An above-average Cannes edition is heading for the finals: high-opportunity contributions by directors Ildikó Enyedi and Julia Ducournau as well as Bruno Dumont’s media satire “France”.
Only four of the 24 films in the competition were made by women; there was nothing more in previous Cannes years. But if you only take the really good films, then the quota looks completely different. The French women Catherine Corsini and Mia Hansen-Løve would each deserve the director’s award in their own way at the gala on Saturday: Corsini for their daring, tragic-comic Paris war film from a hospital during the yellow vest protests. And Hansen-Løve for her feather-light, spun-out and extremely artistic pilgrimage to “Bergman Island”, the former home of the director of the century.
The Hungarian Ildikó Enyedi, who won the Berlinale in 2017 with her radical essay film “Body and Soul”, surprises with the outwardly classic love melodrama “The Story of My Wife”. But as elegantly as the film adaptation of Milán Füst’s 1942 novel about the tragic love of a ship’s captain leads to Paris and Hamburg in the 1920s, the figure drawing is unusually rich in edges. Gijs Naber plays the narrative protagonist who, on the basis of a bet, marries the first woman who enters his local pub; Léa Seydoux, the omnipresent absentee of this festival after a Covid infection with four films, the title role.
Enyedi, who discovered this classic of modern Hungarian literature at the age of 16, fans it on to an excursus on concepts of masculinity and femininity. The unsolvable riddle as the captain, a man of the 19th century, describes this almost iconic embodiment of the “new woman” is reflected in the opposite: Even the young woman is unable to integrate the highly admired ideal of masculinity into her everyday reality. That doesn’t change a mutual fascination, which can be read here quite unideologically as a paraphrase of current gender debates. Armed with the analytical tools of feminist cinema, the director devotes herself to both main characters with the same care.
And Léa Seydoux manages to keep the charm and distance of her role in a fascinating limbo over the two and a half hour runtime. With four main roles in the program, this Cannes would have been a small Seydoux festival. Bruno Dumont’s tragic comedy “France” owes almost everything to her screen presence. It is a somewhat overly long media satire about the star reporter of a political magazine, who also has social media at their feet thanks to her art of emotional addressing. Between the presentations, she confidently stages herself as a courageous war reporter, although not always the dangers, but the tears are real. When she withdraws to an alpine sanatorium during a depressive phase, she succumbs to a case of somewhat shoddy seduction: the man who steals her heart here is an undercover reporter.
That doesn’t necessarily sound like a particularly subtle excursion into satire for a director who has already filmed the lives of Jesus and Joan of Arc. The twist with which he saves the stale debate about journalistic ethics is the astonishing naivety of his heroes: Should these nefarious media professionals really stand behind their own human-touch journalism in the end? Do you even believe in a higher truth, for which you can sometimes lie?
How much more radical, on the other hand, is the fourth film by a woman in this above-average competition: “Titane”, only the second feature film by the French Julia Ducournau, transforms questions of gender identity into a daring cross between fantasy horror and family film. A young woman and wanted murderess slips into the role of a missing young man – and wins the heart of the father, a fire chief.
Every image in this film literally glows in the deep neon colors of an expressive hyperrealism. For the genre that the filmmaker embraces here, there is the auxiliary name “Body Horror”, David Cronenberg is its most famous representative. The artificiality could easily drive the daring story into the insignificance, but this is countered by two extraordinary performances: the non-binary author and artist Agathe Rousselle plays the protagonist and is a natural. You hold your breath, she relentlessly surrenders to Ducournau’s artistic vision – and she thanks her with an extremely intimate art of staging. This sensitivity does not mean that it is not on the other hand to endure some of the most brutal film murders in recent film history.
And then there is an actor who can do everything, perhaps the best in French cinema at the moment: Vincent Lindon plays the fireman who will not stop loving his supposed son with overwhelming credibility. It’s going to be hard to get around such a strong, albeit controversial, film. It has everything that palm tree winners ideally have.
