[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day Two - Furiosa Round One | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

The first full day of the festival is still a warm-up phase. Talent and press are still arriving and getting settled, and the other smaller sections of the program - Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight - are just warming up. The big ticket items really start tomorrow, with critics’ screenings of George Miller’s Furiosa, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and Andrea Arnold’s Bird.

Still, it’s a nice opportunity to watch the festival at work. The Cannes Film Festival is, at its core, an industry festival rather than a public festival. Indeed, the presence of the press here is largely a way to raise awareness of the release of these movies in the weeks and months ahead and even to help secure potential domestic and international distribution. In particular, Coppola’s Megalopolis and Kevin Costner’s Horizon are both here trying to negotiate deals with distributors.

Of course, it isn’t just the big ticket items looking for partners. With a light day of screenings, it’s a good excuse to visit the Marché du Film at the Grand Palace. This is a venue for industry professionals to sell distribution rights to all sorts of films. Indeed, walking through the two floors of the market is quite an experience, as one is accosted by all sorts of posters for projects like David Arquette in Mob Cops or the “inspired by a true story” Killing Pablo’s Hippos.

It is a remarkable snapshot of modern film culture. Some of the stalls are operated by national film boards, inviting passers-by to celebrate Thai, Brazilian, or even Irish films. Most are operated by production companies working within a particular niche. Some are quite respectable, with The Syndicate hosting a foosball table in the shadow of a gigantic poster for Seann William Scott in Bad Man. On the other hand, The Asylum offers a tease of the summer’s mockbuster The Twisters.

It is a space populated by industry professionals negotiating and bantering, sharing the mood of the industry and trying to stay ahead of the game. Some of these distributors are selling rights to older films, as repertoire screenings become increasingly popular, while others are offering the chance to invest in movies that don’t exist yet. Passing a poster for an upcoming Scott Adkins vehicle, the distributor assures anybody who will listen that it’s set to begin shooting in the Philippines in July.

It’s a reminder of what exists outside the studio space: austere international dramas, cheap and wholesome family films that seem to have been shot on the same sets with the same casts over the same weekend, overtly religious movies, and cheap-and-cheerful horrors. It’s hard to not be charmed, for example, by a huge marquee poster for the polar bear horror Paws, sternly warning, “Her habitat melts. Her hunger grows.”

It’s a side of the festival that isn’t often featured in press around the gala premieres or the red carpets. It’s also not necessarily part of what the average person thinks about when they think about the kind of films that premiere at prestigious international film festivals. They probably think of movies like the late Sophie Fillières’ This Life of Mine (★★☆☆☆), a comedy drama exploring the midlife crisis of advertising executive Barbie Bichette (Agnès Jaoui).

This Life of Mine is unfortunately overshadowed by Fillieres’ passing, which came after the film wrapped production, leaving postproduction to be completed by her children. Fillieres’ death was a shock to the French film industry, although it has been known that Fillieres had suffered from a long-term illness. Given the themes of This Life is Mine, in which the central character has a breakdown and struggles to navigate her relationship with her children, it’s hard to divorce the film from context.

This Life of Mine is in many ways a prototypical festival film. It’s a low-budget portrait of middle-class and middle-aged existential ennui, infused with a dark sense of humor and shot on a handheld camera. It aspires to a fine balance between a naturalism and a whimsy, hoping to make the audience laugh while also making them reflect on the human condition. As personal as the film feels, it is also deeply generic, laboring its emotional and thematic beats.

This is the kind of movie where a character attempting to understand the strange absence in their life also happens to be working on a marketing campaign for a breakfast cereal with a hole in the middle, where improbable encounters happen with alarming frequency, and where the supporting cast seem to exist largely as props for the main character’s emotional arc rather than possessing any interiority of their own.

Jaoui does good work in the lead role, and the movie is at its best when it focuses on Barbie’s vague sense of dissatisfaction with her own life, as the strange contempt with which everybody treats her is reflected in her own frustration at her circumstances. The problem is that the film makes two fairly substantial narrative and tonal shifts, neatly breaking down into a clean three act structure. These strip out a lot of the film’s dark humor in favor of a sort of earnest pathos that doesn’t quite gel.

Speaking of the kinds of movies that people imagine playing at Cannes, Magnus von Horn’s The Girl With the Needle (★☆☆☆☆), loosely based on the true story of infamous Danish serial killer Dagmar Overbye (Trine Dyrholm). The film plays almost as a grim self-parody of the sorts of indie arthouse misery porn that casual audiences associate with European filmmaking, down to Michał Dymek's stark symmetrical black-and-white cinematography and Frederikke Hoffmeier's ominous rising score.

There’s an instructive scene early in The Girl With the Needle, in which Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) visits the circus freakshow where her husband Peter (Besir Zeciri), disfigured during the Great War, has taken up residence. The ringmaster (Søren Sætter-Lassen) plays to the cheap seats, daring his audience to confront the horrors of a world that they mostly avoided. When that isn’t enough, he asks Karoline to take to the stage and place her finger in her husband’s empty eye socket.

It’s a scene that reveals more about The Girl With the Needle than von Horn probably expected. The Girl With the Needle is essentially a cavalcade of human suffering in which each scene seems desperate to raise the grotesquery with the hope of making the audience squirm in their seats. There are impromptu attempted abortions, gross facial disfigurements, inappropriate breastfeeding; by the time a character produces a syringe full of morphine, the audience is already numb.

There are potentially interesting ideas here about the horrors of industrialization, particularly in the wake of the First World War, and the way that these vast systems reduce human beings to little more than mechanisms through which capital may be extracted. When she becomes pregnant unexpectedly, Karoline discovers that her body generates products that can be packaged and sold, nothing more than currency in an inhuman economy.

However, there’s something just a little bit sophomore philosophy about all this. The Girl with the Needle occasionally feels like the cinematic equivalent of a teenager puffing their parents’ stolen cigarettes behind the school bike shed, desperately trying to seem worldly by railing against the evils of capitalism. It’s not that any of this is wrong, per se, it’s just that there’s really only so hard one can keep hammering that theme over two interminable human hours.

Speaking of the horrors of industrialization and the way that it reduces human beings to little more than grist for some monstrous mill, George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (★★★★☆) is a fascinating addition to the Mad Max canon. The Mad Max movies have always been about cars, but Furiosa is a film about engines, both literal and metaphorical. Indeed, Furiousa spends a great deal of time discussing the specifics of the construction of the vehicles that ferry these characters around.

Every review is behove to stress that Furiosa is not Mad Max: Fury Road. Then again, very few films are Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the consensus best movies of the 2010s. It is perhaps enough for Furiosa to be the second or third best film in the Mad Max franchise. Honestly, this capsule review is probably going to be very thin. The peculiarities of the Cannes ticketing system means that I got an unexpected ticket to the world premiere, despite expecting to see it tomorrow morning.

Honestly, I will likely still see Furiosa tomorrow morning. There is nothing particularly interesting available in that slot, and Furiosa feels like a movie that will benefit greatly from a rewatch, from being seen free of the burden of being the prequel to one of the best action movies ever made. Seeing the film in whole, understanding the shape of it as its own thing, and returning to it with that understanding in mind, Furiosa seems likely to reward returning viewers.

On first watch, it’s definitely a flawed film. Fury Road was a famously troubled production that came together beautifully through a ruthless edit. Watching Furiosa, there’s a sense that something similar happened here – a feeling supported by recent comments by Anya Taylor-Joy. The edit is a bit rougher this time around, because Furiosa is a fundamentally different film. Fury Road was a chase movie, so its edit relied on momentum. Furiosa is a sweeping epic, so its edit needs to provide scope.

It feels like there was a much bigger movie in here, chopped down to fit a two-and-a-half hour runtime. It’s notable, for example, that the movie’s credited lead – Taylor-Joy – doesn’t actually appear on-screen until about an hour into the runtime. While the film’s third credit lead – Tom Burke – is hugely important in terms of character and theme, his role in the movie feels oddly rushed, a victim of the ruthless cutting of the film around him.

However, there’s an undeniable energy to Furiosa. It feels somewhat deliberate that this is the first film in the Mad Max franchise not to lean on the character of Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson, Tom Hardy). Even the title character of this film, Furiosa (Taylor-Joy), feels like a hero swept up in larger events rather than a protagonist driving the plot. Furiosa is a movie with character arcs and protagonists, but it’s also much more interested in the world of Mad Max.

Furiosa leans heavily on the mythology implied by Fury Road. Not only do the audience get to visit “the Bullet Farm” and “Gas Town”, but those settings are introduced by title-card. The politics and the economics of the Wasteland, as they relate to the tug-of-war between Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and Dementos (Chris Hemsworth). Furiosa is not an especially subtle film, built as it is around the idea of an incompetent populist disruption the function of a fundamentally broken system.

More than any prior Mad Max film, Furiosa is fascinated by the relationship between man and machine. This makes sense. In Fury Road, one of Furiosa’s (Charlize Theron) defining attributes is her mechanical arm. In Furiosa, machines rend human beings limb-from-limb, whether as torture or through collision. These machines are built to rend and crush the flesh contained within. Narratively, Furiosa plays quite close to something like The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Visually, Miller is very much operating in the same mode that he did with Three Thousand Years of Longing. Miller’s visual imagination is intoxicating. There are several extended action set pieces in Furiosa that are just riveting, including what is best described as an aerial assault from motor bikes. As with Fury Road, the decision to render the apocalypse in vivid color is striking. This time around, Miller seems to be drawing more heavily from classic westerns.

Still, perhaps the highest praise for Furiosa is that I’m seeing it again in about eight hours and I’m very excited.