[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day Four - The Best Picture Starting Pistol | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

So, this was a pretty good day at Cannes, all things considered.

Let’s talk about Cannes as the starting pistol on the Best Picture race. This makes a certain amount of sense. The festival occurs a few months after the Oscars, and it tends to be a great marketplace for films. It’s a handy opportunity for studios and critics to identify potential frontrunners in the year ahead. It helps that the festival has genuine recognition among the global public and has cultivated a reputation for prestige.

Still, recent years have seen an erosion of Cannes’ cachet as a launching pad for such campaigns. In the past decade, festivals like Venice and even Toronto have demonstrated that they can rocket films into the awards conversation with enough momentum to get them across the finish line. Coupled with the tepid reception for Disney’s big Cannes premieres last year, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Elemental, big studios seem to have pulled back from premiering at the festival.

That being said, last year three Best Picture nominees premiered at Cannes: Anatomy of a Fall, Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest. Still, at the time of its premiere, Killers of the Flower Moon seemed like the only one of those three certain of a place. It’s an interesting illustration of how the industry has shifted in recent years, and the unique role that Cannes plays in shaping the contours of the cinematic year ahead. It tends to produce the more artsy and indie contenders.

To be fair, part of the problem this year is a result of last year’s big strikes in Hollywood, which crippled the industry. There simply isn’t as much to show at this festival, with the biggest commercial premiere being George Miller’s Furiosa, screening less than a week before its release in French cinemas. This is why Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness (★★★★☆) arrives as such a big deal. It’s a rare big studio film playing this year, from Disney’s (formerly Fox’s) Searchlight brand.

Kinds of Kindness is the first film to screen at this year’s festival that feels like it has a real shot at a Best Picture nomination. After all, it was only two months ago that Lanthimos’ Poor Things was a surprise Oscar hit, the second-most nominated and awarded film at the ceremony after Oppenheimer. Reteaming Lanthimos with Poor Things actors Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley, Kinds of Kindness roars to screen.

In many ways, Poor Things represented something of a “levelling up” for Lanthimos, a frankly astonishing breakout hit that somehow managed to gross over $100 million dollars at the global box office and spark conversation outside of film circles. It’s a bold and stylistic piece of work, shot on sound stages with a distinctive production design, playing with aspect ratios, lenses and colors. It is recognizably the work of Lanthimos, but at a much bigger scale.

In contrast, Kinds of Kindness feels a lot rougher and a lot quicker. It is much closer in style to Lanthimos’ earlier and less expensive films, movies like The Lobster or The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Like those films, it was shot on location with a relatively small cast. Like those films, it unfolds in a world that is recognizable modern, even if the characters who exist within it are peculiar and unique in their own strange ways – “Lanthimosian”, one might say.

Anthology films are always a risky proposition. There’s a solid argument to be made that directors and distributors should just get more comfortable with releasing short films, rather than trying to bundle sets of short films into a single feature. As a rule, an anthology film is only as good as its weakest chapter. Even if the individual elements are all good, there’s a risk that stopping and starting the film over and over again might push the audience out of the narrative.

That said, there is something about Lanthimos’ style that lends itself to this approach. At their core, his films are all about the fear that human beings are inherently odd and inherently alien from one another. Lanthimos’ characters are all very strange in their language and their mannerisms, and they often seem incapable of understanding or relating to one another. There is a sense that these people are trapped inside themselves, struggling to relate to the world or each other.

This idea of connection (and its inverse) is a major recurring theme in many of these sorts of anthology ensemble films that do work: Pulp Fiction, Short Cuts, Go, Magnolia. The best of these films connect thematically to their structure, tying their fragmented narrative strands into broader anxiety that human beings are fundamentally disconnected from one another and that the universe is a cruel and random place that conceals the logic of its mechanics from those living inside it.

The triptych of stories within Kinds of Kindness are wryly built around a single recurring character, known only by the initials “R.M.F.”, although multiple characters within the narrative share some combination of those initials. To discuss the specifics of that character’s involvement, always played by the same actor, would be to give away some of the movie’s surprises. However, there’s a strong recurring sense that R.M.F. is not the protagonist of the movie. He doesn’t have any real agency.

Each of the three stories features the same core cast in some combination: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, and Mamoudou Athie. The actors play different characters in each story, but there are certain recurring thematic motifs that unite the various strands. Plemons and Stone are often paired. Dafoe is often a paternal, and often antagonistic, character.

However, at their core, all three stories are about the idea of love, in various (and often deeply upsetting) ways. Kinds of Kindness is a blackly comic studio of the weird dysfunctions that manifest when human beings attempt to love one another: love as control, love as consumption, love as redemption. One of the core unsettling questions of Kinds of Kindness is how far human beings will go to demonstrate their love for or to one another; the results aren’t always inspiring.

If Kinds of Kindness has a problem, it’s the movie’s length. It runs two-and-three-quarter hours, although some secondary sources whispered to me that the film may be cut again before its theatrical release in June. Still, it’s not that big a problem. The stories hum along well enough, and are odd enough to sustain interest. The consistent cast in rotating roles is also to the movie’s benefit, with Plemons, Dafoe, and Stone standing out, while Qualley continues to build a solid reputation.

Kinds of Kindness largely lives up to the hype that brought it to Cannes. However, just yesterday, Megalopolis demonstrated the dangers of such anticipation, as an ambitious work from a beloved ’70s auteur debuted to divisive critical opinions. This evening, another more modest icon of New Hollywood returns with a late work. Starring Richard Gere and Uma Thurman, Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada (★★★★☆) is basically a chamber piece compared to Coppola’s full orchestra.

While other key figures from that era like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese have modernized and reinvented themselves to stay with the time, there is something endearing in the way that Paul Schrader’s later work has retained an intimacy and focus that recalls his work during the 1970s. Of course, these are all independent movies shot on tiny budgets, but Schrader has earned enough cachet to attract respectable stars eager for the challenge of thorny projects like this.

Oh, Canada focuses on the final day in the life of documentarian Leonard Fife (Gere), who has agreed to a final tell-all interview with former students Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), in the presence of his wife Emma (Thurman). For Fife, facing terminal cancer, there is a sense that this is a final accounting of his life as a younger man (Jacob Elordi). The camera lens is a confessional, an acknowledgement of all his shameful secrets and sinful indiscretion to his beloved wife, for posterity.

There is undeniably something deeply personal nestled within Oh, Canada. Last year, it was reported that Schrader’s wife of four decades, Mary Beth Hurt, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The couple moved together into an assisted living facility. Schrader is a filmmaker who has always channeled his very complicated emotions and history into his work, and there is something deeply moving in the film’s idea of the camera as a sort of confessional between husband and wife.

Oh, Canada is a fascinating study of guilt and memory. Throughout the film, there’s a really interesting power dynamic at play. Who is telling this story? Who sets the narrative? “The narrative will be very sympathetic to Leo,” Malcolm promises. However, Emma is much more skeptical, “It will be their movie, Leo.” Malcolm and Diane interview Leonard using the same techniques he pioneered, and Leonard often completely ignores Malcolm’s prompts to tell the story on his own terms.

There is a real question about who benefits from such a confessional. Leo repeatedly insists that he is doing this for Emma, and that he needs Emma to hear his testimony. However, Emma clearly doesn’t want to hear it. There’s also a vague sense that Leonard’s students have surpassed him, at least in profile and acclaim. Leonard has a shelf full of prestigious awards, but Malcolm and Diane have an Oscar. Who gets to tell the story of Leonard Fife, in the end?

Leonard’s confession is grueling, but it’s also self-serving. He talks at length about his political shortcomings and his infidelities. However, the film is framed by another narrator, entirely absent from Malcolm and Diane’s documentary: Leonard’s son from an earlier marriage, Cornell (Zach Shaffer). There is a sense in the sins that Leonard self-effacing confesses are ultimately camouflage for the sins that he conceals.

Schrader has always been more of a writer than a director, and Oh, Canada is a movie that works best as an intimate chamber piece. That said, there are some charming directorial flourishes as Leonard’s memories distort and replay, often substituting Gere for Elordi. However, the film is most effective as a late showcase for Gere and Thurman, and as a thoughtful meditation on how a husband’s guilt can often be shortsighted. It’s wonderful, deeply moving stuff.

The problem with good days at film festivals, days populated by great films, is that it’s possible for films that are merely good to get lost in proverbial shuffle. This is the case with Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov’s The Shameless (★★★☆☆). The Shameless is an interesting project, an Indian film from an international production team, dealing with big themes of sex work and violence against women in contemporary India.

The film effectively follows the love affair between veteran sex worker Renuka (Anasuya Sengupta) and teenager Devika (Anuksha Suguna Pushparaj). Renuka murdered a man in a Delhi brothel and has fled the authorities. While hiding out and trying to earn enough money to pay for an escape to the Philippines, she strikes up an unlikely relationship with Devika, the granddaughter of a local religious leader (Mita Vashisht). The pair are drawn to one another, but fate conspires against them.

The Shameless is a compellingly uncomfortable and unsettling piece of work. It never tries to smooth down the edges of either the lead characters or the world in which they exist. However, it also manages to avoid wallowing in the sort of exploitative misery porn that turned The Girl With the Needle into a grim self-parody of an international arthouse film. As ugly as the film’s portrayal of humanity can be, Bojanov manages to find some consistent warmth.

A large part of this is down to the film’s two lead performances, in particular Anasuya Sengupta’s powerhouse performance as the older sex worker. Sengupta avoids reducing Renuka to a set of familiar clichés, while never softening the harsher sides of the character’s personality. The film works to the extent that it does because both Renuka and Devika are revealed to be far more complicated characters than the premise might initially suggest.

It’s this emotional throughline that holds the movie together. Narratively, the film is more than a little disjointed. The plot stops and starts over at several points, moving down various cul-de-sacs only to eventually circle back to an inevitable conclusion. This structure plays into the larger themes of the movie – the spiral of desperation in which Renuka is trapped – but the execution is still frustrating. The film can feel like it is spinning its wheels.

Still, Anasuya Sengupta and Anuksha Suguna Pushparaj hold the movie together, while Bojanov manages to strike a very fine balance between being exploitative and being overly sentimental. The Shameless is a little uneven and clumsy, but it’s also a fairly delicate execution of a very high-risk concept. Watching The Shameless, there is a sense that there are so many ways the film could have gone truly wrong that it’s easy to forgive a few minor missteps.

Talking about films that could have gone spectacularly astray, it’s time to talk about Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer (★★★★☆) – or, as it has been known around the festival circuit, “the Nicolas Cage Surfing Movie.” As with Twilight of the Warriors yesterday, there’s a sense in which this was the perfect movie to see at a midnight screening with a game crowd. There was chanting, there was cheering, there was palpable excitement in the air.

These diary entries are long enough without too many anecdotes, but it’s worth recording one for posterity. On Wednesday, I had the good fortune of attending the world premiere of Furiosa with Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth in attendance. The crowd was enthusiastic, but respectful. However, the French audience lost their goddamn minds when Nicolas Cage entered the Grand Théâtre Lumière. The auditorium literally shook with chants of “Nic-o-las! Nic-o-las! Nic-o-las!”

The Surfer is a movie very consciously geared towards Cage’s unique movie star energy in the same way as projects like Mandy or Color Out of Space. Cage stars as the eponymous surfer, returning to Luna Beach. The title character grew up in Australia, but emigrated to California with his family after a horrific tragedy. Now, with his life and career in decline, our hero has returned home. He’s desperately trying to put the financing together to buy back his childhood home.

“I’m going to get it back,” the surfer repeats to himself, as a sort of mantra. Of course, he isn’t just talking about the house. His wife has left him to start another family with another man. His son (Finn Little) holds little respect for him. There’s a vague sense that some of his work projects might be falling through as well. The surfer was once king of the world, and there’s a sense that he can still claim all of that back if he can just close on that house at the top of the hill.

Of course, it is never so simple. While taking his son out to surf, the protagonist is confronted by a gang of local “Bay Boys”, led by self-help coach Scally (Julian McMahon). “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” the gang warns him. Embarrassed in front of his son, the surfer decides to stick around the beach and assert himself. The situation very quickly escalates, as the lead character begins to lose touch with any sense of reality or time in his effort to assert his right to the beach.

Finnegan is a promising young Irish director, who has produced a string of notable genre works: Without Name, Vivarium, and Nocebo. His primary thematic interest is the relationship between people and spaces, and how the attempt by a person to assert control over a place often leads to an erosion of their own sense of self. Finnegan is a director fascinated with the psychology of landscapes, worlds that warp and bend around his protagonists’ slipping sanity.

As such, The Surfer is a perfect blend of lead actor and director. The movie’s framework is designed to play to Cage’s aggressive and often exaggerated performance style and Cage more than obliges. This is a movie about a man at a beach who is gradually unravelling. It’s perfect fodder for Cage, and Lorcan understands that Cage’s face is its own complex geography that the camera can study and explore. What happens when a man truly becomes one with a space like this?

Finnegan is clearly taking his cues from Frank Perry’s The Swimmer, starring Burt Lancaster.  The film has a decidedly 1960s aesthetic, even gently tripping into psychedelia at points. Cinematographer Radek Ladczuk saturates the film in hues of oranges and blues, reflecting the sand and the sea, which not only makes the film feel like something shot in Technicolor but also plays into the inherent absurdity of the core premise. The Surfer is a genre sugar rush.

The film suffers a little bit in its final ten minutes, as it effectively heaps a second climax atop a film that feels like it has largely wrapped up in the hopes of resolving various dangling plot threads. Even then, The Surfer has accrued enough good will and commits hard enough to the bit that it’s easy to go along with what feels like an extended postscript. It’s a reminder of what Cage can do in the right hands, and a spectacular levelling up for Finnegan as a director. The Surfer is totally tubular. It’s easy to get on board with.