CANNES ROUND-UP
cannes 2017 i Eight films to watch out for from this year’s première film festival…
We had a Good Time, followed by a Wind River.
THE FLORIDA PROJECT
Despite playing out of competition, Sean Baker’s follow-up to shot-onan-iPhone gem Tangerine scooped the coveted TF Best Of The Fest award. Set in and around an Orlando hotel, it energetically keeps up with six-yearold Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her pals as they tear around the shabby grounds while her mum (Bria Vinaite, who Baker discovered on Instagram) begs, borrows and steals to make rent. Superbly acted by a cast of non-professionals (and Willem Dafoe), this film gives viewers full residency in a sun-scorched microcosm.
It’s vital filmmaking in every sense.
LOVELESS
Andrey Zvyagintsev should have won the Palme d’Or for 2014’s Leviathan and again came close to clinching the coveted prize with his latest, which begins as a portrait of a doomed Moscow marriage before reconfiguring itself, surprisingly but organically, into a stark missing-person thriller. A bleak and increasingly mesmerising film full of indelible images smothered in rain, snow and ambiguity, Loveless doesn’t deal in triteness, instead painting a picture of a family and country in moral and socio-political crisis. It is a work of considerable artistry and power.
CARNE Y ARENA
One of the most exciting films at Cannes wasn’t actually a film. Rather, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne Y Arena (Flesh And Sand) was the first ever virtual-reality installation invited to the prestigious film festival. Running at 6.5 minutes, the VR short puts you in the shoes of a refugee crossing the Sonoran Desert, an experience Iñárritu fully immerses you in by asking you to walk around barefoot on coarse, cold sand. Humanising an event portrayed countless times on screen by blending film, fact, videogame and art installation, it’s an exhilarating indicator of what’s to come.
GOOD TIME
Robert Pattinson gives the performance of his career in this neon-lit crime thriller from Josh and Ben Safdie. Pattinson plays Connie, a petty criminal negotiating a night of escalating violence and mayhem after a botched heist leads to the arrest of his handicapped brother. With its squalid locations and tight focus on desperate characters, this downward-spiralling odyssey flicks a sweaty salute to Dog Day Afternoon and Scorsese’s screwy ’80s classic After Hours, adorned as it is with surreal sequences and Oneohtrix Point Never’s propulsive electro score.
120 BEATS PER MINUTE
Writer/director Robin Campillo has Cannes form, having penned Palme d’Or winner The Class back in 2008, and his latest was only narrowly pipped to the top prize after spending the bulk of the fest as the hot favourite. Set in ’90s France, it orbits a group of HIV/ Aids activists campaigning for the Paris chapter of advocacy group Act Up. Weighty subject matter it may be, but Campillo’s film is an adroit mix of the personal and the political that faultlessly mixes debate and action, humour and tragedy, thanks in part to one of the year’s best ensemble casts.
WIND RIVER
Does anyone write better modern crime thrillers than Taylor Sheridan? Following Sicario and Hell Or High Water, Sheridan also occupies the director’s chair for his latest about a rookie FBI agent (Elizabeth Olson) and a US Fish and Wildlife Service agent (a sombre Jeremy Renner) who investigate the murder of an 18-year-old girl on the titular Indian reservation in beautiful yet remote Wyoming. This atmospheric, hard-bitten noir/revenge-western savours the rhythms and rhymes of its evocative environment before shattering the spell with bouts of explosive violence, and features Renner’s best performance since The Hurt Locker.
YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE
Scooping prizes for Lynne Ramsay’s screenplay and Joaquin Phoenix’s tortured performance, this taut drama is cloaked in the slouch-shouldered shadow of Travis Bickle, as Phoenix’s hitman shambles about New York on his mission to deliver a young girl from her sordid fate. Ramsay has little interest in plot and even less in Hollywood tropes; hers is a film that deconstructs testosteronefuelled thrillers and rubbishes ideas of the male hero. With its disorientating edits, flushed imagery, scuzzy locations and Jonny Greenwood’s cacophonous score, it will stay with you for days.
THE SQUARE
Ruben Östlund’s follow up to the remarkable Force Majeure was this year’s surprise Palme d’Or winner, though its robust merits made it a worthy winner. A satirical comedy centred around a Swedish art gallery whose new centrepiece exhibition, The Square, implores compassion for fellow man as the homeless crisis goes ignored on the streets, it features a knockout performance from Claes Bang (The Bridge), fun supporting turns from Elisabeth Moss and Dominic West, and easily the best scene of the festival, as mocap master Terry Notary goes ape during a dinner party for toffs.