Last Summer... (Catherine Breillat).
There’s nothing quite like the rush of a bolt-from-the-blue discovery—the real-time realization, while in a darkened theater, that one is witnessing the emergence of a major cinematic voice. The closest this year’s Cannes came to offering such an experience was with the premiere of Pham Thien An’s Directors’ Fortnight selection Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, a deserving recipient of this year’s Caméra d’Or. Immediately notable for its expansive 182-minute runtime, the film, Pham’s first, comprises numerous extremely long takes which call to mind the sequence shots of Shinji Sōmai, with complex choreography that does not conceal the artificiality (and occasional strain) of their production, and which are ultimately less concerned with Bazinian realism than with creating an indiscernibility between the real and the imaginary. Until its title card drops over half-an-hour in, Yellow Cocoon Shell impresses not just for its technical prowess, but also for how it employs duration to a range of disparate ends. When the protagonist’s spiritual journey begins in earnest, however, the film becomes less dynamic as it attends to the narrative, bearing some of the limitations of Bi Gan’s work. Still, Pham is undoubtedly a director to watch.
Much of the excitement at Cannes, though, comes not from debuts, but from the opportunity to catch up with established names. Apart from this year’s slew of Competition perennials—Ken Loach, Hirokazu Koreeda, Nanni Moretti, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, to name just the Palme d’Or–winners—the 76th edition included anticipated premieres from filmmakers long absent from the festival circuit: Jonathan Glazer, with his first feature in ten years (The Zone of Interest); Lisandro Alonso, with his first in nine (Eureka); not to mention Spanish legend Víctor Erice, with his first in a staggering 31 (Close Your Eyes). The Cannes premiere I was most anticipating, however, was Last Summer…, Catherine Breillat’s first Competition film since 2007’s The Last Mistress, and, continuing this pattern, her first film in a decade, since 2013’s Abuse of Weakness.
Nominally a remake of the Danish drama Queen of Hearts (2019), Last Summer… tells the story of a sexual relationship that develops between Anne (Léa Drucker), a lawyer who specializes in child protection and abuse cases, and Théo (Samuel Kircher), her surly, skinny, 17-year-old stepson. But despite the recycled material, Breillat’s distinctive personality asserts itself from frame one: a close-up of a teenage girl on the verge of tears, whom Anne harshly interrogates about the details of her sex life. The questioning is intended to prepare the girl for an upcoming rape trial, where the defense lawyers, Anne informs her, will inevitably attack her as sexually loose and therefore culpable. In the context of the film, which omits the details of the case and cuts straight to the trial’s aftermath, the scene mainly serves to show us Anne’s hardness and cruelty—or, at least, her capacity to embody those attitudes and postures. Subsequent scenes are likewise geared to detailing character, as when Anne abruptly leaves a dinner party she and her husband are hosting, displaying an unexpectedly casual disdain for aspects of her bourgeois life.
When the expected coupling between Anne and Théo does occur, however, Breillat’s control of the material starts to loosen. The scenes they share lack the detailed, push-pull power dynamics of Breillat’s other films, which she typically uses to inject lassitude and even tedium into her characters’ relationships, and thereby undercut the expected story beats. Accordingly, the middle stretch of Last Summer… feels more bound by conventional narrative suspense, with scenes structured mainly around the threat that the pair’s taboo relationship will be discovered. Breillat reasserts her unique perspective toward the end; in a scene that plays well against the opening, Théo meets Anne on her own turf to file charges against her, and the pair’s power dynamics finally become the focal point. The end result, while compelling, is structurally lopsided, and may have benefited from a more drawn-out treatment of the central relationship. Nevertheless, the most combative confrontations between the two possess a blistering force that lingers in memory.
Asteroid City (Wes Anderson).
Breillat is not, in any case, likely to disappoint anyone with overfamiliarity. The same cannot be said of Wes Anderson, who in the handful of films since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) has only intensified the most recognizable aspects of his style: the pleasing symmetry of his pastel-colored, planimetric compositions, as well as the Rube Goldberg–like intricacy of his narrative structures. His latest, Asteroid City, does not buck the trend. Set during the 1950s in a southwestern American town of Anderson’s imagining, the film looks about as close as one can possibly get to a live-action cartoon. The story, meanwhile, centered on an annual Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention being held in Asteroid City, is a veritable menagerie of Andersonian signatures. As in The French Dispatch (2021), there’s a frame story: the “Asteroid City” of the title is actually a stage play, the production of which we cut to at key moments. The whiz-kid convention attendees recall the precocious youngsters of Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), complete with emotionally unavailable parents and the usual familial dysfunction. The film also exhibits Anderson’s usual knack for concrete characterization, often centered on prickly, even unpleasant personalities.
Taken together, these elements are a veritable recipe for caricature. What so often takes Anderson’s films beyond cynicism, and gives them an emotional depth that’s difficult to dismiss, are their stylistic flourishes keyed to moments of personal, character-driven fantasy—think of the Luke Wilson–Gwyneth Paltrow bus station scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, set to Nico’s “These Days,” or the lateral, riverside tracking shot at the climax of The Darjeeling Limited (2007). Asteroid City differs from Anderson’s other movies, then, in that its key moment, the arrival of an alien spaceship, is untethered to any individual subjectivity. The hushed awe of the film’s first contact scene is not a matter of private but collective experience. I’ve never thought of Anderson as a director interested in making grand statements about the national consciousness of the United States. With its visual panoply of 1950s Americana and its evocation of atomic-age and space-race iconography, however, Asteroid City suggests that this judgment may have been premature. Indeed, the film plays like nothing so much as Cold War–era America by way of Moonrise Kingdom (2012), with the existential anxiety of nuclear annihilation filtered through the atmosphere of a summer camp. This weighty political dimension never quite coalesces with the film’s personal stories in a satisfying way, but as always with Anderson, there’s more to his films than their consummate craft, more to his cinematic worlds than their production design. At a glance, Asteroid City may seem to present a conflict between science (as in the main “Asteroid City” narrative) and art (as in the frame story about the staging of the play). But I think the real opposition at the film’s core is the one that informs all of Anderson’s work: a tension, almost a dialectic, between the unpredictability of the world and our attempts to make sense of it by whatever means we can.
Perfect Days (Wim Wenders).
Less freighted by political portent is Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, one of the last Competition films to premiere on the Croisette. If attendees were expecting anything like a grand statement, however, the film was surely a disappointment: Perfect Days is most notable for its modest scale, comprising repeated shot sequences that follow the daily routine of an elderly toilet cleaner, Hirayama (played by Kōji Yakusho, who won this year’s Best Actor prize). We watch him as he wakes up, shaves, waters his plants, buys a coffee from a vending machine, gets into his car and drives to work, while each time listening to a different cassette tape (invariably a ’70s or ’80s classic, including, yes, Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day”). During his breaks, we see him take pictures with an old film camera. On the weekends, he drops off a roll of film to get developed, picks up last week’s results, and then methodically sorts through them, selecting the ones he wants to keep and discarding the rest.
Like Paterson (2016), Jim Jarmusch’s lyrical, low-key portrait of a bus driver-cum-poet, Perfect Days is fairly direct in its appeal to the quotidian beauty of daily life, and as in that film, the sentiment is a tad pushy and insistent. But Wenders’s dogged commitment to depicting the minutiae of Hirayama’s routine eventually achieves something more than mere preciousness. Across Perfect Days, several encounters take Hirayama away from his routine, involving him in a series of personal dramas of varying interest. The main, or indeed only, operative tension is whether any of them will exert enough force to transform his habitual trajectory. In terms of emotional range, Wenders’s approach is undeniably limited, but his meticulous depiction of Hirayama’s routine pays off in the film’s latter half, where even the smallest deviations in shot selection and composition resonate as strongly as the film’s incipient dramatic turns. In this sense, the film is less a meditation on the fleeting beauty of the everyday than a reflexive exploration of visual and narrative sequencing—an examination of how we use images to mark and measure our works and days.
In Our Day (Hong Sang-soo).
A different sort of narrative play could be found in Hong Sang-soo’s Fortnight closer In Our Day. Long known for his structural gamesmanship, Hong has gradually become less concerned about signaling his formal interventions. Since sometime around Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), Hong has gradually dispensed with narrative signposts like the title cards which bifurcate that film, the shuffled letters of Hill of Freedom (2014), or the “1”/“2” labels in Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (2000). For the most part, his recent films maintain an outward neutrality, an apparent flatness that gives the impression, at least to begin with, that they feature no structural fillips at all. In Introduction (2021), The Novelist’s Film (2022), and Walk Up (2022), for example, Hong’s shaping of the raw story material makes itself felt only cumulatively—not through conspicuous stylistic ruptures but with simple cuts, subtle shifts in framing, or lines of dialogue that take on unanticipated force. In these films, most any cinematic element, however inconspicuous, can suddenly emerge as being of crucial significance. Hong’s underlying project, it would seem, is to see whether he can achieve the disorienting effects of his earlier work without having to explicitly mark out which elements are of structural importance.
With In Our Day, Hong reshuffles the deck yet again. On the one hand, the film features the up-front story interventions of his earlier period, including title cards and a structure that alternates between two apparently disconnected stories. In the first, Sangwon (Kim Min-hee), a former actress recently returned to Korea, is staying with a close friend, when she’s visited by a younger relative who’s looking to get into acting. In the second, an elderly poet, Uiju (Ki Joo-bong), spends time with a young filmmaker who’s making a movie about him, when he’s also visited by a fan, who also happens to be an aspiring actor. On the other hand, the tendencies of Hong’s more recent films remain. The title cards are notable in that they inform us of things, such as a character’s thoughts and feelings, which are not just difficult to represent in images, but also nigh-impossible to discern in the scenes that follow, which maintain the deliberate visual and dramatic flatness characteristic of his recent period. The extent to which we can actually see what the text describes is always uncertain.
Even more conspicuously, there are several coincidences and synchronicities between the two stories: each opens with a lengthy conversation, followed by a shot of the central character getting into bed, and then by a visit from a third person. A guitar features at similar points in both sections, as does a meal of ramyun noodles with gochujang (hot pepper paste). Unusually, though, the stories never link up in terms of their diegetic narratives. Thus, although we might initially assume that the two stories are unfolding in parallel, we are eventually led to consider whether the stories might in fact be taking place on different days, or even in entirely different worlds. By omitting any causal material connections between the two stories, Hong asks us to consider what sort of relation they share.
Within Hong’s oeuvre, the most notable precursor for In Our Day’s alternating storylines is HaHaHa (2010), where two friends meet to recount their summer vacations, without ever realizing that they interacted with the same people in the same places—a structural gambit that draws attention to the characters’ limited self-awareness. Upon first viewing, In Our Day strikes me as a more opaque experiment in story containment: an exploration of how images interact across boundaries. Indeed, the film’s deliberately un-linked stories create an effect that’s akin to quantum entanglement, where a change in one discrete unit immediately affects the other, despite their apparent separation and distance. As Hong remarked of Right Now, Wrong Then’s two discrete worlds, which maintain their independence so long as no clear meaning is established between them: “It’s like a permanent reverberation.”
Already, I’ve talked to several critics for whom In Our Day, with its casual disregard for the usual technical competencies of image and sound (a product of Hong’s decision to add shooting duties to his usual role as writer-director), only barely qualifies as a movie. While I can’t defend Hong’s garishly overexposed frames as virtues in themselves, In Our Day nonetheless stood out to me as a model of maximum inventiveness achieved with a minimum of means. Hong is often accused of repeating himself, and thereby playing it safe, but I can think of few working directors more committed to perpetual artistic reinvention. In Our Day may not be the “best” film I saw at this year’s festival, but it was the only one that challenged me to examine the grounds of such judgments, to (re)consider what I value in cinema and why. In the context of Cannes, where the conferral of value—in the form of awards, ratings, and even distribution deals—is the order of the day, and where slick professionalism so often triumphs over artistic risk, I can think of few more worthwhile achievements.