Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
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Eephus (Carson Lund, 2024).
For all the thrills that come from watching the latest film by this or that renowned auteur, I don’t come to Cannes for confirmation, but for the pleasure of discovery. And nothing quite matches the exhilaration of reckoning with a new voice—the kind that jolts you out of your festival torpor and reminds you of all the beauty and magic the cinema can muster. As usual, those epiphanies were a lot harder to come by in the official competition than in the risk-friendlier Directors’ Fortnight, an independent sidebar born in 1969 as a counterprogram dedicated, per its mission statement, “to showcasing the most singular forms of contemporary cinema.” It is here that some of the greatest have shown their earliest stuff, an illustrious pedigree that’s flaunted before each screening through a short reel of clips from the likes of Chantal Akerman, Aki Kaurismäki, Manoel de Oliveira, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. As the sidebar’s team changed in 2023, newly appointed artistic director Julien Rejl vowed to open the Fortnight to lesser-known names than those it used to host (in previous years, this is where Joanna Hogg, Alex Garland, and Robert Eggers had bowed—not exactly first-timers).
It’s a bold pivot that’s paved the way for some intriguing debuts, including Carson Lund’s Eephus, the first feature directed by the cinematographer responsible for shooting such mesmeric projects as Tyler Taormina’s Ham On Rye (2019) and Jonathan Davies’s Topology of Sirens (2022). And while Eephus doesn’t exactly deal in the magical vein of those works, it nonetheless sponges some of their wistfulness. A chronicle of the last baseball game played at Soldiers Field in Douglas, Massachusetts, before the grounds will be replaced by a new middle school, Eephus is drenched in a melancholy that transcends its very specific setting. Its last-day-before-closure conceit aligns it with other homages to dying American hangouts, from Eagle Pennell’s Last Night at the Alamo (1983) to Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion (2006). Like Altman’s swan song, this is a polyphonic canvas, peopled by a gaggle of largely middle-aged amateur ballplayers and a supporting cast of passers-by, relatives, and a smattering of radio hosts whose announcements ricochet in between innings from an old boombox (including one Branch Moreland, voiced by none other than Frederick Wiseman).
Speaking a few days before the premiere, Lund said that casting Wiseman wasn’t just a testament to his admiration for the documentary maverick, but a clue as to Eephus’s ethos. Like Wiseman’s forays into public institutions across the US—town halls, hospitals, libraries—this is a film preoccupied with mapping out and exploring an ecosystem, the folks who inhabit it, and the arcane rules they follow. Lund is a geographical filmmaker, a director who’s so immersed in the world he captures that once Eephus wraps you come out of it feeling like you intimately know it, too. As a complete baseball neophyte, I found this familiarity nothing short of remarkable. Then again, you don’t need to know much about the game to appreciate what Lund’s after. Steeped in the sport’s lore as it is, Eephus is propelled by a much broader concern: the disappearance of a place, which is to say a certain way of being among others. Written by Lund, Nate Fisher, and Michael Basta, the script reins in that funereal undertone by poking fun at its cast of cantankerous nostalgics. Eephus treats its sometimes archetypal characters with an affection that gives them heft; their conflicts feel lived-in, their fears—and their inability to articulate them—genuine. At a time when so many films purport to tackle masculinity only to succumb to the tritest clichés, here’s one that dissects these men’s awkwardness about their emotions in a way that’s disarmingly sincere, but never soppy. As far as surprises go, Lund was one of Cannes’s most riveting; I can’t wait to see what he’ll come up with next.
Christmas Eve in Miller's Point (Tyler Taormina, 2024).
Lund lensed another Directors’ Fortnight standout, Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, a film that was likewise fluent in the rituals of its universe. If you’ve kept abreast of Taormina’s output—a string of shorts followed by Ham on Rye and Happer’s Comet (2022)—that’s nothing shocking. His cinema is so well-versed in small-town America it can turn the drabbest stretch of suburbia into a fantasia of odd rites and eccentrics. So it is with Christmas Eve, a night in the life of a garrulous Italian-American family which bandies together for a yuletide dinner-cum-reunion at grandma’s Long Island home. Like Ham on Rye, this is a group portrait, yet both projects rest on the tension between our need for community and the forces that eventually lead us to pair off. It’s no coincidence that Taormina should rework into his latest the most terrifying scene of that earlier film, in which a pack of high schoolers in the midst of prom festivities—at a deli—gather around in a big circle and split into couples, the shyest teens watching with nail-biting angst as their friends get picked to dance, one by one. A similar ritual comes up again late into Christmas Eve and takes on a more explicitly erotic dimension. Yet it’s also a moment of almost ineffable loneliness, crystallizing the film’s melancholy: dreamy and wondrous as Lund shoots it, this is a world that’s falling indelibly into the past, one whose inhabitants are all too aware their time together is running out.
It’s the same feeling that powers Whit Stillman’s cinema—to which, the more I think about it, Taormina’s stands as a wondrous heir. Christmas Eve unspools as an ethnography, an immersive look at a tribe immortalized with an insider’s flair for its patois, etiquettes, and traditions (salami sticks, anyone?). And similarly to Stillman’s own chamber pieces, it exists in a time-space continuum that’s hard to pin down. Paris Peterson’s production design is rife with temporal markers that amplify this ambiguity: mobile phones from the mid-aughts bob up next to more antiquated models, as do VHS tapes and some vintage (and gorgeous) wind-up tin toys. Kevin Anton’s montage editing turns the camera into a sort of omniscient narrator, as Christmas Eve jumps frenetically between chatty clusters, dogging first the adults in the room and then segueing into a second half that tracks their children as they meet and hang at the local deli (as foundational a setting to Taormina’s oeuvre as karaoke bars are to Kaurismäki’s). There are strange characters—none more so than a couple of cops played by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington—and stranger apparitions, including a firetruck bedecked with Christmas lights and a life-sized cardboard cutout of a model which someone stuck to the Roomba and left dancing in the garage. But mostly, there’s a vibe: a preemptive nostalgia and heartfelt wonder for a time and place that will soon evaporate. With just three features to his name, Taormina has cemented himself as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of US suburbia; a world that’s only boring for those who don’t know where and how to look.
Good One (India Donaldson, 2024).
Melancholy radiated from another Fortnight entry, India Donaldson’s Good One, whose Sundance premiere earlier this year had been lauded in mostly diminutive terms: a “little,” “low-key,” “minimalist character study.” While that’s not technically incorrect—clocking at 89 minutes and tracking a three-day father-daughter camping trip in Upstate New York, both runtime and premise do suggest a restrained affair—there’s nothing small about Donaldson’s debut. As it is with the cinema of Kelly Reichardt, whose Old Joy (2006) serves as an unmistakable touchstone here, this is a film of vast scope and emotional depth, a coming-of- and grappling-with-age that pushes against the genre’s staid tropes to deliver something vibrant and authentic. Good One follows seventeen-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) during one last pre-college weekend which she spends schlepping up the Catskills with her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and his best friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy). Matt’s son was meant to tag along but pulled out at the last minute, leaving Sam to third wheel with the two middle-aged men. That balancing act powers Donaldson’s script, which follows Sam as she negotiates her position before two adults more than twice her age, awkwardly shifting from child to confidante, from friend to something else entirely. Much of the charm here stems from the effortless alchemy the three actors achieve, and the way Collias grounds every scene she’s in; her watchful, attentive performance is of a piece with Donaldson’s own observational approach.
That group chemistry shatters after a throwaway line recasts Sam’s role in a completely different light—a twist that’s tragically all too predictable, in hindsight, but still managed to leave me and others in the Croisette theater gasping in unison. But even that moment doesn’t ring as big or declamatory. Good One doesn’t need shouting matches or bilious altercations to work; it traffics with evasive answers and sly microaggressions, and is all the more astute and powerful for it. In his introduction, Rejl called it a film of incredible tenderness. Delicate as Donaldson’s register undeniably is, her feature debut is imbued with a lingering sense of regret. For while this may well be Sam’s story, it’s her father and Matt’s anecdotes that take center stage, imbuing the journey and one long campfire chat with copious sadness for all the roads they didn’t take, the chances they missed, the people they failed. And yet, as it was with Old Joy, Good One offers up enchantments that offset all that dread. Shot by Wilson Cameron and scored by Celia Hollander’s lilting, harp-heavy tracks, it gestures toward a bucolic fairytale, punctuating the stroll with closeups of butterflies, newts, and other creatures lurking in the woods. In another film, these interludes would seem little more than precious ornaments; in Donaldson’s, they widen and complicate its scope. By the end, sitting at the wheel of her father’s car and ready to drive home, Sam might have discovered some painful truths about the grownups around her. But she’s also alive to the world and her role inside it in a way she wasn’t when she ventured into the forest. Hardly the work of a miniaturist, Good One is expansive filmmaking, a film whose story emerges incrementally, with characters whose unassuming gestures express whole swaths of personal history.
Viet and Nam (Truong Minh Qúy, 2024).
In The Tree House, one of my fondest memories and highlights of the 2019 Locarno Festival, Truong Minh Qúy imagined a young man dialing in from Mars in AD 2045 in hopes of reconnecting with his Earth-stranded father. Truong’s latest, a standout in a traditionally hit-or-miss Un Certain Regard sidebar, is powered by a similar void. Named after its two leads, Viet and Nam follows two twentysomething miners and lovers as they prepare to part ways. It’s 2001, the height of Vietnam’s emigration boom, and Nam (Thanh Hai Pham) will soon be sneaking out of the country aboard a container ship—a perilous journey that hints at a real-life event Truong has said served as a trigger: the 2019 Essex Lorry deaths, in which 39 Vietnamese migrants lost their lives as they were smuggled into Europe. But as the departure day approaches, Nam’s mother starts dreaming of her late husband, shot dead during the Vietnam War and buried somewhere in the jungle. His absence traverses Viet and Nam as a structuring principle. In keeping with his protagonists’ strenuous underground toil, Truong’s second feature is perched between a ghost story and an act of excavation. The film’s spectral histories—personal and national—routinely intercept, as Nam’s quest to locate his father’s body in the rainforest yields a picture of a country still reckoning with the void the war left behind. In many ways, Vietnam appears to be frozen in time, as literalized by a shot that glides across a field being scouted for undetonated mines, the soldiers locked in a sculptural stillness.
That’s not the only moment to blur the line between the real and the imagined. Viet and Nam teems with all sorts of mystifying scenes. After opening with the most entrancing sequence I saw at the festival—a pitch-black screen that gradually accrues a dank luminescence as stars begin to swivel all over it and two human silhouettes emerge from the dark—sounds and images interlace at an almost molecular level. Working with diegetic noises ricocheting around the mine (the cavernous chugging of its elevators) and jungle (the deafening sizzling of insects), Viet and Nam hangs in a dreamlike region not unlike that of Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023), another recent Cannes selection from Vietnam pitched along the nebulous border that runs between fact and hallucination. But where Pham’s debut feature was more stylistically cogent than dramatically deft, Viet and Nam shows a stronger grip on its narrative and the ways it unfolds—all the more impressive for a tale that’s immensely rich, touching on such issues as human trafficking, closeted romances, and the meaning of home. I hadn’t thought of Truong as a sensualist, but the attention he pays to the coal-smeared bodies of his two heroes as they hug, caress, and make out grounds Viet and Nam, ensuring even its most symbolic passages land with visceral poignancy. A few days before its Cannes premiere, the film was banned in its home country, not for its queer characters but for its allegedly “gloomy, deadlocked, and negative view” of the nation, per an official letter from Vietnam’s Cinema Department. Nothing could be further from the truth. Truong’s picture may be cloaked in darkness, but the journey is no less transfixing for it: a tribute to the two lovers at its center, and to a country uneasily poised between the past and the future.
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024).
Split into two parts of roughly equal length, Viet and Nam unfurls as a diptych, the first half set in a coal-mining town and the second in a lush rainforest. It’s the same scaffolding that anchors this year’s Grand Prix winner, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light—the only film in competition, aside from Miguel Gomes’s majestic travelogue, Grand Tour, to truly leave my senses agog. Kapadia’s feature debut, A Night of Knowing Nothing, unveiled in the 2021 Directors’ Fortnight, offered a look at the student protests that swept across India in response to the right-wing Modi administration. A documentary culled from footage of the 2015 university strikes at Kapadia’s alma mater, the Film and Television Institute of India, A Night weaves into its furious material a fictitious series of letters between two students who have ended their inter-caste relationship in the face of one family’s disapproval. Like Viet and Nam, that intensely intimate story played out against a much larger one, and these frictions—between the personal and the political, the individual and the collective, sounds and visuals—were the hallmark of Kapadia’s incendiary first film. So it is with her latest. Firmly rooted in fiction, All We Imagine draws much of its disquieting allure from the many tensions Kapadia mines. In its simplest terms, this plays as another tale of doomed love—or rather, two such tales. It centers on Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), two nurses working in a Mumbai hospital and grappling with the pangs of their sentimental liaisons. Prabha, the elder, is by now only nominally married to a man who left India for a job in Germany and has yet to come back. Twentysomething Anu, in turn, has just recently started seeing Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), an affair she must conceal from her family and colleagues, not least because of the ethnic and religious gulfs that stand between them (she’s Hindu; he’s Muslim).
Neither Prabha nor Anu are Mumbai natives, but transplants from Kerala for whom impermanence is now an inescapable condition. It stands to reason then that Kapadia should capture Mumbai not through instantly recognizable landmarks but via a handful of liminal spaces: buses, trains, markets, and hospital rooms. Everything here suggests transition, a rootlessness that has both spatial and temporal connotations; the first half, set in a crepuscular Mumbai forever plagued by monsoons, is also the most elliptical. All We Imagine understands the crucial difference between emotional and labor time, how the ways we grieve or long for a loved one can’t be accounted for in terms of days, hours, or minutes, but moments unmoored in time and space. It’s a lesson that shapes the film’s fabric; at least in its urban first half, All We Imagine doesn’t seem to unfurl through scenes so much as loose vignettes increasingly pitched toward loneliness. Kapadia’s cinema teems with dissonances; sounds and images often don’t exist in sync but combine to open up a wider set of possibilities—as they do here, where the howling of an invisible wind is used to score some of the early testimonies of migrants stranded in Mumbai—their stories carried in a breeze that for a minute or two seems impossibly louder than the city’s own musique concrète of sirens, cars, and construction sites.
Having rewatched A Night of Knowing Nothing on my way to Cannes, I went into All We Imagine expecting something just as raucous. But Kapadia here operates in a different, subtler key. Which isn’t to suggest her new film is any less pugilistic in its cries for justice. After all, the action only moves from city to countryside after Prabha's best friend and coworker, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is wrongfully evicted from her Mumbai home by some rapacious property developers, and invites her two colleagues to her seaside hometown, where she’s determined to start anew. Away from the metropolis, All We Imagine swells into a melodrama, as Prabha and Anu can finally live out their romances, in a coda that’s as oneiric and hopeful as the dance that closes A Night of Knowing Nothing. Pauline Kael once observed that melodrama is "the chief vehicle for political thought in our films.” Granted, she was writing about a few US classics from the 1940s, but that’s just as good a way of thinking about Kapadia’s film, which wields genre to both indict the systemic forces her heroines are up against and conjure for them a finale of astonishing empathy. That last shot—the characters gathered outside a beachside shack, wombed in neon light under a starry sky—is the closest the festival came to a moment of pure transcendence. That the festival this year should open with a film so skeptical of the medium’s purpose in our troubled times, Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act, and then hand the Grand Prix to one so certain of its capacity to heal and redeem, feels almost cosmic.
