HITS AND MISSES FROM THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL ...
THE 72nd Cannes Film Festival has been a triumph, on the whole, with some really terrific new films competing for the coveted Palme d’Or.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time . . . In Hollywood, which I reviewed in Wednesday’s paper, is a beguilingly funny, playful love-letter to his own industry, and to the films and TV shows he adored as a child.
But he also means it as a cinematic form of vengeance, against the addled murderers of Sharon Tate and her friends one awful night in August 1969.
The two leads are Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, both wonderful. DiCaprio plays a TV cowboy, an actor who feels that his career is ebbing away, with Pitt as his stunt double, employee and best friend. Significantly, DiCaprio’s character, Rick Dalton, has new next-door neighbours: Tate (Margot Robbie) and her film director husband Roman Polanski.
The story covers a six-month period from February 1969, and leads us towards that August slaughter but with so many entertaining tangents on the way that it’s easy to forget what’s coming, or what we think is coming. Tarantino’s last two features,
the Hateful Eight (2015) and Django Unchained (2012), both had streaks of brilliance without being anywhere near masterpieces. I think this picture reasserts his genius as a film-maker.
There are those who think Ken Loach a genius, others who think his films terminally dreary, and infected by his left-wing agenda to their detriment. But Sorry We Missed You is his best for years, a really moving, absorbing story of a couple in Newcastle who are struggling to reconcile the demands of working full-time in zero-hour contract jobs — him as a delivery driver, her as a nurse — with their responsibilities as parents.
Yes, it is politically charged; Loach’s films always are. But it doesn’t feel like a socialist manifesto, as the over-praised I, Daniel Blake rather did.
What will win? Predictions at Cannes are notoriously difficult, but I wouldn’t be astonished to see the great Spanish director Pedro Almodovar get a prize for his film Pain And Glory, a sweet, lyrical and, one presumes, semiautobiographical tale of a movie director (beautifully played by Antonio Banderas) in the grip of a late mid-life crisis but sustained by memories of childhood and long-ago love.
The Festival’s big disappointment, for me, was Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe, a kind of psychological horror film starring Emily Beecham, Ben Whishaw and Lindsay Duncan, about laboratory- raised plants which begin to infect human brains. It simply didn’t engage, compel, scare or provoke, on any level.
But I liked Young Ahmed, a quietly intense and timely Belgian film about a Muslim boy who becomes radicalised and tries to kill his teacher.
I also admired many aspects of Terrence Malick’s stirring, if overlong, A Hidden Life, based on the true story of an Austrian farmer who was conscripted into the German army but refused to swear an oath to Hitler and was executed.
If the Cannes jury had a word with me on the QT, however, I’d say give the Palme d’Or to QT. A quarter of a century since he won for Pulp Fiction, this should be Tarantino’s year again.