Cannes Day 3 & 4: UFOs, Malevolent Plants & Elton John

Alistair Ryder: We’re now four days into the festival, and we’re finally beginning to settle in to the daily routine; wake up at 6:30am, queue and watch four movies a day, then spend whatever free time in-between looking for cheap food or a place to write. Ah, the glamour of Cannes. In today’s dispatch, I dig deep into Takashi Miike‘s latest, as well as an unsung gem from the Un Certain Regard lineup, Gus Edgar-Chan takes a close look at the latest competition movies to have premiered, and Maria Lattila joins to review that Elton John biopic you may have heard of.

Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

Gus Edgar-Chan: Kleber Mendonça Filho teams up with Juliano Dornelles for his latest: a genre exercise in colonial revenge and cultural erasure that takes place ‘a few years from now’. And a few years from Aquarius, Filho has taken a surprising new direction: a gutsy, audacious quasi-western that shares the same defiant tone but replaces council spats with blood splats.

Chugging along with a tradition-tinged outrage in the vein of last year’s gun-ho Birds of Passage, the dusty town of Bacurau mourn the loss of one of its members, Carmelita. Following a foreboding ceremony wake, the village contend with a manipulative mayoral candidate, a lack of control over their own water supply, and a UFO-shaped drone in the horizon. Sci-fi is teased before Bacurau grooves into a Rambo-esque rhythm, as the town is taken off the map and its members ticked off a kill list.

If the narrative’s twists and turns never allow its audience a firm grip on proceedings, a strong thematic throughline is maintained, especially as the film threads in a group of multinational gun-for-hires headed by Udo Kier. Killing and f*cking for fun, the bloodshed is a sport for them, and their B-movie machinations pointedly butt heads with the comparatively on-simmer tensions of Bacurau’s village life.

‘We’re not actually here’, remarks Kier, and we may as well be holding the trigger. Filho and Dornelles set their sights on the audience, condemning us for a passive existence; help is needed, but our privilege obfuscates our concerns. Bacurau urges us to take problems elsewhere seriously, even if the film itself veers into the pulpy territory of John Carpenter.

Not everything works: the restlessness screenplay, for all of its entertaining diversions, dilutes the nuances of its message in favour of committing to the genre. And after all the energy put into defying expectations, it’s perhaps a little disappointing to see the exercise end so conventionally.

But I’m all for Filho’s new direction; this is a confident step into unknown territory for him, if not thematically, then at least narratively. His formal flair contributes to the kooky aesthetic, and the ending note of defiance dictates that when the privileged invade, tradition will fight back.

For Sama (Waad al-Kateab & Edward Watts)

Gus Edgar-Chan: How to go about discussing a documentary like For Sama? It feels difficult to review and immoral to criticise, considering what’s presented on screen. It is filmed from the perspective of Waad al-Kateab, a female journalist, and activist, over five years of the uprising in Aleppo. Russians bomb at a constant and the aggressors close in around her hospital base; she stays in the Syrian city to fight for the cause. But then she becomes a mother, and has to reckon and reconcile with staying to help and putting her child in danger.

For Sama is, among other things, video evidence for her daughter, Sama, to help explain why she made that choice. It is also a testament to the power of motherhood, a fierce condemnation of the forces that forsake their humanity for a chance at power, a urgent demonstration of the life that’s worth fighting for, a love letter to a city reduced to rubble, and a necessary female view on the destruction of war.

Sure, the music can be overblown at times, and I do wish al-Kateab had let a few of the images speak for themselves rather than persisting in her narration, but this is visceral, stunning stuff. The images can be gruesome and upsetting—a mother cradles a dead child in her arms and that’s only the film’s third most disturbing moment—yet they’re vital, too. At one point, al-Kateab is urged to keep filming, and the message is clear: these images need to get out there; people need to be aware of the struggle during the Aleppo conflict.

A garden is shelled and the flowers planted by al-Kateab and her heroic husband, a doctor named Hamza, are destroyed. Hamza urges life back into them in vain—it’s easy to link this act back to Sama herself, a symbol of all the young lives staring death in the face during the rebellion. To some of these kids, Aleppo under fire is all they have known; a boy cries about how all his friends have fled the city and deserted him, while another pleads for a bedtime story about a man who was shelled. They make playgrounds out of burned vehicles, swimming pools out of burst pipes.

This normalisation of extreme circumstances is harrowing, but it is also life-affirming. The people documented joke around, paint each other’s faces, fall in love. We are reminded that our humanity remains intact in spite of carnage; no-one deserves this fate.

And at For Sama’s centre is another love story, one that would be melodramatic if it weren’t all real. al-Kateab and Hamza fall for each other, marry, and have a child. They try to sustain both their personal and professional lives, even as fire rains down from above. It’s distressing, angry, vital and hopeful. For Sama has the staggering weight of a potent war epic, but without any of the artifice.

The Swallows of Kabul (Zabou Breitman & Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec)

Alistair Ryder: Adapted from Yasmina Khadra’s best seller, The Swallows of Kabul vividly captures the horror of life under Sharia Law, packing such a visceral punch in its drama that it’s often easy to forget you’re watching a beautiful work of hand drawn animation. For those who saw The Breadwinner, the similarly themed animation from Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, it’s easy to see why this material may feel too familiar and suffer in comparison, even if it is adapted from a well known source of its own. Thankfully, co-directors Zabou Breitman and Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec aren’t trying to tone down the nature of the horrors to appease a potential younger audience, and from the opening moments bluntly depict the harrowing realities of life under Taliban rule.

For those not familiar with the source material, the story is simple; in the late 90’s, in the capital of Afghanistan, the Taliban have come to power and nobody knows what the future holds. Mohsen (voiced by Swann Arlaud) and his wife Zunaira (Zita Hanrot) hold on to the naive belief that things can get back to how they were, but circumstances have changed dramatically – rules pervade every inch of their daily lives, that causes fractures in their happy coupledom. Zunaira is eventually imprisoned and sentenced to a public execution, but while behind bars she catches the eye of prison warden Atiq (Simon Abkarian). He slowly becomes obsessed with the weak justifications he’s given as to why she deserves the death penalty and decides to quietly take matters into his own hands.

One of the film’s most arresting images takes place in the opening moments; a woman being stoned to death by braying crowds, a laughing child among those throwing rocks, the blood pooling out of the material as she finally collapses. The horrors of life under such an authoritarian regime are all vividly captured, created to make the audience wince as much as they would in a live action film within the same setting. The film also has echoes of a ghost story outside of its haunting, blunt-force violence, as the characters haunted by a past they can no longer retreat to; the burnt out school and town landmarks like the abandoned cinema appear like artefacts from a distant history that can no longer be repeated once society loses its innocence.

The Swallows of Kabul is a haunting, harrowing drama – beautifully hand drawn, and yet so unflinching in the horrors it portrays, you might start forgetting this is a mere animated feature.

Atlantics (Mati Diop)

Gus Edgar-Chan: Continuing the Cannes Competition’s timely fascination with revenge and revolution is Mati Diop’s Atlantics, a muddled ghost story-cum-romance that nevertheless boasts fleeting moments of powerful lyricism.

The film takes place in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, where unpaid construction workers, building a futuristic tower, have decided to flee the country by boat in search of a life free from corruption. Among those workers is Souleimane (Ibrahima Traore), and among those left behind is his lover, Ada (Mame Bineta Sane). Ada, grieving Souleimane’s absence, is due to be wedded to another, and we follow her along her disastrous wedding night and subsequent period of immense longing.

And that sense of longing is felt in the many shots of Senegal’s expansive ocean, sprayed with hues, fog roiling the waters. The sea is a calling, a means of escape, but also a symbol of uncertainty. Ada and Souleimane only spend a brief moment together before he departs, but his absence hangs heavily over the film’s narrative.

Until it doesn’t. Diop decides to take a turn into supernatural fantasy that draws the film’s political outrage to the forefront, but possesses little in the way of internal logic—and, more importantly, loses sight of its Romeo and Juliet-style romance.

Atlantics’ tranquil waters turn choppy; the film fudges its slow-burn intrigue in attempting to fuse the power of love to a police procedural mystery, a ghost story, a sociopolitical polemic and a meditation on a country’s past, present and future. The talent is there—Diop’s eye for imagery is especially notable, basking faces in moonlight and dotting her characters in neon green—but she’s wrestling with too much material.

In turn, each plane the film is operating on feels undernourished; a bipolar mood piece, or discordant tone poem. By the time the film circles back around to the romance, it has receded to cloying star-crossed lovers schtick.

Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach)

Maria Lattila: Ken Loach is a Cannes darling. His bleakly realistic British films have always received a warm welcome at the festival and Sorry We Missed You doesn’t seem to diverge from that. After tackling the unfairness of the benefits system in the Palme D’Or winning I, Daniel Blake, Loach takes on zero-hour contracts in his latest film.

Ricky Turner (Kris Hitchen) believes he’s just got the big break of his life. A van driver for a big delivery company, he is made to believe that he is essentially his own boss and a franchise owner. It doesn’t take long for Ricky to notice that the job is brutal, from impossible ‘precisors’ to the inability to take off leave. One of the fellow drivers even passes Ricky a bottle for peeing because you simply won’t have time to find a proper restroom. Ricky’s wife Abby agrees to sell her car to fund his own van and is left taking buses to the elderly people she cares for. The decision our characters make at the beginning of the film, as well as throughout, have disastrous consequences for their entire family.

If you’re not a Ken Loach fan, Sorry We Missed You won’t convert you, but it’s undeniably accurate in its portrayal of the insanity of zero-hour contracts. Ricky and Abby are essentially working themselves to death and at what price? Their whole family starts to unravel dangerously fast, but the parents are too busy working to do anything to stop this.

The film’s biggest strength is Loach’s ability to depict the mundane and authentic life of its characters. Sorry We Missed You is constantly painfully relatable and it makes you forget you’re watching a carefully crafted and edited fictional narrative. The film covers a lot of ground, touching upon many contemporary Britain’s problems from the aforementioned zero hour contracts to the status of nurses, teenage rebellion, with subtle digs at NHS wait times and consumerism.

Sorry We Missed You is a new high for Ken Loach. The film’s ending offers no resolution for the characters or us, making it one of the most heartbreaking and tragic endings we’ve seen lately. Featuring fantastic performances, especially from Kris Hitchin and Katie Proctor, who plays the family’s daughter caught in the middle, Sorry We Missed You is a must-see film for anyone who has ever had a crappy job.

Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)

Gus Edgar-Chan: Once again absent from Cannes’ official selection is Bertrand Bonello, whose genre bender Zombi Child haunts the parallel Directors’ Fortnight section instead. Their loss: Bonello’s latest is terrific, probing problematic subject matter in a provocative, evocative, and entirely empathetic way (House of Tolerance dealt with prostitution and Nocturama with terrorism; here, among other things, cultural appropriation gets its time in the Haitian sun).

Zombi Child opens with the 1960s tale of Clairvius Narcisse (Bijou Mackenson), a Haitian man zombified via ritual and made to slave away among the sugarcane. This is then juxtaposed with present day Paris, where the literary sorority of an elite girls school recruit Melissa (Wislanda Louimat), befriend her, and inevitably gawk at her voodoo heritage. Of course, there are the usual Bonello ruminations on pop culture, teenage desire, and the force of the past and its degradation in modern society, but Zombi Child blankets these ideas in chilling genre fare that eventually rises to the forefront.

The present day perspective does not, in fact, belong to Melissa, but to Fanny (Louise Labeque), a classmate whose lovestruck crooning to an absent boyfriend provides the film with one-sided voiceover. Pointedly, Melissa is viewed through Fanny’s lily-white lens, this racial dynamic feeding into Zombi Child’s mullings on appropriation; the girls sing along to French rap and strip away its meaning, much like a Willow Smith track playing over images of a burning city in Nocturama.

This temporal slicing, between present day Paris and 1960s Haiti, isn’t simply used as shorthand for cultural decay. Bonello presents the two opposing timelines without judgement: Haiti contains dense, lush jungle imagery, its dark palette and lively sound design at odds with the pristine, refined halls of the academy. The two periods share rituals, too, the schoolgirls arching their backs to greet their headmaster. Unlike the professors, who treat a single perspective on France’s colonialist history as fact, Bonello refuses to make his own intentions so opaque.

This all culminates in Fanny seeking out the help of Melissa’s aunt, a Mamba, or voodoo priestess. She wishes to cure her heartbreak, and if this act is insincere and inconsiderate—the shallow whims of an impulsive teenager reckoning with the immense history of an entire Creole culture—Bonello makes no attempt to belittle her. The resulting fare plunges into shocking horror and Fanny is caught cold; she slinks back to her bed, traumatised.

Melissa, during all of this, explains her ancestral roots to the sorority, drawing her closer to the group and their dynamic. And as Clairvius Narcisse, back in Haiti, rediscovers his old life and shambles back to a lost love, Melissa, too, reclaims her heritage. Bonello’s film is slippery, elusive, and utterly transfixing. Applying a horror underpinning to dual tales of colonial discourse and cultural appropriation, the errors of the past and the deep-rooted identities of the present are beginning to awake from their slumber.

Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher)

Maria Lattila: Rocketman has a lot riding on its glitzy back. The inevitable comparisons to Bohemian Rhapsody are ever-present while watching and reviewing the film, mainly because of director Dexter Fletcher’s involvement in both: being brought in to finish production on BoRhap, which went on to win several controversial awards. Although Fletcher’s name does not appear as the director, he is forever associated with BoRhap. The question lingering in the air before heading into Rocketman is: could Fletcher not fix BoRhap because he’s not good at his job or was BoRhap simply beyond fixing?

Good news! Rocketman is a good film and Fletcher shows he’s the real deal. Following young Reginald Dwight as he eventually transforms into the one and only Elton John, Fletcher’s film seems to have bit more than it can chew on. It’s ambitious to even attempt to bring the story of a living legend on screen, but Fletcher dives head first into the crazy life of Elton and makes the most of it.

Wisely, Fletcher decides to go all out with Rocketman; it’s a sparkly and wild ride, full of glitter and big musical numbers. This is no A Star Is Born, but an old-school musical where the musical numbers intrude our everyday life and it’s all a bit more magical for it. It’s a delightful film that also doesn’t shy away from the more questionable aspects of his life.

The film’s only issue is it attempts to cover so much ground that it all falls a bit flat. Everything is big and colourful, so much so that nothing stands out by the end. Issues like John’s drug abuse and orgies become somehow muddled and the full impact of these just doesn’t land like it’s meant to.

Taron Egerton gives a career-defining performance as Elton John. He is fierce and fearless in his portrayal of John and never downplays his ugly qualities. At times John acts like an obnoxious diva, but Egerton always grounds it in tragedy and heartbreak. Richard Madden is delicious as John’s love interest and the film’s eventual villain; John Reid and he and Egerton share great chemistry. Their first sex scene is gentle and kind, quite lovely in fact. Unfortunately Fletcher’s film moves so fast that Madden isn’t given enough time to develop his character beyond villainous caricature. Overall, Rocketman is a real winner though and proves Fletcher still has it.

First Love (Takashi Miike)

Alistair Ryder: Although he’s no longer making films as extreme as Visitor Q or Ichi the Killer, Takashi Miike could never be accused of mellowing with old age. More than 100 features into his filmography, and he’s still capable of creating wild, hyper violent genre films that contain multiple images no other filmmaker could have possibly conceived, let alone filmed with delirious glee. First Love sees Miike play to his most surreal, violent impulses, but transforms them into an unexpected crowdpleaser – audiences will not be rushing to the nearest sick bag in revulsion, as he’s instead crafted what could be the bloodiest slapstick comedy in the genre’s history.

The set-up is a deceptively complex criminal underworld tale, but this table setting is thankfully over by the 20 minute mark. Boxer Leo (Masataka Kubota) is informed that he only has weeks to live after a harsh blow at a boxing match. On the walk home from the neurosurgeon, he sees a woman running and crying for help – this is call girl Monica (played by J-pop star Becky), who is involved in a drug smuggling scheme that Leo unwittingly finds himself involved in when he comes to her help. Over the course of one night, he aims to protect Monica against corrupt cops, the Yakuza, and Chinese triad gangs, while Monica deals with surreal visions of her father chasing her, dressed in only his underpants.

Once the pieces are in place, the tribal associations of characters become an immediate irrelevance. After all, they exist only to cater for relentless mayhem, from decapitations to the recurring sight of a middle aged man in his Y-fronts dancing to the film’s score. It’s one of Miike’s more accessible films, turning his darkest quirks into something more tangible for the casual audience, without toning down the absurd places his story leads to – there are stages where it feels like an odd Japanese cousin to a Coen Brothers thriller, where all the carnage is a result of mounting bad decisions. It’s the sort of film that, had he made it earlier in his career, would be a perfect warm up for anybody prepared to seek out his more nihilistic works, but now, feels like a great reminder as to why we love his brand of insanity in the first place.

Little Joe (Jessica Hausner)

Gus Edgar-Chan: Happiness is a commodity in Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe, a plant-based parable that plays its hand too early. Emily Beecham’s Alice is a careless plant breeder, who mothers her genetically-modified flowers—designed to give off a scent that makes you happy—in place of her son, Joe (Kit Connor), with whom she has a strained relationship.

These unassuming little plants are more malevolent than at first seems, though that may have been obvious from the discordant percussionist score, roving camera and sterile lab-set stylisations, which leave the imprints of a horror movie. And there are some thrillingly tense moments, kickstarted when Alice takes the flower – symbolically named ‘Little Joe’ – home for her son to cheer him up. But Hausner’s film is sluggish, repetitive, and strangely judgemental—in its analogy on anti-depressants, its assertion that the point of life it so reproduce, and its GMO fear-mongering.

People who inhale the plant seem to change, but stay the same – acting like themselves rather than being themselves. It’s a tone-deaf comparison to make to anti-depressants, and any ambiguity on whether the film condemns this change for the sake of happiness falls to the wayside as those affected by the plant commit acts of increasing malevolence. ‘It’s better to be true to yourself’, insists Alice’s therapist towards the end, the line as careless as it is hamfisted.

Little Joe manages to squander its ambiguity at all angles, in fact, draining this genre thriller of its chill. Perhaps a better film would not show its characters inhaling the plants’ pollen, leaving whether they have actually changed open-ended. Instead, we know right from the off that the plants are indeed affecting the protagonists, and so any instance where people attempt to convince Alice that she’s deluded—and any potential to interrogate themes on growing up, changing, and mental illness—become meaningless. In turn, there’s no dramatic impetus whatsoever; Little Joe becomes a series of dull, repetitive moments, with a cacophonous score trying to find the pulse and a misguided take on anti-depressants flatlining it completely. A huge whiff.