[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day Five - A Rockier Day | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Film festivals are fascinating. On the one hand, you have days like yesterday, when Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, and Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer provided three of the best films of the festival, back-to-back-to-back. On the other hand, you have days like today, in which the quality was decidedly… rockier.

This is the first Saturday of the film festival, and it’s worth just outlining a quirk of the festival’s structure. The first weekend is typically saturated with screenings of movies that premiered earlier in the festival, to allow critics to catch up on screenings they missed or maybe to see movies that premiered to surprisingly strong buzz. There are so many films premiering at Cannes that it’s impossible to see all of them, and some arrive out of nowhere to great buzz.

Indeed, even allowing for the opportunity to play catch-up today and tomorrow, I’m still going to miss two of the most divisive films of the festival, based on the response to their earlier screenings: Tyler Taormina Christmas Eve in Miller's Point and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez. Many of these screenings take place outside the Grand Palace and the central theatres in Cannes, outsourced to the Cineum, essentially the city’s big multiplex. So today was the first time this week that I had popcorn.

The films themselves were a mixed bag, to say the least. Roberto Minervini’s The Damned (★★☆☆☆) is a slow western set in the winter of 1862, following a troop of Union soldiers marching slowly westward across the continent. There’s an old adage about how war, at least in the olden days, consisted of long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. By that metric, The Damned gets it half-right.

The Damned is a movie that makes a solid argument for limiting access to Terrence Malick films for professional filmmakers. Sure, movie-goers and film critics and the general public should be able to enjoy Malick at their leisure, but it seems like the worst thing a director can do is to try to take their stylistic cues from that icon of American cinema. The Damned often feels like a bad imitation of Malick: lots of beautiful landscapes, handheld photography, still moments, earnest monologues.

However, it never manages to capture the beauty or the poetry of Malick’s best work. The issue is somewhat compounded by the fact that Minervini seems to be working with relatively inexperienced screen actors, giving them mountains of dialogue to either memorize or improvise, without the gravitas to hold the audience’s attention during long meditations on the horrors of war and the inevitability of conflict. The Damned is damned boring, unfortunately.

Of course, there are still premieres at the weekend, and the commute from the Cineum back into the center of Cannes is a fraught journey for any critic with a screening deadline to hit. It can take twenty minutes to get out to the multiplex, but up to seventy minutes to get back. Still, I braved the journey to catch the festival’s first (and only) screening of Ron Howard’s latest documentary, Jim Henson Idea Man (★★★☆☆), which will premiere on Disney+ next week.

Oddly enough, Idea Man somehow became the hottest ticket of my Cannes film festival, ahead of more likely contenders than Furiosa, Megalopolis, or Horizon. There were two main reasons for this. The first was the opportunity to see Ron Howard at Cannes, the juxtaposition of a reliable and workmanlike director with the most prestigious festival in the world. To be clear, this is entirely sincere. I have a great fondness for Howard, even if he’s not a director in the classic auteur mode.

The other, decidedly more pragmatic reason for my desire to get into that particular screening was that – despite the fact the film was showing in the Cannes Classics strand, and so was put before a jury – it was only screening once over the entire festival. There were no mop-up screenings. It was also one of only two prominent Disney films to screen at this year’s festival, the other being Kinds of Kindness, and so only screening it once felt like a bit of a cheat.

Ultimately, as one might expect from Howard, Jim Henson Idea Man is a solid piece of work. It offers a suitably holistic overview of the late artist’s life and career. It helps that Henson is the sort of figure who lends himself to this sort of hagiography, somebody who genuinely reinvented the field in which he was working and brought joy to millions of children over multiple generations. Howard isn’t a particularly probing documentarian, and Henson isn’t a subject who particularly needs to be probed.

There are two smaller issues with the film. The first is that Howard doesn’t necessarily dig particularly deep into Henson’s psychology and try to contextualize his decisions. To pick one small example, from the dates in the film, Henson’s moment of “self-doubt” and his trip to Europe, followed by his marriage and his full-throated commitment to his art came directly after his brother’s death, but the film never explores any possible connection between the two events.

The other notable issue is the extent to which the movie plays as an advertisement for Disney and their ownership of Henson’s iconic creations. Idea Man ends with Henson’s passing, but goes out of its way to reassure viewers that the brand is still in good hands. There is footage of Henson and Eisner together, along with mentions of how much Henson loved Disneyland. It’s just a little crass and tasteless as an ending to a documentary celebrating such a singular artist.

Still, it’s an enjoyably sincere ode to one of the great modern American entertainers. It’s quite nice to listen to Henson’s collaborators sit down and enthusiastically gush about his inventiveness and his excitement. There is also a nice recurring thread that explores Henson’s connection to television as a medium, and how that impacted the craft and the technique of his puppetry that is fun to consider. All said, Jim Henson Idea Man is just a really pleasant experience.

There were two other biggish premieres today, and they both ultimately suffer from the same basic issue. The first of which was Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson’s Rumours (★★☆☆☆), starring Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander. The film takes place during a G7 summit that goes horribly wrong, with the world leaders abandoned in the middle of the woods and left to find their own way back to civilization, while possibly being stalked by reanimated bog bodies.

Rumours has a strong hook. It is basically a classic teen slasher movie that focuses on the leaders of the world’s seven most powerful liberal democracies. This is not an exaggeration. The plot mechanics are lifted directly from such films, right down to a love triangle between the Prime Minister of Great Britain (Nikki Amuka-Bird), the Prime Minister of Canada (Roy Dupuis) and the Chancellor of Germany (Blanchett). It is a pretty good joke: The Blair Witch Project meets The Thick of It.

The characters are very broadly drawn, and the movie is much less interested in politics than it is in watching these older and more worldly characters conform to various slasher movie archetypes. The Prime Minister of Italy (Rolando Ravello) is a bumbling, but well-meaning, idiot. The President of the United States (Charles Dance) refuses to admit anything is wrong. The President of France (Denis Ménochet) works on a laptop desperately putting together theories.

This works well enough for the first twenty to thirty minutes of the movie, juxtaposing the world that these leaders inhabit with the conventions of a much nastier sort of cinematic entertainment. However, the biggest issue with the film is that there’s really only one joke here and it is stretched to breaking point over a near-interminable two hours. Honestly, Rumours would gain a whole star rating if it constrained itself to a tight ninety minutes.

The other big issue with the film is that it’s comparatively bloodless. Rumours is very obviously riffing on slasher movie tropes and conventions, but it clearly likes its ensemble far too much to ever put them in any real danger. Yes, this is a broad farce, but even Scary Movie was willing to kill off characters because it understood that death was part of the genre framework. There are only two significant deaths in the movies, both essentially “guest stars” who pop in for a few scenes.

It’s a shame, because there are moments that Rumours seems to circle around some bigger ideas. Liberal democracies are in a constant state of crisis, and one of the movie’s best jokes is the effort to build a meaningful statement around “the crisis”, some undefined event happening that is never clearly articulated and which the characters themselves don’t even seem to understand. There’s also a question of where power lies in the modern world, and how it has shifted away from such leaders.

Rumours gestures vaguely at such ideas. The French President notes that the bog bodies were often chieftains or leaders sacrificed for failing to deliver “a good harvest” to their constituents. There are a few mentions of tech giants and their growing power. There is a better movie tucked away somewhere within Rumours, one more committed to both its genre fusion and to its big ideas. Unfortunately, Rumours starts very strong and quickly alienates the audience through dull repetition.

That said, the biggest premiere of the day was Noémie Merlant’s The Balconettes (★★☆☆☆), competing for the Queer Palme. The Balconettes basically has the same issue as Rumours. It’s a film that starts strong and very quickly loses the audience. Co-written with Merlant’s frequent collaborator Celine Sciamma (who wrote for Merlant in Paris, 13th District and directed her in Portrait of a Lady on Fire), The Balconettes is a very strange genre hybrid.

The movie focuses on three women sharing an apartment during a heatwave in Marseilles: flatmates online sex worker Ruby (Souheilia Yacoub) and wannabe novelist Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), and their good friend Élise (Merlant), an actor fleeing her husband. From the balcony, the three women become obsessed with the smoldering and mysterious photographer (Lucas Bravo) who lives in the apartment opposite. Things quickly spiral out of control. Think of it as Queer Window.

It is very obvious that The Balconettes has things that it wants to say about the state of the modern world, particularly about the way that men treat women. Over the course of the film, each of the three women have an arc in which they are forced to confront toxic masculinity in its various forms. It’s very earnest and very sincere. It’s certainly well-intentioned and it will never be less than timely. Indeed, even using the template of a Hitchcock film to play with these ideas is a clever touch.

However, The Balconettes simply cannot maintain a consistent tone as it hops between genres. The opening act is playful and mischievous, reflecting a dark sense of humor and occasionally even a cartoonish sensibility. However, once the film introduces the particulars of its inciting incident, the tone understandably shifts. It’s very hard to still be funny when dealing with issues related to consent, assault, and sexual violence, particularly when addressing these ideas so directly.

This is a movie that opens with a darkly comic set piece that involves a woman suffocating her abusive husband by sitting on his face, but which later contains several self-serious and extended sequences of Ruby grimly performing for her webcam like she’s retroactively auditioning for a role in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. It is a lot, and the film never seems to find a point on which it can focus to develop a consistent tone or mood.

The Balconettes bristles with rage for the experiences of its three central characters, and women in general, but can never fully decide on how it intends to express that anger. Does The Balconettes want the audience to laugh along at the grim absurdity of it all? Does The Balconettes want the viewer to get righteously angry? Does The Balconettes simply want the people watching to shake their head in frustration and disappointment at how commonplace these horrors can be?

Any one of those responses would be entirely valid, and it’s possible to imagine a better version of The Balconettes operating in any one of those modes – and maybe in a few more. The problem is that the film never settles into a particular groove or rhythm. It never finds a particular tone. The results are disorienting and frustrating, not least because it is entirely possible to strike the balance that The Balconettes so clumsily fumbles.

If nothing else, Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (★★★☆☆) is evidence of that. The film opens with Shula (Susan Chardy) driving home from a fancy dress party when she comes across a dead body lying in the middle of the road. It is her mother’s brother, Uncle Fred (Roy Chisha), who seemingly expired on his way home from a local brothel. With local law enforcement preoccupied, Shula has to spend the night with the body, sitting in her car in her lavish costume.

The bulk of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl follows the funeral rites for Uncle Fred, as the family gathers around to both celebrate his life and to decide his legacy. It very quickly becomes clear that Uncle Fred’s legacy is more complicated than the earnest eulogies would suggest. Many of the younger women in the family have stories that they whisper about Uncle Fred, while Shula can’t help but notice how young Fred’s widow (Norah Mwansa) is.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is, as that short summary suggests, a meditation on memory, grief, trauma, and complicity. It’s a film about the ways in which the systems and structures that protect predators often outlive the individuals themselves. Part of the horror of this sort of thing is that these frameworks are often maintained by the people who should be protecting those vulnerable victims and who are women themselves.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a very restrained and very considered movie. It’s thoughtful and assured, striking a number of careful balances in its exploration of the legacies of this sort of sexual violence. Nyoni, who wrote the script, is never crass or sensationalist in her handling of these ideas. Instead, the film is often quiet and understated. It avoids the urge to wallow in melodrama without minimizing the surreality of the situation.

The film works in large part thanks to its two lead performances. Chardy is a compelling presence as Shula, in a role that often says more with silence than most roles do with mountains of exposition. Much of the movie’s drama unfolds through Chardy’s face, processing and reacting to the situation around her. Elizabeth Chisela has an admittedly showier role as Shula’s cousin Nsansa, but it’s a remarkably layered performance for what could easily be a one-note character.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is perhaps a little too deliberate and a little too restrained at points, particularly during its second act. However, the film starts and ends strong, bookended with thoughtful references to the eponymous animal that underscore the movie’s themes in compelling ways. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl flies where The Balconettes falls.

Check out the rest of Darren’s Cannes columns below –

• Cannes Diary, Day One - ‘Yes We Cannes’

• Cannes Diary, Day Two - Furiosa Round One

• Cannes Diary, Day Three - The Premiere of Coppola’s Megalopolis

• Cannes Diary, Day Four - The Best Picture Starting Pistol