In “Homeward” a father instructs his son on how to use a knife in a fight, slashing one’s adversary across the thighs and then on the forehead to blind him with blood. They are driving across the Ukraine to Crimea with the corpse of the father’s oldest son to bury him in their homeland. They encounter various difficulties along the way, including being robbed and being denied crossing into Crimea. This somewhat standard fare didn’t take any false steps nor inflate the drama more than necessary giving a glimpse of life in the region.
Knives don’t come into play until the over-the-top climax of “Parasite” by South Korea’s Joon Ho Bong . This cross between last year’s Palm d’Or winner “Shoplifters” and “Wild Tales” of a few years ago intricately plots a family of ne’er-do-wells taking over all the staff positions of a well-to-do family with two children—the chauffeur, house-keeper, tutor and art therapist. One scene was so outrageously choreographed that when a packet of ketchup is squirted on a tissue in a garbage can to imply the housekeeper has TB and is coughing up blood the audience in the Palais burst into applause. This intricately plotted black comedy somewhat deflates with an over-the top blood bath at a child’s birthday party.
This was the first of three days of repeat screenings of all the Competition, Un Certain Regard, Out-of-Competion and Special Screening films. Two that I most wanted to see didn’t fit into my schedule—a documentary on Maradonna and Gaspar Noe’s “Lux Aeterna.” I was able to see however Werner Herzog’s “Family Romance, among the Special Screenings. I had been turned away on my first attempt.
I was third in line this time showing up an hour early for this non-documentary on a service in Japan that provides fill-ins to masquerade as a family member or some other position. The first in this series of vignettes is of a man in a suit meeting a young girl. Her mother has hired him to pretend to be the girl’s father who she had never met. Another of the vignettes is of the same guy being enlisted to serve as the father-of-the-bride at her wedding as her real father is an alcoholic and might prove to be an embarrassment. Herzog must have been torn between making a documentary or a feature of this cultural oddity, but it gave him the chance to break the rut of the many documentaries he’s been making lately.
Another long-time director now in his 80s, Claude Lelouche, was also granted a Special Screening slot for “The Best Years of Our Life’s,” allowing his stars of “A Man and A Woman” from 1966 to reprise their roles with Jean-Louis Trintignant in a nursing home with memory issues visited by Anouk Aimée. Lelouche missed the 50 anniversary of this seminal film despite doing a follow-up in 1986, twenty years after. Trintignant doesn’t recognize Aimée on her first visit, though he says she bears a strong resemblance to the love of his life. On her second visit she greets him with “cou-cou,” an informal “bonjour” that doesn’t turn up very often, just the second time in all the French films I’ve seen this year. There were some quite touching scenes that devotees of Lelouche will embrace and those not enameled with his style will think pandering.
Ralph failed to warn me to skip the nonsensical “Liberté” he’d earlier seen in Un Certain Regard, a film of debauchery taking place in a forest during the French Revolution. The program categorized it as an “experimental film,” one of the few. A woman sitting next to me had the right idea, texting throughout the whole film. If she had been a “Me-tooer” she would have been screaming in outrage at some of the scenes.
Ralph and I were turned away from a climate change documentary produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, who was on hand to introduce it, so we slipped over to the Bunuel for a Cannes Classic, Lina Wertmueller’s renovated “Seven Beauties” from 1975. The 90-year old director was too frail to take to the stage, just rising from her front-row scene to acknowledge standing ovations before and after the film. Her star Giancarlo Giannini spoke a few words in Italian after Thierry Fremaux’s introduction. It was the second film, along with Malick’s, with footage of the Nazis and Hitler. Whenever I indulge in one of these great films from the past, I think I ought to take more advantage of the one or two the festival offers every day.
Three days to go with the first batch of award-winners announced by the Critics Weekly jury. Their selections will screen tomorrow, something to look forward to, along with Xavier Dolan’s film to start the day in the Palais.
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