to think about the sins you’ve committed in your life that have now brought upon this punishment titled “The Last Face” in front of you. So wrong in so many ways, Penn’s humanitarian-crisis movie has made previous Cannes clunkers “Grace of Monaco” and ” Sea of Trees ” feel practically philosophical in hindsight. It fumbles with its central affair between Theron’s Wren and Bardem’s Manuel, volunteer doctors who fall for each other as they perform an impromptu cesarean delivery in the bushes, their passion ignited by the horror of West African civil war. Replete with gag-reflexive dialogue like “she leaks urine, but she’s dancing” and Jean Reno‘s unforgettable Doctor Love, “The Last Face” will have leave you in stitches while trying to lecture you about the refugee crisis. It’s horrible.
“Two Lovers and A Bear” [Review]
Two seriously impressive turns by Dane DeHaan and Tatiana Maslany can’t save Kim Nguyen ‘s silly little “Two Lovers and A Bear.” A love story set in the cold white planes near the North Pole, the film follows tortured lovers Roman (DeHaan) and Lucy (Maslany), who battle with personal demons before deciding to just say “fuck it” and run off towards…a better life? The film quickly veers off-course after the titular bear makes his awkward entrance, creating such a great imbalance in tone, mood and narrative that the only thing we’re left to cling to is the sizzling chemistry between Roman and Lucy. It sizzles out in record time, though, thanks to Nguyen’s screenplay which sounds like it was written in college during a magic mushroom comedown. In lieu of resonant depth we get everything we’ve seen in countless dark relationship films before; its two central performances at one point becoming so authentic that they only serve to detach us further from the whole experience.
Outside of the above titles, there were a few other noteworthy film that didn’t make the list for one reason or another, most high-profile of all, Steven Spielberg ‘s “The BFG” [review] which we loved but with its out-of-competition gala bow, felt like it wasn’t particularly Cannes-y. Same goes for Shane Black‘s ” The Nice Guys,” [review] which we reviewed elsewhere and our time-pressed Cannes reporters didn’t even get to. And we’re holdouts over Olivier Assayas‘ ” Personal Shopper ” [review] with Kristen Stewart, which is too much of a mess to qualify for “Best” but too occasionally interesting a mess to languish with “Worst.”
Other than those bigger titles, it’s worth calling out: Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s “After The Storm,” which played in Un Certain Regard and while uneven is at times as charmingly insightful as anything the great humanist filmmaker has made; Studio Ghibli co-production “The Red Turtle” the simple, dialogue-free animation detailing a man stranded on a desert island with a giant turtle that turns into a human woman; Koji Fukada‘s chilly, mysterious “Harmonium” which took a prize in the Un Certain Regard awards; Laura Poitras ‘ typically intelligent, urgent-feeling Julian Assange documentary ” Risk ” [review]; and Queer Palm winner “The Lives of Therese ,” a 52-minute, deeply moving documentary from Sebastien Lifshitz . All these titles and more besides combined to make our time at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival simply unforgettable: we may disagree with the awards, we may question the selections, we may argue at times with our peers, but the Cannes Film Festival is an incredible resource for lovers of cinema, and its 69th edition proved that and then some. Long may it flourish.