Notebook is covering the Cannes Film Festival with an ongoing correspondence between critics Leonardo Goi and Lawrence Garcia, and editor Daniel Kasman.
La Jauría.
Dear Danny and Lawrence,
By the time you’ll read this, the Croisette will be a distant place and a faraway memory. I’m writing my last dispatch from a press room that’s gearing up for the awards ceremony; another couple of hours and it’ll be crammed with people cheering, booing, and shouting, a pandemonium in the vein of Triangle of Sadness (minus that film's shit and the vomit, I hope). I’m sure you’ll have plenty of final thoughts to share tomorrow, Lawrence; for my part, all I’ll say is that the 75th Cannes Film Festival struck me as a relatively underwhelming affair, especially when compared to more ebullient recent editions. The official competition proved particularly disappointing. There are films I look forward to re-watching as soon as possible (Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future), and others I’m gutted to have missed (Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N.). But aside from two fulminating entries (more below) and a few personal highlights (Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO), most of the things I saw have left an all too frail impression. Better luck next year.
That said, as is often the case at the fest, some of the most intriguing titles were hidden in the parallel sidebars. One of the last ones I caught was Andrés Ramírez Pulido’s La Jauría, which took home the main prize in the independent Critics' Week section. I wasn’t entirely foreign to the Colombian director’s work. I’d already seen and very much enjoyed his short El Eden, which premiered in Berlin back in 2016, and for a while La Jauría seemed to jut into being from the same sensual and luxuriant realm of that earlier film. Both follow teenage boys stranded in derelict buildings somewhere deep in the Colombian jungle. In El Eden, two youths break into an abandoned spa; in La Jauría, Pulido imagines a juvenile prison in the woods, where teens can atone for their crimes through a combination of hard labor and therapy. Violence, which had traversed El Eden as a largely invisible if omnipresent specter, is fleshed out far more forcefully here, as La Jauría doubles as a study of its endless cyclicality. At its center is Eliu (John Estiven Jimenez), a teen determined to kill his father over a history of sexual abuse—a motive Pulido’s script leaves deliberately ambiguous until a late scene. Except the man Eliu kills during the course of one fateful night, with the help of his best pal Mono (Maicol Andrés Jimenez), is someone else entirely. Arrested and shipped to the prison, the lad ingratiates himself with the guards and forms something of a shaky alliance with the camp’s leader, Alvaro (Miguel Viera), at least until Mono joins the small platoon of underage criminals, and things start to unravel.
With its emphasis on a largely adult-less tribe enmeshed in pointless, self-destructive battles, La Jauría carries echoes of Alejandro Landes’ Monos (2019). But Pulido’s tale is far more linear, and much less esoteric. Violence here isn’t couched as a old trauma the boys must somewhat overcome but serves as a structuring presence, conjured in intramural fights, humiliating punishments, and the promise of the dead man’s family to make Eliu and Mono pay the price for their mistake. The juxtaposition of the film’s lush locale with its horrific subtext makes for an interesting conflict, but as shot by Balthazar Lab, the jungle gradually sheds its paradisiac allure to embrace something far more chilling and claustrophobic (a cradle of terror and decay that reminded me of Werner Herzog’s musings in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams). There are occult flourishes, and surreal visions too: Alvaro speaks a patois of New Age-y faux-profundities, and his alternative therapy include group sessions that feel like an odd hybrid between yoga and exorcisms. As the camera ventured down caves and lingered inside dilapidated, plants- and mold-infested cells, my mind travelled not to Monos but to the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Mind you, La Jauría never quite vibrates with the Thai’s magic realism and dreamlike energy. But if its plot offers little in the way of surprises and twists, the film still strikes a sinister note out of its haunting and haunted locale, trailing after its young characters as they fumble after an impossible redemption. For all its fictional and dystopian elements, there are times La Jauría seems to unfurl as a documentary, happy to linger with the boys and record seemingly inconsequential moments (an extended pool scene is emblematic of this). It may be uneven, but Pulido finds an interesting balance between these observational sequences and the film’s oneiric touches. I look forward to the stories he’ll yank out of the jungle next.
Showing Up.
You were wondering if I’d caught glimpses of light before the end of the ride, Danny; thankfully, the official competition climaxed with two of its most luminous entries. In Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt teams up with Michelle Williams—for the fourth time—in a tale that unspools as a stripped-down, beguilingly low-key creative and existential journey. Williams plays Lizzie, a young sculptor struggling to catch a break in Portland, Oregon. Showing Up tracks an artist coming to terms with her craft—a Künstlerroman of sorts. It’s also that rare film about an artist that actually shows what it’s like to be and to work as one, as attuned to the wonders of creation as it is to the unsentimental logic of cash. Its ideas—the importance of integrity and the dangers of compromise, the urge to find and defend one’s voice over and against the mainstream—are grounded in material reality, which aligns Showing Up to Reichardt’s previous films, all of them concerned, in different ways and to different extents, with the nexus of power and capital. Lizzie lives next door (and pays rent) to former art school classmate Jo (Hong Chau), another artist who seems to have “made it” already, but is also too busy enjoying her success to fix Lizzie’s boiler, depriving her neighbor of her right to a hot shower. While Jo displays her artworks all over town, Lizzie makes ends meet working at her alma mater as a secretary for her own mother (Maryann Plunkett). It is only at night that she can lock herself inside her makeshift studio and finally get to work; in these late-night sessions, a crammed garage becomes a sanctuary.
Lizzie is rushing to finish a new series of ceramics for a forthcoming gallery show—one foot tall clay statues, all women, that look gnarly in their lack of proportions and lines, but are doused in delicate, pastel colors. That we do get to see these statuettes come into being, with Reichardt devoting ample time to Lizzie’s massaging, kneading, and sculpting clay, is one of Showing Up’s many charms, and a crucial detail that sets it apart from other artist-focused tales. With its meticulous, painstaking, and gradual documenting of what making art looks like, the film brought me back to La belle noiseuse (1991), another drama that didn’t seek to dramatize an artist’s biography so much as capture the very mystery of creation itself. But the painter in Jacques Rivette’s drama was revered as a genius, a title Lizzie—despite her talent—is never gifted. If anything, Reichardt pokes fun at the very concept, especially as this is very arbitrarily used by her mother to describe Lizzie’s troubled hermit of a brother Sean (John Magaro), a fellow creative with a proclivity for “earth-work” (i.e. digging meteor-crater-like holes in his backyard). The script, penned by Reichardt and longtime co-scribe Jonathan Raymond, is full of similar jibes, and the film shows a keen ear for the obscure and ridiculous art school-ese spoken by teachers and students around Lizzie.
But the satirical vein coursing through Showing Up is undercut by a lingering affection for these bubbles and their inhabitants. And no one here is granted more empathy than Lizzie, whose creative endeavors are always somehow threatened by real-life inconveniences. Early on, her orange tabby cat brings home and nearly kills a pigeon, which Lizzie unceremoniously dumps back in the garden and then agrees to look after once Jo rescues it the next morning. Reichardt makes the bird synonymous with Lizzie’s own quest, which is to say her journey toward self-acceptance. (You could argue that the animal plays a similar role to Williams’s mutt in Reichardt’s 2008 Wendy and Lucy). I must confess there were moments when the pigeon felt like an unnecessary intrusion, especially as Showing Up climaxes with an on-the-nose sequence that makes the link between the bird’s recovery and Lizzie’s own awakening a little too explicit. But that’s only because everything else here feels so light, so nimble, so delicately and effortlessly stitched together.
The beauty of Showing Up lies in how Reichardt manages to avoid spelling out the terrifying question that hangs over Lizzie like a sword of Damocles (what will she make of her life if she doesn’t succeed at becoming the artist she wants to be?). Instead, Showing Up buries that under a trellis of detours, petty hassles, chance encounters. For the less familiar viewer, the meandering gaze can prove frustrating. But it is a testament to Reichardt’s ingenuity and mastery that she trusts the audience enough to let her films unfurl through allusions and traces, leaving us to connect the dots and watch as tiny details swell into revelations. Showing Up is a film that searches for the sublime in the epic banal, in which the key line belongs not to Lizzie but to a colleague and fellow artist played by André Benjamin, who, pulling one of her creations out of the kiln, smiles at the way the piece came out half burnt: “I like imperfections.” I have no way of knowing if Lizzie will make that wisdom hers, too; if, by the end of the film, she’ll grow to appreciate the unpredictability and inescapable messiness of art—and life itself. But as Reichardt turned her camera for one last shot of Portland and the lambent glow of a sunset made the whole screen blush, I was swept by a wave of unbridled optimism, cocooned by a film that, for large chunks, washed over me like a languorous summer afternoon.
Pacifiction.
Showing Up was among the official competition’s finest, but the lineup’s true gem—and, for my money, the best film in the festival—was Albert Serra’s Pacifiction. In it, Serra follows a High Commissioner stationed in French Polynesia as he saunters through tropical, seductive landscapes and hobnobs with local activists and politicians, never quite betraying his true interests and allegiances. He’s played by Benoît Magimel, who roams these idyllic islands with the white linen suit of Fitzcarraldo and the sly wit of Graham Greene’s Thomas Fowler. Greene and The Quiet American hover everywhere around Pacifiction, a film whose hero must reckon with the full weight and meaning of his being engagé, involved in a land that’s only technically and legally a French territory. Seemingly admired and respected by the locals, Magimel’s Monsieur De Roller remains a stranger in a strange land, much like the (almost exclusively white) elite he schmoozes with, Old World drifters who’ve washed up on these Edenic island and mill around neon-lit bars like drunken moths around lampposts.
De Roller might look more at ease than any one of them as he waltzes in and out of gala dinners, nightclub soirees and secret meetings (and his ability to circumvent conflicts recalls the trasformismo of Burt Lancaster’s prince in Visconti The Leopard). But the impartial role the man has carved for himself is shattered once rumors start spreading that France will soon resume new nuclear tests on the islands. Serra, who also penned the script, mines an unsealed wound in Tahiti’s recent history. From 1966 to 1974, France blew up 41 nuclear weapons in French Polynesia, tests which authorities have long insisted were conducted safely, but recent findings suggest may have contributed to a spike in cancers in the region, leaving around 90 percent of Polynesians exposed to radioactive fallout. As tension rises and threats of rallies and protests mount, De Roller finds himself implicated in a game of cat and mouse with baleful-looking figures and citizens suddenly eager to question his presence and rule.
Considered within the larger context of Serra’s filmography, Pacifiction heralds as many changes as continuities. Arguably his most narratively-driven film to date, it unfolds as an elliptical political thriller akin to Andreas Fontana’s Azor (2021), another work whose spooky allure is a function of evasive and oblique discussions more than actual scares. The stakes are real, the nuclear threat too. Time and again, De Roller pulls out his state-of-the-art binoculars to spy on some ominous silhouettes floating close to the shore (submarines or optical illusions?). The James Bond-esque gadget is an extension of the Commissioner’s body, as essential as his white uniform and blue-tinted shades. It also hints at the voyeuristic impulses tucked deep inside Pacifiction, a film where people spend as much time looking as they do talking.
Politics, as Serra understands it, is a battle of words, and De Roller’s perambulations teem with chats and arguments, some as sprawling as a drunkard’s speech, others as cutting and sharp as a razor. Yet Serra doesn’t shy away from irony. Late in the film, Magimel delivers a monologue on the horrors of war à la Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, but his audience (a colleague sitting next to him in the Commissioner’s Mercedes, as white as his suit) keeps dozing on and off. And if the conversations crackle with all manner of threats and innuendos, the images captured by Artur Tort offer lyrical vistas and visions. All through its near three hours, Pacifiction has the rhythm and flavor of a tropical reverie, and the source of the film's arresting power derives from its ability to weave thriller stylings with disquieting detours into the uncanny, footage that seems plucked out of a dream. An admiral dancing by himself in a neon-lit bar; a group of Polynesian actors reenacting a cockfight under De Roller’s watchful eye, who in scenes like these traverses Pacifiction as a Tahitian equivalent to Ben Gazzara’s doomed hero in Saint Jack (one of the very few actors, incidentally, who could ever rival Magimel’s duplicitous and magnetic aura here). But the film’s most sensational sequence happens out at sea, when De Roller jumps aboard a jet ski and floats over waves that look as tall as 15–20 meters, watching as surfers ride them just a few feet away. I’m still wondering how on earth Serra managed to shoot that (and how the shot could be insured), but I know I will treasure it as one of my most indelible festival moments of the year, one that made me feel a kind of electric encounter with what I was seeing.
Cannes being Cannes, a surreal place where one can watch films in the day and bump into their directors as they stroll down the Croisette at night, I happened into Serra on my way home at 3 am, a few hours after Pacifiction’s premiere. We talked about his latest, and then pivoted—don’t ask me how—to the writings of Ryanair’s CEO Michael O’Leary. I bid Serra goodbye and made it home just in time to pack, and in the few hours I slept I dreamt of Magimel riding the waves around Tahiti.
I hope your last films treated you just as well, Lawrence, and I look forward to more correspondences with you both next year.
Until then,
Leo