Film Festival Reports

Cannes

CANNES 2019: THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF EURÍDICE GUSMÃO BY KARIM AÏNOUZ

By Mónica Delgado

There’s a marketing fever that considers that every story of women in the festival, is automatically framed in the waves of feminine empowerment of recent times. This of course, happens with The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, the new film of Brazilian Karim Aïnouz, a melodrama about two sisters which are separated by the father because one of them was made pregnant by a Greek sailor. If maybe this is a story about how sexism destroyed the family environment in the fifties, the staging full of conventionalisms and stereotypes about women, knocks down any intention of vindication.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: ATLANTIQUE BY MATI DIOP

By Mónica Delgado

Atlantique’s title makes sense with a turn of the screw, a surprise effect that takes the film out of the love drama to render it as a fantastic one. The sea acquires an oneiric dimension and becomes an element of transit between worlds, of the living and the dead. A young woman if forced to marry someone she doesn’t love, and at the same time, keeps the secret of a love affair. Suddenly, the lover disappears with all the men of the community of Ada’s (Ibrahima Mbaye) friends, in an illegal ship of Senegal, in course to Spain, and after that incident, an ambiance of sad women who just lost their couples sets in.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: LET IT BE LAW, BY JUAN SOLANAS

By Mónica Delgado

A couple of days ago, Juan Solanas’ Que sea ley was presented in a special projection in Cannes, a film which seeks to be a vehicle to achieve a change of mind for the  decriminalization of abortion in Argentina. Through testimonies of victims and showing various positions in interviews to different political actors, Solanas makes a documentary about the mood that permeated the country before the vote against the project in the Argentinian senate.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: A HIDDEN LIFE, BY TERRENCE MALICK

By Mónica Delgado

Again we face a film of the Malick trademark. The elements are all there: atmospheric cameras always in unrest, melancholic voice overs spilling pseudo-existential reflections, and a soundtrack which complete the spiritual elevation of the characters. In Malicks cinema, even a rusty chain, an old broom in a corner or a hairy worm over a letter seems transcendent. So, yes, A hidden life is more of the same.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: PORTRAIT DE LA JEUNE FILLE EN FEU BY CÉLINE SCIAMMA

By Mónica Delgado

Céline Sciamma takes as an inspiration some imaginaries about sisterhood through the times, to appropriate them and return them inside a tal of a lesbian love at the end of XIX century. An abortion, a night gathering of women where they sing and meet around the fire, hallucinogenic potions which are absorbed when scrubbed in the skin appear in different passages of Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, her second film.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: LIBERTÉ BY ALBERT SERRA

By Mónica Delgado

Albert Serra’s Liberté becomes a new semantic for the libertine imaginaries of the XVIII century. In hand with one of the motifs of the tales of Marquis de Sade, to the fantasies of Guillaume Apollinaire, and an installation and play from the own filmmaker, Serra develops in this film a naturalization of the different sexual practices of that particular historical context, to implant them under the shelter of some woods during a whole night and dawn. It’s the practice of decadent cruising for the enjoyment of voyeurists and exhibitionists.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: LA GOMERA BY CORNELIU PORUMBOIU

By Mónica Delgado

Mafias, narcs, a femme fatale, a corrupt policeman, a search for the booty and a paradisiac scenario as classic elements of a police movie or thriller, transformed by Corneliu Porumboiu with a peculiar style and sense of humor. Divided in acts, named by different characters’ names, La Gomera shows two things: a master of cinema in directing and an affirmation that Romanian cinema can go beyond its social realism

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: JEANNE BY BRUNO DUMONT

By Mónica Delgado

I will start with a phrase that is often repeated in this season of Cannes: “this film should’ve been in the official competition”. And it’s that, Bruno Dumont’s Jeanna not only makes an incredible diptych with his last Jeannette, l’enfance de Jeanne d’Arc , but, despite its minimalism and the theatrical diction that unites them, in this new film there’s a more political intention, less mystic, the one of the child Joan of Arc, confronted against the church and the factual powers in XV century France.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS BY PATRICIO GUZMÁN

By Mónica Delgado

As it happens with Nostalgia for the light, the exploration of territory allows e opportunity for historical metaphor, to deepen in the recent memory of Chile. The Atacama Desert as geography is used to compare the vastness of facts that remain unlooked, and as a symbol for waiting: when the night arrives, the secrets of the sky are uncovered, and that allows auscultating for constellations. The reconstruction of history always seems to be waiting a celestial phenomenon to reach justice for thousands of victims.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: LIVING AND KNOWING YOU ARE ALIVE BY ALAIN CAVALIER

By Mónica Delgado

There’s probably no film as intimate in this whole edition of Cannes 2019 like this work about mourning and goodbye. Alain Cavalier, with over eighty years, delivers a film about the last days of writer and script writer Emmanuele Bernheim, a friend of the author with whom he planned to make a film about her memories. This film diary, in the visual style of the most recent Cavalier, starts with reflections about the transit to the next life, and the narrations on how he accompanied his best friend Anne, who he met at 16, in a process of assisted death. And those images that come up through this tale in first person of the filmmaker, will accompany the whole development of the film, made in an artisan way with a very low budget.

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