Joaquin Phoenix electrifies Cannes in feminist movie
Joaquin Phoenix wowed Cannes as a hammerwielding hitman tasked with saving a young girl from an elite ring, in a thriller he said had a feminist twist.
You Were Never Really Here by British director Lynne Ramsay may win accolades on the final day.
In a year that has seen stars such as Nicole Kidman and Salma Hayek hit out at show business sexism, Ramsay is one of only three women among the 19 film-makers vying for glory at the world’s biggest film festival.
Critics said Ramsay had a solid chance of becoming its second female director to win Cannes, after Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993.
In the film’s 85 minutes of intense violence and psychodrama, Phoenix plays Joe, an Iraq veteran and former FBI agent who is hired by a New York state senator to rescue his daughter from a paedophile ring.
The mission dredges Joe’s own traumas to the surface including an abusive father and atrocities he witnessed as a soldier. He resorts to self-harm including suffocating himself with towels and plastic bags to shut out the memories.
The Gladiator and Her star said Joe, who uses a hammer as his weapon of choice, explored the “impotence of masculinity.”
“We wanted to get away from that idea of the male hero,” he said.
“I think what’s maybe interesting about this film... is that really the girl is ultimately the one that saves herself.”
Phoenix bulked up for the role of Joe, a middle-aged former Marine who is out of shape but still has his killer instincts.
“We wanted to stay away from the kind of typical physical body that you find with these kind of characters .... ”
“We wanted him to be big as possible, (have) this kind of armour.”
Phoenix said much of the script was improvised on the set of the film, which was financed in part by Amazon and whose score was written by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. Ramsay, who was last in competition at Cannes in 2011 with We Need to Talk About Kevin starring Tilda Swinton, said her highly-strung film mirrored a deep sense of anxiety in today’s tumultuous world.
“It’s a sort of traumatising time at the moment and I just like to explore characters, like their flaws in their beauty,” she said.
The movie left many critics enraptured, drawing comparisons with the Martin Scorsese 1976 classic Taxi Driver.