Women in Time
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Cannes will unveil the bulk of its lineup next Thursday, but the festival has already announced that Quentin Dupieux’s new comedy The Second Act will open the seventy-seventh edition on May 14. Léa Seydoux—who also stars in Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (see below) and has lined up projects with Arnaud Desplechin and Ildikó Enyedi—plays Florence, who is madly in love with David (Louis Garrel) and can’t wait to introduce him to her father (Vincent Lindon). David, though, aims to unload Florence on his friend, Willy (Raphaël Quenard). “Ever since he dogged a sentient tire on a killing spree in Rubber (2010), musician-turned-filmmaker Quentin Dupieux has been distilling a singular form of gonzo,” writes Leonardo Goi, introducing his interview with the filmmaker for the Notebook.
Rodrigo Sorogoyen, whose 2019 short film Madre was nominated for an Oscar, will preside over the jury during this year’s Critics’ Week. The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough notes that the parallel section established by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics in 1962 is “the oldest non-official Cannes sidebar. The section is credited with discovering some of the biggest names in independent and arthouse cinema, from Ken Loach and Alejandro González Iñárritu to Andrea Arnold and Justine Triet.”
Los Angeles, in the meantime, is in for an amazing weekend. The inaugural edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies is already underway. “As great as LA is for revival cinema right now, it’s still challenging for new independent films to get the same amount of attention or foothold here,” Micah Gottlieb, who cofounded the event with producer Sarah Winshall, tells J. Kim Murphy in Variety. “This is an opportunity to start fresh. We see ourselves as a small regional festival in LA and that’s something that we want to maintain.”
The UCLA Festival of Preservation is also running through Sunday. “It’s not just gorgeous new versions of films you’ve never seen or seen only in diminished condition,” writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. “The UCLA event inevitably includes remarkable movies you never even knew existed, films that expand our knowledge of the extent of the vast cinematic universe.”
Last Sunday, Barbara Rush, who appeared in Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954), Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956), Edward Dmytryk’s The Young Lions (1958), and dozens of other films and television series, passed away. “In 1950s science fiction pictures like It Came From Outer Space and When Worlds Collide, she was the small-town heroine, the scientist’s daughter, the Earthling most likely to succeed,” writes Anita Gates in the New York Times. Rush was ninety-seven.
As LAT television critic Robert Lloyd points out, comedian Joe Flaherty, who died on Monday at the age of eighty-two, will be remembered for his work in two series, SCTV and Freaks and Geeks. “Neither were hugely successful in their time,” writes Lloyd. “SCTV, though it twice won Emmys for writing, shared by Flaherty, was overshadowed by Saturday Night Live, the other series to emerge from Second City, and Freaks and Geeks lasted only a single, eighteen-episode season. But both are dear to the heart of comedy fans, and the characters Flaherty created there live large in my mind, and I hope in yours.”
This week’s highlights:
- Inspired by The Beast in the Jungle, Henry James’s 1903 novella about a man convinced that his life is about to take a tragic turn, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is “an audacious interdimensional romance, techno-thriller, and Los Angeles noir rolled up in one,” writes Beatrice Loayza in the New York Times. Incarnations of Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay) keep falling in love—in 1910, again in 2014, and yet again in 2044. “Through its intricate excavation of emotions,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns, “The Beast stands as an intimate spectacle, deploying a vast canvas to explore a microscale subject: the roiling inner life of its heroine . . . While the movie may mark the writer-director’s first foray into sci-fi, it is never chilly or clinical; its greatest special effect is the endlessly expressive face, often filmed in extreme close-up, of Seydoux.” Bonello discusses The Beast and more with Film Comment editor Devika Girish and with Nick Newman at the Film Stage.
- The TIFF Cinematheque retrospective Destroy, She Said: The Cinema of Marguerite Duras is on through April 24, and programmer Andréa Picard notes that “like her books, the films are defiant disruptors of form, privileging cadence and repetition, and frequently displaying a tendency to want to revisit, remake, and, mainly, to destroy what came before. But Duras did not make novelist films, she made cinema—like she was reinventing it.” Surveying the series for the Toronto Star, Adam Nayman focuses on India Song (1975), Duras’s “consensus masterpiece as a director,” and Le camion (1977), “a movie whose multiple contradictions—not only between simplicity and complexity, and fiction and documentary, but also boredom and immersion—remain fascinatingly unresolved, making it a perfect candidate for repeat viewings.”
- Set in 1930s Prague, Juraj Herz’s The Cremator (1969), starring Rudolf Hrušínský as an upright citizen on a killing spree, is “a jarring, cacophonous, dissonant work from its first moments to its last,” writes Nick Pinkerton in Metrograph Journal, “and this consistency suggests it to be something other than a narrative of innocence seduced by evil. Herz’s film is not a character study of a serene, simplistic bourgeoisie who is led astray by the Nazi ideology; it is the study of an incipient Nazi who takes to dogma of the Reich like a duck to water precisely because he has been primed for it by years of practice playing an upstanding member of his class.”
- Doc Films may already be about a third of the way through its Thursday evening series Kinuyo Tanaka, Actress and Auteur, but there are still six features to catch through mid-May. “Tanaka was the only woman filmmaker active in the postwar Golden Age of Japanese cinema and was particularly distinguished for working within the commercial studio system, something very few women filmmakers in the world were doing at the time,” writes Kat Sachs in the Chicago Reader. “While she was not expressly a feminist, there’s no denying that her compelling star power, groundbreaking directorial work, and status within a male-dominated industry were trailblazing examples of women’s empowerment.”
- Launching a new column at Screen Slate on New York’s repertory scene, Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer looks back on two recent series, Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s and Afterimage: Counter Cinema, Radical Cinema. “As a writer who grew up during a period that the film critic Kent Jones characterized for its ‘marginalization of cinema,’” he writes, “it is clear to me that my contemporaries are dissatisfied with the diminishment of cinema’s role in culture. This is why they favor watching old movies instead of new ones. The sentiment does not arise from nostalgia, but from the feeling that films are not grappling with the difficulty of our moment with the same commitment filmmakers have demonstrated in the past.”
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