Notebook is covering the Cannes Film Festival with an ongoing correspondence between critics Leonardo Goi and Lawrence Garcia, and editor Daniel Kasman.
Son of Ramses.
Dear Lawrence and Leo,
I’m glad to read you, Lawrence, on Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon. Reactions to the film here seem to be muted, but I loved it: Leave behind any idea that this is a robust production of an English-language thriller, and instead embrace way the great French impressionist and master elliptician (and sensualist, as you rightly point out) skims the bare surface of the genres that provide the film’s framework, in order to evoke the tenuous limbos—national, mortal, romantic—of its sweaty, horny imperialist couple. The film feels like it was a fly-by-night, catch-as-catch-can shoot, with images and drama caught quickly and on the go. Yes, this means that many opportunities, particularly of the Nicaraguan context from Denis Johnson’s source novel (or that of today’s pandemic, in which the film is pleasingly moved into), are lost, which makes the film less rich than the director’s last foreign drama, White Material (2009). Like that film, this one also flirts with using a non-Western nation’s violent struggles as backdrop for white protagonist’s quandaries of self. But this aspect actually underlines the existential tenor of the film, the isolation and desperation of these few dwindling foreigners who are increasingly useless and stranded but haven’t realized it. They think they may be pulling the strings, but really their time is up: No local friends, thrown out of the country, pursued by the forever-supreme CIA. Thus the film’s supposedly exotic premise yet meager scope emphasizes the precariousness of the lives of these two happenstance, doomed lovers on the run, neither of whom really trust the other, and who don’t have the capacity to change their lives, but want to fuck and embrace and fall sweatily asleep regardless. It reminded me of Michael Mann’s Blackhat—another ambitious overseas genre film that seems to fail as often as it succeeds—stripped down even further, and reorienting its characters’ desire to transcend borders to a desire to grasp fleeting desire—whether that means hiding, fleeing, or just fucking, again—when there’s little else left for them.
Another B-picture sneaking into the festival under the guise of an art movie is Clément Cogitore’s Son of Ramses. I didn’t think much of Guillermo del Toro's lush, unnecessary new version of Nightmare Alley, but I have to admit that stories of charlatans and con-men hold a strong pull— first in the satisfaction watching a master fool others, then in our smugness of understanding the grift, and finally the satisfaction of exposure and comeuppance. This is also the initial appeal of Son of Ramses, a film at once grounded and fantastical and thus more compelling than the indulgences of Del Toro’s version. Karim Leklou’s charismatic, disarmingly sleepy-eyed and schlumpy Ramses maintains a psychic business in an anonymous flat in the multicultural Goutte d'Or neighborhood of Paris. Dressed with heavy curtains, low-light candles, and two-way mirrors, the lair splits the difference between shabby seance and boho spa. We see Ramses do several readings that bring people to tears before the trick is revealed: having the clients wait long enough to observe them unlocking their phones, he then uses the phones to skim personal information. The sequence of Ramses fluently plowing through texts, Facebook, and photos to find names and key dates and then turn them back into just-suggestive and just-accurate enough words from the afterlife is a great modern update of an old carnival trick.
But Ramses doesn’t operate in a vacuum, as there are competing crews of long-established psychics each trying to court their own immigrant communities. But while Ramses may be able to arrogantly handle his spiritualist peers, he is terrified of the younger immigrant generation, street kids with no ties and nothing to lose, who break into his apartment building and terrorize the neighborhood. After one steals a talisman from Ramses and disappears, the roving scamps recruit the man they call a “mage” to use his powers to find their missing friend. Ramses is then led to find the boy’s deceased body in a building construction site, but he’s at a loss over how he intuited the location. From this point the film pushes more deeply into an atmosphere of seedy Parisian noir, cops on the group’s tail, and Ramses getting more and more downcast and guilty as he loses his charlatan superiority—all tinged evocatively with the suggestion that there are some unknown forces at work, nebulous shadows woven between petty crime, exploitation of grief, and the children’s woebegone existence in France. For me, the film echoes Abel Ferrera’s underseen Rome-set pandemic thriller Zeroes and Ones in its lean nocturnal vibrations. Son of Ramses never quite grips firmly on the potential of its idea—rival psychics, modern flimflam men, and roving modern Parisian urchins entangled in death and desperation—and Leklou’s increasingly passive demeanor doesn’t quite gel with the petty mastermind he is introduced as. Yet the film carries considerable urban poetry and feral energy, keeping its wayward miscreants, Ramses included, under a surprisingly compassionate gaze. It’s modest but risky, a movie thatnot fully successful but along with Stars at Noon it is likely as close as we’ll get in Cannes to a genre B-picture from the arthouse world.
Nostalgia.
In a more classical genre register, I found that—surprise!—there’s another James Gray film in competition here, only it’s not by Gray but rather by Italian veteran Mario Martone. (In a standard festival experience, here’s someone who’s made twelve plus feature films, of which this is my first.) Martone’s Nostalgia is an expertly made and ruminative classical drama of the tensions over one’s home and past. This being cinema, there of course is an element of crime, and thus a story of feeling and ideas also becomes one of morality.
Felice (The Traitor’s Pierfrancesco Favino) returns to Naples for the first time after 40 years overseas, during which he has started a business, converted to Islam, married an Egyptian woman, and not seen his mother again. Why return? Possibly for the same reason as the Korea-born, French-adopted 20-something Freddie (Park Jin-min) in Davy Chou’s excellent Return to Soul in the Un Certain Regard section: an irrational, spontaneous urge inspired by deeply conflicted feeling. Felice returns to find his mother elderly but the town “exactly the same,” that is, beautiful but run down, and the streets owned by omnipresent thugs. In this microcosm, the only other path for youth in his neighborhood is that of the local church’s outreach—Felice’s escape out of the country is a far more radical solution, that of rejection, and as such his presence is treated with hostility. As Felice deals with his elderly mother, he gets drawn between the neighborhood’s upright priest and a phantom from his past, a childhood best friend who stayed behind and rose to become a king among criminals.
This is a tale of the internal wrestling of an old soul with the intersection of family tradition and the tension between being suffocated by staying home or cutting all ties, underscored by a passionate yet tormented male friendship. Think of Gray’s The Yards, We Own the Night, and this year’s Cannes premiere, Armageddon Time—all rich with intense moral self-scrutiny over upbringing. With a style that is elegantly calibrated—with sharp widescreen imagery carefully evoking Naples’ locations (particularly its evocative verticality, climbing hills and dilapidated flats and exploring the catacombs)—and with Favino’s stoic, thoughtful performance, we find a movie closer indeed to post-classical filmmakers like Clint Eastwood and Gray than the festival’s surrounding art cinema. Its clean, direct lines were a welcome refresher from the hazy ambiguity endemic among festival films.
Tori and Lokita.
Likely the most direct and unambiguous film at the festival belonged to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Their new film, Tori and Lokita, follows two young Benin immigrants in Belgium posing as brother and sister in order to get papers for the elder, Lokita (Mbundu Joely). At this point in their long career, the brothers can make a social-realist movie like this in their sleep—it’s practically a genre they founded in modern Euro art cinema, unfortunately spawning numerous subpar followers (many found here in Cannes) using a thoughtless default style prioritizing handheld pseudo-realism and sloppy "natural" staging over precise direction driven by ideas. But Tori and Lokita showcase exactly how to do this kind of story: with surgical precision. It is a film supremely uninflected and unadorned so as to confront us with the blunt brutality of everyday living of those who go unseen except by law enforcement and exploiters. Performances are stripped to a functional, behavioral minimum, actions and acts like the infliction of violence or a gesture of love and commiseration are spare, pointed, and without excess. This makes the story of the hand-to-mouth struggle of displaced living all the more ruthless. The two kids—smart, resilient, and caring—are treated with polite skepticism and inaction by the government; are extorted by their local Black smugglers who demand regular payment; and are squeezed dry by a restaurant chef who has them delivering drugs for a pittance, as well coerces Lokita into sexual acts. What funds remain, Lokita has to send back to her mother in Benin. Ultimately, the two are almost totally isolated in a microcosm of anxious, hectic scrounging for money and avoidance of scrutiny and abuse.
Same old world, so what else is new, you might wearily say. The answer is twofold: one, it needs to be said again and again lest we grow inured to our denial of those who suffer so that we may live a more frictionless life; and the other answer is about how direct this film is. No veneer, no easy answers, no melodrama, and no exploitation of its subject (compare this to Ali Abbasid’s reprehensible serial killer film in competition, Holy Spider). Consolation comes in few, very few, moments of respite—moments of rest from the hustle and stress, not moments of forced humanization. The most poignant, when it comes, is a powerhouse entirely because of how bare the whole movie is: the brother and sister in spirit, her laying curled on her bed, him sitting beside, bowed, an image of love, sacrifice, and sorrow held together by their bond. Lokita says she misses her mother in Benin, from whom she’s been cut off in a desperate new role minding a remote drug production facility, living in even more abject and solitary conditions in order to secure fake papers and end but one portion of her struggle. To this muffled lament, Tori (Pablo Schils) responds that he is there for her. She places her hand on his, for she is that for him as well. Suffice to say, in the brutal globalized capitalist world alluded to in every moment as the puppet master of these two, this moment will not last, even if its sentiment defines the film’s implicit observational humanism. It’s the kind of gesture that normally ends a film by the Dardennes, a note of grace. Here it comes before the ending, which, in keeping with the film’s vision of our world, is unable to liberate these good souls.
The Natural History of Destruction.
To this end, and to wrap my festival dispatches, forgive me for going further down this path into darkness, a path guided by Sergei Loznitsa. The Ukrainian filmmaker is back in Cannes with yet another great archival documentary, and one might ask after State Funeral (2019), Babi Yar. Context and Mr. Landsbergis (both 2021), how on earth this man has the time to watch and research such mountains of footage, edit it into the subtle narrative of history in which he wants to intervene, restore it, and add his distinct (and controversial) Foley soundtrack to bring that footage uncannily more present. But considering all these films are revealing aspects of Soviet and Russian history, and asking questions about memory, violence, resistance, and acquiescence, we should welcome another such work all the more so in the midst of a grotesque war between Russian and Ukraine.
This new film, The Natural History of Destruction, is based on an essay at W.G. Sebald about the Germans’ unaddressed national memory of their massive bombing by the Allied forces during World War II, in which industrial sites and civilian centers were targeted and which resulted in, among other horrors, the firestorms of Dresden and Hamburg, and an estimated death count in the hundreds of thousands. Loznitsa’s film is likely intended as an astonishing confrontation with this destruction, though unlike the total freshness of the footage in his recent archival films, material devoted to mass bombings and guttered urban landscapes are far less rare and therefore carry less of the charge found in the source material exposed in Babi Yar. Context. The narrative path of the movie is also not quite as straightforward as his last three histories; here, the pictorial seems to have as much importance as historical progression. It all starts from a calm, flourishing, peaceful Germany—gorgeous images of bucolic towns, dances on the boardwalk, jaunts in newfangled blimps, life a treat, swastikas only glimpsed. Then, perhaps the most beautiful and terrible cut in a movie at the festival: We jump to the black of night and twinkling stars in the sky. Only, soon we realize they aren’t stars but are fires, and we’re not looking up, we’re looking down at the landscape being scorched into obliteration. Flaring, conjoining, snuffed out in the deep dark distance, the sublime, nearly abstract beauty of these fires and explosions underscore a key tension of the film, the power of imagery and the historic horror behind it. Here is history: We see, but do we understand?
After this sequence the rhythm of the film asserts itself: the terrible see-saw of retaliation. Bombers are produced en mass in factories, launched to pursue more bombings; homes and buildings are scorched, reduced to rubble; speeches (first British, then American, and finally Hitler) assert technological superiority and moral rightness of their missions to destroy. We hear of the fight but see nothing of the cause: Problematically, Loznitsa leaves out material suggesting why Germany was bombed, a bold and unignorable lacuna in the film. We see no war, learn little of ideology, we hear of no holocaust. Instead, after what is clearly intended as a false idyll before the war, we only see destruction turned into destruction. An American psychotically says that this war provides a good experiment to mass bomb cities; Hitler says he will counter terror with terror. Back and forth they go, leaping into the air in order to rain down again on factories and people alike. All we see is apocalyptic devastation; the pristine Germany of the film’s prelude is turned into a heap of unrecognizable vistas, scorched stones, and anonymous bodies.
Due to the more poetic narrative, there’s a dangerous flirtation in the film with equivocation and simplification, with all sides equally bad, war being evil . But more likely, the film, in its terrible vision of ruination, should be taken as a warning, first to Putin and then to the rest of the world. To Putin, the warning is: Along a certain path, you will only bring destruction to yourself, your people, and your country. To the rest of the world: You can fail too, by embracing the dark allure of supremacy through obliteration. This is obviously the most despairing film at the festival, portraying a world where those in power do whatever is necessary to bring rival powers to their knees; where doing the right thing is taken to mean doing whatever it takes to be the victor in the end. The results are plain to see from the ghastly, enthralling footage: It will be the end of the world.
I hope, Leo, that you found some glimpses of light at the end of the festival.
Warmly,
Danny