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[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day Eight - Entering the Final Stretch | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2024-05-23 14:00:10 +0000 UTC
As the festival enters its final stretch, there is a consensus forming around this year’s competition. It has, by most accounts, been a fairly decent festival. Indeed, if one looks at the critics’ jury up until the weekend, most of the scores are bunched in the 2-2.5/4-star range. That’s an impressive showing, and indicative of a festival without any major bombs.
It is also, perhaps, indicative of a festival without any major breakout hits comparable to Killers of the Flower Moon, Anatomy of a Fall, or The Zone of Interest last year. Indeed, the breakout hit of the festival seems to be Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, which – with all due respect to recent Palme d’Or winner Titane – seems like a somewhat unlikely champion of the Cannes Film Festival. However, all of that changes this evening.
The buzz coming out of Sean Baker’s Anora (★★★☆☆) was borderline ecstatic. To be fair, the film has a fine pedigree. It is distributed by Neon, the indie company that has handled the last five Palme d’Or winners, including Parasite and Titane. Baker is a much-lauded director on the independent film circuit, owing to films like The Florida Project and Tangerine. It helps that Anora is a film that exists in two spaces, as a broad crowd pleaser and as the work of a distinctive auteur.
The plot follows the eponymous sex worker, who also goes by the name Ani (Mikey Madison), as she gets swept up in a relationship with young Russian heir Ivan (Mark Eidelstein). What begins as a purely commercial transaction quickly turns personal, with Ivan falling for his companion. The pair agree to marry in Las Vegas, but Ani doesn’t quite understand what she has let herself in for by joining Ivan’s extremely dysfunctional family.
Anora is very obviously heavily indebted to the classic screwball comedies of manners (and errors) that were so popular during the 1930s, most notably Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night. Indeed, the movie’s extended second act opens with a rapidly-escalating misunderstanding in Ivan’s mansion and then devolves into a chase through Coney Island. It’s incredibly high-energy, like a very low-stakes take on Uncut Gems.
As a filmmaker, Baker is fascinated by lower- and working-class American life in a way that is true of very few of his contemporaries, and so he makes a good fit for a retro screwball comedy. After all, so many of those classics were products of the Great Depression and were about the rigid boundaries of wealth and class that existed in American life despite the fantasy of a classless society. Anora is similarly fascinated by money and status, and the different experiences of those with and without.
Madison is electrifying in the title role, a bolt of energy coursing through the film. Indeed, Madison is essentially the engine that drives the movie across its extended runtime. Madison manages to walk a fine line between resolve and vulnerability, a tough outer shell masking a rich emotional center. She’s been around for a few years now, making an impression in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and the fifth Scream movie, but – with any luck – Anora might serve as a breakout for the young performer.
The movie has two main problems. The first of which is that it is far too long. Baker is evoking classic screwball comedies with a movie that runs a good hour longer than most of the popular examples of the form. Comedy is like horror, it’s hard to consistently maintain that sort of high energy across an extended period. It doesn’t help that each of Anora’s three acts essentially feels like a feature film unto itself, with the movie effectively restarting twice.
Then there’s the more basic structural issue. Most of these classic screwball comedies involved key creative partnerships, two leads – usually one male and one female – who could bounce off one another to generate sparks. Those sparks powered the narrative engine. To put it frankly, there is nobody else in Anora operating at the same level as Madison. As a result, it occasionally feels like Anora is going almost twice as far on half the fuel.
These problems combine in the movie’s first act, which works really hard to sell the relationship between Ivan and Anora. On one level, that makes sense. That relationship is going to serve as the motivating factor for the rest of the film. However, it’s very obvious that the relationship is not built to last, and it’s very clear where exactly the movie is going to end up in relationship to the pair. This has the effect of making that opening hour feel a little bit like gilding the proverbial lily.
It's a shame. Despite these issues, there’s a lot here to like in Anora. Indeed, given the reaction in the room to the premiere and from talking to various critics afterwards, even these modest complaints are going to represent the minority opinion on the film. Anora is a movie that is very easy to like, but somewhat harder to love. Still, if this afternoon’s critics’ jury panel is anything to go by, it is now the definite favorite to take home major prizes from the festival jury.
This year has been a big festival for older directors, with new films from Francis Ford Coppola, Kevin Costner, Paul Schrader and David Cronenberg. While the films are of variable quality, it’s interesting to check in on directors with long filmographies to see how their thematic interests and stylistic sensibilities have shifted over the decades. In the best cases, there’s a clear evolution. On the other hand, as with Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope (★★★☆☆), there’s occasionally a sense of stasis.
Parthenope is a picaresque journey following the eponymous young woman (Celeste Dalla Porta) as she explores the concept of beauty and aging, from her birth in the 1950s through to the modern day. The film is also something of a love letter to Naples. Primarily focusing on her late teens and twenties, the film returns to Sorrentino’s core interests: the very idea of beauty and youth, and how those two concepts often overlap and intertwine.
Throughout the film, the beautiful young Parthenope is confronted with carious ideas of beauty and desire, but also what happens to it in age. She flirts with writer John Cheever (Gary Oldman), conducts a study of a holy miracle overseen by a bishop with papal ambitions (Peppe Lanzetta), meets with botched plastic surgery victim Flora Malva (Isabella Ferrari) and washed-up star Greta Cool (Luisa Ranieri). At each step of the way, Parthenope is invited to consider what beauty is.
There’s an endearing earnestness to Parthenope, reflected in the title character’s curiosity about the world outside herself and her empathy for the strange people that she meets. “I don’t know anything, but I love everything,” she tells her college professor (Silvio Orlando) on their first encounter. When he challenges Parthenope to define the science of anthropology, she stumbles. He later informs her simply, “Anthropology is seeing.”
There’s something very tender in the implication, threaded through Parthenope, that beauty is something to be perceived rather than something that exists of itself. The true beauty of Parthenope isn’t reflected in her body, though Sorrentino shoots Porta like she is a wonder of the world, it’s in what she sees in others. This gives Parthenope an easy charm that helps the movie to go down a little easier than it might otherwise.
This is good, because Parthenope doesn’t really cohere as a film. The episodic structure means that the narrative is constantly stopping and starting, which means that the movie feels every one of its 136 minutes. However, there’s also a more fundamental issue with Parthenope. This doesn’t feel like anything especially new or interesting from Sorrentino. Indeed, it feels like the statistical mean of the director’s filmography. This is exactly what an audience expects a Sorrentino film to be.
Sorrentino has an incredible eye for beauty. There is a reason that he remains one of the enduring European auteurs. However, it holds the film back from greatness, because there’s very little sense of self to Parthenope. The film doesn’t really have a character or inner life of itself. The other older directors returning to the festival at least brought some sense of personal urgency to their films. In contrast, Parthenope is ultimately exactly what it looks like.
The premiere of Parthenope marks the last of the high-profile premieres, at least until Michel Hazanavicius’ return to the festival on Friday evening with La Plus Précieuse des marchandises. This isn’t a bad thing, as it allows the opportunity to check in with some of the smaller and lower-profile films, the movies that might get lost in the proverbial shuffle between the headline premieres, movies like Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s Eat the Night (★★☆☆☆).
Eat the Night is a conceptually interesting film. It is about a young girl named Appoline (Lila Gueneau Lefas), who is obsessed with the online role-playing game Darknoon. The game provides Appoline with a framework to bond with her older brother Pablo (Théo Cholbi), who provides for the pair by dealing drugs. However, their relationship is complicated with Pablo recruits and falls for another young man named Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé), and it is announced that Darknoon is being shut down.
The most interesting aspect of Eat the Night is its understanding of the appeal of virtual spaces for teenagers, as a mode of expression and escape. In some ways, Eat the Night feels like a companion piece to other recent films about the eerie digital spaces that simmer beneath the surface of the mundane world, such as Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. “Darknoon was always there,” Appoline explains of her passion for the game and the community it provides.
The film is unfortunately less successful when it comes to integrating that story about online communal spaces into the gritty urban crime story around it, as Pablo and Night find themselves embroiled in escalating conflict with a local gang that threatens to completely destroy Pablo’s relationship with his younger sister. This element of the narrative is frustratingly undercooked, a much more generic framework for a low-budget indie film.
It doesn’t help that Eat the Night tries clumsily to parallel the events unfolding in the real world with the fantastical world of the video game. After Appoline’s new gaming computer is smashed in an act of petty violence, the movie cuts to her in-game avatar being brutally beaten by non-player characters. The countdown to the disconnect of the server also serves as a countdown to Pablo’s reckoning with his rival dealers. It’s a frustratingly bland take on a really compelling premise.
However, there was one real surprise today: Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Ghost Cat Anzu (★★★★☆), the new film from studios Miyu Productions and Shin-Ei Animation with distributors G-Kids and Toho. (Indeed, the Toho logo got quite a cheer in the press screening.) Adapted from the manga by Takashi Imashiro, Ghost Cat Anzu is a beautifully rotoscoped animated film, with its character animation modelled on performance capture work by the movie’s voice cast.
Ghost Cat Anzu follows a young girl named Karin (Noa Gotô), who is still grieving the loss of her mother (Miwako Ichikawa Osho-san) and is essentially abandoned in rural Japan by her deadbeat father (Munetaka Aoki Yuzuki) as he tries to find money to pay back his gambling debts. While there, Karin befriends the eponymous phantom feline (Mirai Moriyama), who drives a scooter and answers a mobile phone around his neck. Karin befriends all manner of local forest spirits along the way.
It is perhaps reductive to compare every Japanese anime about forest spirits to the work of Studio Ghibli, just as it is fruitless to compare all American computer-generated animation to Pixar. At the same time, Studio Ghibli is inevitably on the mind. The studio picked up an honorary award from the Cannes Film Festival, with Goro Miyazaki in attendance and a brief video call from Hayao Miyazaki. However, even outside that context, it’s hard to watch Ghost Cat Anzu without thinking of Ghibli.
The film is aware of these comparisons, and even encourages them. The third act takes a very sharp detour into a version of the afterlife defined largely by menial labor, effectively switching lanes from My Neighbor Totoro to Spirited Away. It is perhaps a demonstration of the charm of Ghost Cat Anzu that the film is not meaningfully diminished by these comparisons. Indeed, Ghost Cat Anzu seems to ask, “What if Totoro were a deadbeat 37-year-old cat with a penchant for Pachinko and fart jokes?”
There’s an endearing and appealing warmth to Ghost Cat Anzu, a movie with incredibly vaguely defined stakes and a tendency towards the absurd. This is the kind of movie where a bunch of demons eager to reclaim an escaped soul climb into the back of a minivan, while a bunch of goofy forest spirits rock up to the climax in a Lamborghini that seems to function like a clown car, with only a single throwaway line by way of explanation.
The film’s playful sensibility is balanced well by a sense of earnestness. Anzu, who finds himself forced to act as a guardian for Karin against his own better judgment, is a decidedly fallible individual prone to make bad choices and awkward mistakes, but he also seems fundamentally decent. Indeed, for a movie where the climactic stakes seem to include eternal torment, Ghost Cat Anzu is often a story about people stumbling through the world, trying to figure out their way.
Nobody’s purr-fect, but sometimes you just have a good feline about people.
Check out the rest of Darren’s Cannes columns below –
Cannes Diary, Day Three - The Premiere of Coppola’s Megalopolis
Cannes Diary, Day Six - Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga
Cannes Diary, Day Seven - VR Festival, New Cronenberg, and the Trump Biopic
