[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day Nine - Twists, Animated Excellence, and Some Great Closing Credits | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Published:

2024-05-25 14:00:09

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2024-05

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It really does feel like the Cannes Film Festival is coming to an end. The screenings are appreciably less busy. The films themselves feel a little more niche. There’s no more getting up at 7am in the morning in the hope of frantically securing a ticket for a film four days away. Everybody feels a little more relaxed than they did last week. More broadly, there’s a lot more time to meet with people and to catch up, to engage in the networking that is part and parcel of the festival.

This sense of an impending end is reflected in the films themselves. Today marked the end of Critics’ Week, one of the major strands of the festival. Emma Benestan’s Animale (★★☆☆☆) was chosen as the closing film. Benestan’s second feature, following Fragile, Animale takes place within the world of professional bull fighting, following the entry of a young woman, Nejma (Oulaya Amamra), into the traditionally male-dominated sport.

Despite pursuing that career for her entire life, Nejma suddenly finds herself developing a strange sense of empathy for these dangerous-but-captive creatures. She begins to feel some strange connection to the animals in the arena, which are goaded and gored for the amusement of crowds of spectators. At the same time, she comes to realize that there are more red flags than the ones being waved to attract the bulls.

There is a lot to like in Animale. Amamra gives a good central performance, essentially providing the movie’s heart and soul. It’s beautifully shot by cinematographer Ruben Impens, who was also responsible for the vivid worlds of Raw and Titane. Benestan pushes the movie’s color palette towards red and white, which is a clever choice in a movie about bull-fighting. A not-insignificant portion of the film seems to take place at magic hour, lending it an enchanting dream-like quality.

The biggest problem with Animale is that Benestan leans too heavily on a pair of twists that are both very predictable in the context of the movie. Settling into the film, from the opening minutes, it’s very clear in which direction the movie plans to move. There is perhaps a pithy, but not unfair, Rod-Serling-esque summary of the film that suggests the real animal is man. (Ani-male, eh?) However, the film takes forever to build to that revelation, and then doesn’t do anything meaningful with it.

The second twist is much more interesting, because it threatens to pivot Animale into a completely different genre, away from the naturalistic indie that it had been to that point. Once again, it’s very easy to predict the nature of that twist just based on the larger themes of the movie. And, as with the first twist, there’s a sense that Animale would be more interesting if it didn’t bury that twist in its final ten minutes. It’s a shame, because there’s a lot of talent on display here.

Ariane Labed’s September Says (★★☆☆☆) is another otherwise promising film somewhat undermined by a late-in-the-game twist. September Says marks the actor’s feature film directorial debut, following on from the short Olla and an episode of the French anthology series H24. The movie focuses on the dysfunctional relationship between two sisters, July (Mia Tharia) and September (Pascale Kann), and their fragile artist mother, Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar).

September Says works best as an exploration of the complicated dynamics of teenage siblingdom. September is the elder of the two girls, and the most assertive. She speaks her mind, she carries a knife, and she takes no nonsense. In contrast, July is much shier and more introverted. She seems to live inside her shell. To a certain extent, July’s entire life is defined by September. The eponymous game finds September asserting control over July, commanding her to do things.

It’s an interesting and challenging dynamic. September clearly cares for July. She looks out for her younger sibling, making it clear that anybody who messes with July is going to mess with her. At the same time, she also seems reluctant to afford July the space necessary for her younger sibling to self-actualize as her own unique person. It’s a very heightened take on the tensions of growing up as part of a family with multiple kids close together in age.

The film benefits greatly from its three leads, who manage to hit all the right notes to make the drama work. In particular, Pascale Kann does wonderful work with September, who could very easily become a two-dimensional caricature or completely unsympathetic. The film is so tightly focused on July and September that it stumbles a little bit when it tries to explore Sheela’s character, but Thakrar does really good work in a role that could also very easily be forgettable or unsympathetic.

However, as with Animale, the film trips over itself in the final stretch with the inclusion of a too-clever-by-half plot twist that massively undermines a lot of the movie that came before. To be fair, the exact nature of the twist did come as something of a surprise, but there is a strong sense in the second half of the movie that September Says is deliberately holding something back to set up a massive reveal, and that reveal ultimately doesn’t feel like it’s worth the dramatic cost.

It is a shame, because the nature of the final plot twist sours a lot of what came before and massively undermines what was – until that point – an endearingly sweet study of a deeply dysfunctional family. Interestingly, September Says feels like another ending point, of sorts. This is the last of the five Irish co-productions screening at the festival. At the risk of being unnecessarily patriotic, it has been a fairly decent showing for Ireland at Cannes.

There has been another subtler shift as Cannes enters its terminal phase. The last week of the festival has seen a strong emphasis on animation. I didn’t get a chance to see Claude Barras’ Sauvages, but each of the last four of these diary entries will contain at least one animated feature, culminating in Michel Hazanavicius' The Most Precious of Cargoes, which will be the last film to screen as part of the competition. Today, it’s Gints Zilbalodis Flow (★★★★☆).

Flow is a frankly remarkable accomplishment. Set in a valley that is suddenly flooded, it focuses on a rag-tag bunch of animals who find themselves thrown together in a desperate attempt to survive the deluge. As the group make their way to a boat and navigate a shifting landscape, they soon discover that none of them will be able to make it alone. What follows is a beautiful and thoughtful odyssey, a perilous journey towards a renewed paradise.

There is no dialogue in Flow. The animals do not talk. They make noises – they meow, bark, squawk and so on – but there is no narration of exposition. Instead, Zilbalodis trusts his vision and the animated characters to guide the audience on this strange and remarkable journey. It’s a wonderful approach to this sort of storytelling, one that places a great deal of trust in both the audience and the craft of the creative team. In Flow, that faith is rewarded.

Remarkably, each of the characters in Flow manages to take on a distinct character, without ever needing to verbally define itself. The cat is independent and suspicious. The bird is stoic and patrician. The lemur is covetous and greedy. The labrador is well-meaning but extremely stupid. The capybara is the kind of mammal that one wants around in a crisis. Each is expressive and distinct, and each serves the movie’s narrative and themes in their own way.

Flow can be read any number of ways. It works as a secular riff on the classic biblical story of Noah, a version of the adventure in which these creatures have been abandoned to fend for themselves. It feels like a movie inspired by the “rewilding” of the pandemic era. It also works as a parable for the existential threat of climate change, as the only way to survive the rising oceans will be through cooperation. As the (literally) mirrored opening and closing shots suggest, nobody can do it alone.

What’s particularly interesting about the world of Flow is that it feels completely abandoned. There are recurring references to the presence of humanity; the lead cat lives in a house seemingly occupied by a whittler, the ensemble journeys through the overgrown ruins of a city. However, there are no humans. This is a story about a generation forsaken, left behind to fend for themselves in the detritus of a world long lost. It’s evocative and emotional, even if never explicitly articulated.

There are moments when Flow tips over into the genuinely sublime, when events happen on screen that are difficult to explain in any strictly rational sense, but instead suggest a deeper spiritual idea underpinning the movie. Flow is a film that has a lot of imagination and creativity, crafting a world that feels like it operates according to its own internal logic, even if that logic is mysterious both to the animals within the movie and audience watching from outside.

With no dialogue to sustain the movie’s runtime, special mention must be made of the evocative synth-heavy score from composer Rihards Zalupe, working alongside director Gints Zilbalodis. In its own weird way, Flow feels like the pure distillation of cinema, sound and images combined to create meaning. It’s one of the best films of the festival, and it deservedly snagged international distribution minutes after the global premiere. It’s truly magical.

It is perhaps unfairly dismissive to suggest that the best thing about Karim Aïnouz’s Motel Destino (★★☆☆☆) is the closing credits, but it’s also hard to explain just how hard those closing credits hit. A synth-heavy soundtrack roars to life as the credits hard smash onto the screen with exactly the sort of energy that one needs at 12am on the ninth day of a sustained international film festival. It’s a neon-coated speedball for the senses, which seems to be exactly what Aïnouz intended.

Of course, the energy and dynamism of those closing credits only hit so hard because they follow a frustratingly conventional and generic riff on a classic film noir set-up, one that contains precious few surprises and even less excitement. The film focuses on Heraldo (Iago Xavier), a young criminal who botches a hit and so is forced to go into hiding at the eponymous resort, the sort of sleazy institution where couples rock up and ask to stay in “the cheapest suite.”

The Motel Destino is a purgatorial space. It is a world of sex and death. It is a space where animal impulses can be brought to life, something that the film draws attention to by repeatedly having animals intrude into the hotel. Trying to keep his head down and hide from his former employers, Heraldo finds himself drawn into the complicated relationship between the motel’s owner, Elias (Fábio Assunção), and his wife, Dayana (Nataly Rocha).

To give Motel Destino some credit, the film looks great. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart saturates the motel with a gross neon hue that gives the environment a very distinct and uncomfortable aesthetic – this is a space that is somehow both well-lit and also ambiguous. Amin and Benedikt Schiefer’s score captures the dull hum of fluorescent lights, the inescapable ambience of such a space. Assunção is delightfully sleazy as the motel’s perverted proprietor.

However, watching Motel Destino, it’s hard not to get the sense that nothing is happening very slowly. The film is built from a starter pack of classic film noir concepts, but it never really does anything particularly novel or interesting or compelling with them. The film gestures in the direction of the voyeuristic impulses of cinema as a medium, but never coheres into any sort of compelling statement. It’s all frustratingly shallow.

But man, the closing credits are great.

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