Notebook is covering the Cannes Film Festival with an ongoing correspondence between critics Leonardo Goi and Lawrence Garcia, and editor Daniel Kasman.
Enys Men.
Dear Danny and Lawrence,
I can’t believe we’re halfway through the circus already. Time has a way of slipping out of bounds when one’s in Cannes: it’s been six days since we landed here, though in my currently starved and sleep-deprived state, that feels like a whole month already. I’m spending my Saturday night typing away in a semi-deserted press room, while you two must be currently queuing for Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. I’d have loved to join you—and I look forward to hearing your impressions in your next dispatches—but I felt as though I needed a break to sort out my thoughts on three titles I’ve caught earlier this week and have been mulling over here since.
One of them was Enys Men, Mark Jenkin’s follow up to his singular, riveting Bait (2019). Set in a barren, uninhabited island off the coast of Cornwall, the film is a folk horror that dances between pagan rites, the supernatural, and the metaphysical. More elliptical and much more disquieting than Bait, it hangs in a nebulous region where everything crackles with secrets and mysteries and hallucinations coexist with reality. The film centers on a woman whose story and purpose on the island Jenkin leaves deliberately blurred. We don’t know her name (played by Mary Woodvine, she’s credited as “The Volunteer”), don’t know when she got to there, or how long she’ll be stranded for. Written by Jenkin, the script is stint on background and contextual knowledge; all the woman seems to be doing is pay daily visits to a shock of snow-white flowers growing on the edge of a cliff, return home, and record her notes in a log. Date. Daily temperature. Observations. The diary says it’s April 1973, and she’s been doing this for a few days (weeks?) already. To what end, it’s hard to say, just as it’s difficult to tell how—if at all—the flowers are related to other, more occult parts of her sojourn. Once home to Cornish miners and sailors, the island remembers them via the artifacts they left behind: an underground shaft, moss-covered railroad tracks, the name plaque of a ship that may or may not have sunk almost a century prior. Not to mention the story we hear on the volunteer’s radio early on: a statue erected on the island to the memory of its deceased dwellers has been vandalized, and though Jenkin never makes the link explicit, the monument may well be the sinister slab of rock, human-sized, that sits not far off from the volunteer’s cottage.
What made Bait such a perturbing watch was the way Jenkin was able to capture the everyday objects surrounding his characters not as mute, inanimate items, but repositories of mysteries—things that spoke their own tongues, adding texture to the story and widening its scope. A bucket, a net, a buoy, a saint’s statue… these inserts did not interrupt the narrative so much as enrich it, gesturing to a non-human world that was only ostensibly silent, and percolated through the film’s fabric. I say all this because Enys Men takes this approach to new extremes; here too, the volunteer’s story is inextricably bound to that of the things and places around her, as if it effectively emerged from them. In a film that favors dramatization over narrativization, the objects Jenkin turns to here are their own micro-characters, and part of the beauty of Enys Men is to navigate the trellis of connections between them, and surrender to the fact that some, in a tale dotted with ghosts and visions that echo works from the decade like The Wicker Man (1973) or Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), may be clearer than others.
The production design, courtesy of Joe Grey and Mae Voogd, is fastidious (there are period-faithful transistors, teapots, clothes, tin cans) yet I never got the feeling that these had been placed there simply to “validate” the film’s 1970s credentials. Jenkin doesn’t pursue authenticity for authenticity’s sake (the way one may argue Robert Eggers does in The Northman, say) and time is as spongy and malleable as the moss the volunteer bounces on along the cliffs, a feeling that extends to the film as an object of its own right. Shot on 16mm color negative with a 1970s clockwork Bolex by Jenkin (yet again on a multi-hyphenate stint, working as director, writer, producer, film and sound editor, as well as cinematographer), and with post synch sound, Enys Men looks and sounds as a curious kind of relic, a chest washed ashore, with the howling wind still trapped inside, echoing strange memories and even stranger threads. I can appreciate the concerns of those who’ll find it hermetic to a fault, but to me, this was a most hypnotic experience, and one of the best I’ve had so far at the fest.
Mariupolis 2.
You wrapped your first dispatch wondering how many “topical” films we’d end up watching here, Danny, and Mariupolis 2, one of the festival’s last-minute additions, more than fits the bill. A chronicle of the Ukrainian city under Russian occupation, it is the last film by Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravičius, who, earlier this April, was captured and murdered by Russian troops in the city of his swan song. Stitched together posthumously by Kvedaravičius’ fiancée Hanna Bilobrova (who brought back the footage and edited it with Dounia Sichov), the documentary is a firsthand study of life in war-torn Mariupolis, as recorded by Kvedaravičius from the confines of a church-turned-shelter the director spent his last days in with dozens of other civilians. The confined settings have a straightjacketing effect: there’s only so many vistas Kvedaravičius can show from his bunker, and the camera seldom ventures outside the church’s courtyard. But the war remains an omnipresent specter, evoked by the restless pounding of bombs, the eerie arcs of missiles slashing the horizon, or the land mines placed by the Russians just a few feet away from the church’s gate. Much as a refuge, the shelter serves as a prison too, and what emanates from Kvedaravičius’ images is a feeling of claustrophobia—an encroaching, inevitable end.
Months of compulsive doomscrolling have made me wary of the sensationalistic approach with which Western media have tended to frame the war in Ukraine. Which is why Kvedaravičius’ lower-key, more intimate account felt so refreshing. Trapped inside the church grounds, the director observes daily routines and everyday rituals—people sweeping, cooking, smoking, basking in the pallid sun in between air raids. These may strike as seemingly inconsequential moments, but in the film’s wider context, they accrue the power of small heroic acts. Mariupolis 2 is, at once, the diary of an inescapable tragedy and a hymn to the resilience of those struggling against forces beyond their control. In that, it brought me back to the films of Sergei Loznitsa—more specifically, his 2006 Blockade, a chronicle of the Leningrad siege culled entirely from Soviet-era archival footage. Like Loznitsa, Kvedaravičius trades a traditional, top-down dramatization of history for a more horizontal, bottom-up approach: one that focusses on ordinary individuals as they figure out how to respond—and survive—the cataclysmic events around them. The film’s long, uninterrupted shots do not just shake with a you-are-there intimacy, they also have an ethical import, opening a space where both drifters and audience can finally breathe.
I feel a little awkward moving from a war journal to a film that made me cackle throughout, but that’s happened with Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, arguably one of the strongest official competition entries so far. It’s been five years since the Swedish director nabbed a Palme d’Or for his art world satire, The Square, and I must confess that, ten minutes in, part of me wondered if Triangle would add anything novel to its predecessor—or if Östlund’s takedown of yet another navel-gazing and uber-privileged milieu would merely swap museums and galleries for catwalks and Instagram stories. I’m still not entirely convinced the two films are all that different, thematically; Triangle’s targets are, very broadly, the same as its precursor’s—sex, money, beauty, and power. But the film maintains a deranged, rollicking momentum to an extent The Square didn’t quite manage—not past its first half hour, at least—swelling into a journey that’s savage, uneven, yet wildly entertaining.
Triangle of Sadness.
Split into three chapters, Triangle’s first introduces us to twenty-something models Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickinson) as they struggle to negotiate their relationship’s power dynamics. Male models earn a third of their female counterparts, we’re told at the preamble, and their endless bickering over who should foot the bill at the end of a date is the kind of scene that both heralds some of the film’s chief preoccupations and sets the tone for the witty, rapid-fire repartee that will be exchanged throughout. Invited, in the film’s second chapter, to take part in a cruise for the ultra-rich and the ultra-dull (the kind of scenario that reminded me of David Foster Wallace’s own luxury cruise diary, "Shipping Out") Yaya and Carl spend a few days at sea with the crème de la crème, a pantheon of eccentrics who have no shame in admitting they are “so fucking rich,” even when their wealth is the result of morally dubious business ventures (one old couple proudly gloats that their best-selling product is used in every functioning democracy: hand grenades). Add to the mix an alcoholic captain (Woody Harrelson), a gala dinner, and an apocalyptic storm and mayhem is served: it’s not long before the ship’s rocking sends everyone throwing up over floor, tables, and guests, a chundering triumph that tips its hat to Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
Yet more than the Pythons, Michael Haneke, or Lars von Trier, the director Triangle kept reminding me of was Jean Renoir; his 1939 masterwork The Rules of the Game is a key reference, especially as Östlund enjoys watching his characters engage in role reversals. Nowhere is that clearer than in the film’s third and final segment, where a crew of eight washes up on a seemingly desert island and Triangle veers into Lord of the Flies territory, with the affluent suddenly forced to confront their non-existent survivalist skills, and the downtrodden finally turning into commanders of their own. To be clear, I’m not suggesting the film’s satire of the bourgeoise is as piercing and sophisticated as Renoir’s. The characters Östlund pens can come across as caricatures—a good amount of them, at least—and there are moments when the jokes can feel a little heavy-handed (the ship’s crew howling "MONEY!" in unison, as if possessed, at the prospect of very generous tips when the voyage’s over), or repetitive (there is only so much mileage Östlund can get from poking fun at such obvious targets as social media influencers and spoiled patricians).
And yet, when it works, Triangle of Sadness soars. Harrelson, here standing as a self-proclaimed Marxist skipper, has a phenomenal (and very drunken) pas de deux with a Russian billionaire (Zlatko Burić); as the boat threatens to keel and the wealthy slide in their own shit and vomit, the two drawl out jokes by Lenin and Reagan over the intercom, drinking themselves into an ideological stupor. That’s the power of Triangle of Sadness: anytime I thought it had plateaued, Östlund seemed to find a way to push his absurdities to new heights, with startling playfulness and scalding wit. Does the film hold a mirror on our society? Is it the kind of farce that will force us to confront our own values, the images of ourselves we project onto the world? I’m not so sure. Östlund is a piercing anatomist of bourgeois vulnerability and selfishness, skills that are probably more apparent in his 2014 Force Majeure than they are here—or in The Square. But he’s also a grand, unapologetic entertainer, a provocateur hellbent on showing a side of ourselves we may not be comfortable with—and that showmanship is here in glorious display.
Looking forward to your thoughts on this and other films, Lawrence.
More soon,
Leo