At Cannes, the Heartfelt and the Scathing Exist Side by Side

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/movies/cannes-almodovar-kechiche.html

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By the time that the 72nd Cannes Film Festival ends Saturday night, hundreds of new movies will have screened and thousands of exhausted attendees will be crawling toward home. A stubborn testament to the cinematic experience, Cannes continues to maintain its hold on the international art and the industry, no small thing in the age of streaming. If nothing else, Cannes affirms that there is more to see and think about than Disney and Netflix, the twinned behemoths that increasingly dominate screens and the attention of the entertainment media.

This year’s selections have been greeted with a predictable lack of critical consensus. Among the best received was Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory,” a fictionalized self-portrait starring a deeply moving Antonio Banderas as a filmmaker struggling with his health, his past and his artistic vision. Somehow Almodóvar has never won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor, and it’s difficult to see how the jury (headed up by the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu) wouldn’t rectify that omission by giving it to this movie, one of Almodóvar’s unqualified best in a while.

Another critical favorite is “Parasite,” a scabrous, often very funny social satire from the South Korean director Bong Joon Ho about colliding families, both destitute and wealthy. Bong was here in 2017 with “Okja,” which was overshadowed by a controversy involving its distributor, Netflix. The streaming giant wasn’t at this year’s event perhaps because of the French law that requires movies to play in theaters for three years before going to streaming. The law may seem dated, but it helps keep French cinema alive in a Disney-and-Netflix world.

In December, the French Ministry of Culture cut the time between theatrical release and airing on broadcast television and may shorten that window for streaming services that agree to participate in the country’s financing program, which helps pay for film and audiovisual content. In France, movie love is a matter of pride and heritage, not just dollars and market-driven sense, and the country pours money into both French and foreign productions. Movies at this year’s festival that received French state money included “The Orphanage” (from Afghanistan) and “Port Authority” (the United States).

In time, these movies and many others will find their way into theaters or onto a digital platform. Among those to look out for is Kantemir Balagov’s “Beanpole,” a devastating, brilliantly directed and acted drama about two female friends — played by the equally extraordinary Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina — who reunite amid the ruins of Leningrad after World War II. The movie was partly inspired by the novel “The Unwomanly Face of War” by Svetlana Alexievich, who in 2015 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“Beanpole” is one of a number of titles here that turn on female friendships, including among Muslim women, some of whom cover their heads and others who don’t, as in Mati Diop’s appealing Senegalese drama “Atlantics.” In “Adam,” a grief-hardened Casablanca baker reluctantly takes in a young unmarried pregnant woman, a kindness that changes both women’s lives. The Moroccan writer-director Maryam Touzani, making her fiction feature debut, creates a persuasive, intimate world, and while she edges close to sentimentalism, the feelings ring true.

In “Papicha,” an Algerian student pushes against encroaching fundamentalism. Set in the 1990s civil war, the movie creates an intense sense of escalating threat as religious hard-liners chastise female students for putative immodesty; among the most terrifying sequences are women in black headscarves and cloaks who storm the school. The writer-director Mounia Meddour occasionally slips up tonally. But her vision of a brutally closing world is harrowing and often indelibly sad, as when an older woman reminisces about how the country’s women helped win independence from the French by hiding guns under the long traditional dress, the haik.

One of the most divisive movies here is Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life,” which is based on the story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), a conscientious objector who was executed by the Nazis in 1943 and later beatified by the Catholic Church. Running nearly three hours — during which there is no direct mention of the Nazi persecution of the Jews — it tracks Franz from pastoral bliss with his wife (Valerie Pachner) to his arrest. It’s hard not to feel for Franz and his spiritual struggle, and all too easy to enjoy the flowers, sweaters, sheep and sky shots, but Malick’s prettification of this world is as appalling as is his lack of interest in history.

As I watched Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo,” I kept wondering how it would be received by the women on the main jury, including the directors Kelly Reichardt and Alice Rohrwacher. What would they make of the festival giving one of the prestigious 21 slots in the main competition to this three-and-a-half hour ode to the female rear end? In 2013, Kechiche won the Palme d’Or for “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” sharing the prize with its stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. It was clear then that he had a thing for women’s posteriors, a fixation that has reached its nadir in this epic of jittering, bopping butt.

The movie is divided into drifty sections and opens with 45 minutes of young women on the beach who twerk in the water; rub sunscreen on one another; yammer blandly. This is followed by a mind-numbing three hours in a dance club, including an explicit oral-sex scene in a bathroom. This interlude is mostly notable for its uncomfortable-looking gymnastics and its tireless female performer (Ophélie Bau). Wearing nothing but sneakers and a shirt, she must continually rearrange her body so she can present her vulva or rear end to the camera, a display that is familiar from hard-core pornography.

There’s nothing new about an art-house director working with pornographic imagery. But Kechiche’s fetishization of the female body here is as tedious as it is insulting, and the actual filmmaking is flat-out bad; it’s uninterestingly, unproductively ugly, boring and repetitive. It is possible to imagine that the programmers felt compelled to include “Mektoub” because of Kechiche’s Palme; he’s their guy, in a way, and this event helped establish his international reputation. Then again, one thing that Cannes reminds you is that quality is rarely the only reason movies play in festivals; slots need to be filled, quotas met, back-room deals made.

Whatever the reason that “Mektoub” was programmed and no matter how many scathing reviews it receives, the result is that the festival has reaffirmed Kechiche’s stature as a Cannes-anointed auteur. It’s dispiriting. Cannes has been rightly and regularly criticized for its lack of gender diversity, though recently it has made good-faith efforts to rectify its reputation for venerating male auteurs while making a spectacle out of young, beautiful female stars. Last year its programmers signed a “pledge for parity and inclusion” with the activist group 5050x2020, a French group that formed after the Weinstein accusations.

The festival is clearly trying to change — partly because of outside feminist pressure — but it needs to do better. One easy symbolic fix would be a complete reconsideration of the red carpet, which is at once the festival’s global brand and a continuing, very contentious emblem of gender inequality. The festival’s official policy is that women are not required to wear high heels, but this year Claudia Eller, the editor in chief of Variety, had a showdown with guards over her (nice!) flats. That there’s a continuum between the kind of religiously enforced clothing restrictions in “Papicha” and the dress code on the red carpet is unfortunately obvious.