A Gentle Creature
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Cannes diary 2017: 'The Square' provoked, 'Florida Project' thrilled…Nicole Kidman was everywhere with Colin Farrell - Los Angeles Times 13.01.20, 1358 Cannes diary 2017: 'The Square' provoked, 'Florida Project' thrilled and Nicole Kidman was everywhere with Colin Farrell At the 70th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, recently concluded on May 28, L.A. Times film critic Justin Chang took in the scene and all the movies he could watch on very little sleep. In this, his Cannes diary, he gives us an up-close view of one of the world’s most glamorous events, a mecca for film lovers. DAY 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6-7 | 8 | 9-10 The 70th Festival de Cannes has ended and Pedro Almodóvarʼs jury has rendered its verdict, which you can read about in my report on the closing- night awards ceremony. And rest assured, this year there will be no indignant screed against their decisions from yours truly. Whatʼs remarkable about this festival is that, even with a much less impressive competition than last yearʼs, the jury managed to come up with a much more discerning and satisfying set of winners. Not entirely satisfying, of course: My personal choice for the Palme dʼOr would probably have been “Loveless,” followed closely by “A Gentle Creature” (what can I say, itʼs been a good year for devastating portraits of modern-day Russia), and I regret that the Safdie brothers and Robert Pattinson won nothing for their sensationally entertaining “Good Time.” But in the end, I can't fault a jury for honoring a film as provocative as “The Square,” as moving as “120 Beats Per Minute” or as stylishly single-minded as “You Were Never Really Here.” A title that more or less captures what it https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-cannes-diary-justin-chang-20170517-htmlstory.html Seite 1 von 53 Cannes diary 2017: 'The Square' provoked, 'Florida Project' thrilled…Nicole Kidman was everywhere with Colin Farrell - Los Angeles Times 13.01.20, 1358 would probably feel like to be in Cannes now — once more a sleepy beachside town, with the red carpets rolled up and the metal detectors stowed away for another year. Until then ... ‘A Gentle Creature,ʼ ‘Good Timeʼ and ‘You Were Never Really Hereʼ bring late highs to a middling competition Vasilina Makovtseva in the film "A Gentle Creature." (Wild Bunch) Based on a highly selective and unscientific sampling of opinions on the Croisette, the general consensus is that while this may be a milestone 70th- anniversary year for the Festival de Cannes, itʼs been a disappointing set of films overall, with one of the weaker competition slates in recent memory. Thatʼs not to say there havenʼt been good and even very good movies, only that theyʼve been fewer and farther between. The charge of excitement delivered last year by the likes of “Toni Erdmann,” “Elle,” “Paterson,” “The Handmaiden,” “American Honey,” “Aquarius” and “Personal Shopper” — bold, confident visions all, regardless of what you may think of them individually — has struggled to reproduce itself here. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-cannes-diary-justin-chang-20170517-htmlstory.html Seite 2 von 53 Cannes diary 2017: 'The Square' provoked, 'Florida Project' thrilled…Nicole Kidman was everywhere with Colin Farrell - Los Angeles Times 13.01.20, 1358 And yet — as always, a blanket sense of disappointment doesnʼt tell the whole story. The highs may not have been stratospheric this year, but there have been highs nonetheless. One of them, for me, is the Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsaʼs “A Gentle Creature” (“Krotkoya”), which is unequivocally one of the toughest, darkest and longest movies playing in competition. (Here I must correct an earlier post in which I misidentified “The Square” and “120 Beats Per Minute” as the longest films in competition; at 143 minutes, “A Gentle Creature” belongs in their company.) Inspired by (though not adapted from) the Dostoevsky short story of the same title, “A Gentle Creature” follows a stoic Russian woman (played with riveting impassivity by Vasilina Makovtseva) trying to get a care package to her convict husband after it is inexplicably returned to her. Rebuffed at her local post office, she decides to travel to the prison and deliver the parcel herself — a journey that will lead her through her a Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare and into the very heart of Putinʼs Russia, a place where violent absurdity and everyday inhumanity reign. Loznitsa, making his third appearance in the Cannes competition (after “My Joy” and “In the Fog”), uses richly textured visuals and sustained long shots to usher us alongside this “gentle creature” down the rabbit-hole. That allusion comes from the story itself, whose surreal climax plays like something out of “Alice in Wonderland,” at least until — well, Iʼll leave that horror for you to discover. “A Gentle Creature” is about as strange, perplexing and foreign an experience as any Iʼve had at the Festival de Cannes, and the reasons that will limit its commercial viability are the very reasons that you should seek it out, if and when it arrives in your local art- house theater. “A Gentle Creature” screened for the press on Wednesday. With its single most challenging offering out of the way, the competition has seemed to speed toward the finish with several brisk, light-footed genre movies that have been, if not a series of unmitigated delights, then at least something of https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-cannes-diary-justin-chang-20170517-htmlstory.html Seite 3 von 53 Cannes diary 2017: 'The Square' provoked, 'Florida Project' thrilled…Nicole Kidman was everywhere with Colin Farrell - Los Angeles Times 13.01.20, 1358 a relief. Thatʼs not unusual given the track record of Thierry Frémaux, the festivalʼs general delegate, who has been known to give action movies such as “Drive” and “Death Proof” pride of place in competition. The 2004 selection, one of the first under his reign, included the now-infamous “Oldboy,” whose director, Park Chan-wook, sits on this yearʼs competition jury. Robert Pattinson and Benny Safdie in the film "Good Time." (A24) Among the best of this yearʼs genre offerings is the aptly titled “Good Time,” which marks the first appearance in competition by the American independent filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie. (The brothers were previously at Cannes in 2009 with “Daddy Longlegs,” then titled “Go Get Some Rosemary,” which played in the Directorsʼ Fortnight section.) Their latest is, fittingly enough, a tale of intense brotherly devotion: Benny Safdie plays Nick, a troubled young man who gets dragged into an ill-advised bank robbery by his brother, Connie, a bumbling yet resourceful small-timer played with ferocious agility by a revelatory Robert Pattinson. “Good Time” opens with a therapy session, jumps ahead to the amateur https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-cannes-diary-justin-chang-20170517-htmlstory.html Seite 4 von 53 Cannes diary 2017: 'The Square' provoked, 'Florida Project' thrilled…Nicole Kidman was everywhere with Colin Farrell - Los Angeles Times 13.01.20, 1358 heist, and then becomes a sustained chase thriller that harks back to the pulpy, scuzzy pleasures of vintage Sidney Lumet and Abel Ferrara. The action is so brisk and kinetic that you may not notice the social insights that the Safdies have so shrewdly tucked into the margins of their story: Nick and Connie may have had a rough upbringing, but the Safdies are not so sympathetic that they overlook their charactersʼ undeniable privilege and the even more marginalized people they exploit along the way. A24 is releasing “Good Time” in U.S. theaters in August, and it both stands and deserves to earn the Safdie brothers their widest audience to date. Joaquin Phoenix and Ekaterina Samsonov in the film "You Were Never Really Here." (WhyNot Productions) Even more hypnotic in terms of sheer craft is the Amazon Studios release “You Were Never Really Here,” the latest declaratively titled film from the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”). Adapted from a Jonathan Ames novella, the movie stars a heavily bearded Joaquin Phoenix as a severely troubled, hammer-wielding assassin whose latest job will either kill him or give him a reason to keep living. What follows is a kind of 21st century riff on “Taxi Driver” that morphs, by https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-cannes-diary-justin-chang-20170517-htmlstory.html Seite 5 von 53 Cannes diary 2017: 'The Square' provoked, 'Florida Project' thrilled…Nicole Kidman was everywhere with Colin Farrell - Los Angeles Times 13.01.20, 1358 the end, into a stealth art-house remake of “Logan” — a deranged odyssey across a wide-ranging New York hellscape that combines sleek formal elegance, fatalistic humor, unsparing violence and another gorgeously unnerving score by Jonny Greenwood. Ramsayʼs unwillingness to compromise artistically has often run afoul of a bottom-line-minded industry, which explains why “You Were Never Really Here” is only her fourth film in the 18 years since her brilliant, Cannes-premiered debut feature, “Ratcatcher.” Her return seals her standing as one of our most fearless and forceful filmmakers, if not one as prolific as she deserves to be. Fitting the Hobbesian criteria of nasty, brutish and short — itʼs been ruthlessly whittled down from an anticipated 95-minute running time to a terse, diamond-hard 85 minutes — Ramsayʼs film brought the competition to an electrifying but polarizing close. Some declared it precisely the tour de force the festival had been waiting for; others stayed behind to loudly boo the film as the lights came up, perhaps repelled by its brutal nihilism or its placement in the competition.