- Cannes 2026: John Lennon: The Last Interview, La Libertad Doble (May 17, 2026)
The afternoon of the day he was killed in 1980, John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, sat for a radio interview at their apartment in the Dakota in New York. The ostensible subject was their new album, Double Fantasy, but the conversation was expansive. It included reflections on how they met, their artistic temperaments, and their feelings about their lives together and parenthood.
The audio recording forms the spine of “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” a documentary by Steven Soderbergh selected for Cannes’s Special Screenings section. Soderbergh told Deadline that he had to abridge the interview for running-time purposes but nevertheless preserved its chronology and flow.
Although the reporters speaking to Lennon and Ono were told that questions about the Beatles were off-limits, Lennon doesn’t seem to have been shy about the subject. He describes Paul McCartney as the only Beatle he picked as his partner (George came through Paul and Ringo came through George); how his experiments with “freaky music” worked their way into songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” (apparently a night of playing with tapes and making sounds marked a pivotal step in his and Ono’s courtship); and how he had lived the boyhood dream of being Elvis, a stage he sounds eager to move past. He explains the difference between composing on assignment—not his preferred mode—and genuine inspiration.
Most of the discussion is accompanied by conventional archival footage. Soderbergh also shot a group interview with the three still-starstruck reporters—Laurie Kaye, Ron Hummel, and Dave Sholin—who were there asking the questions. These talking-head interludes are perfunctory, but their trio’s recollections set the scene well. Among other details, we learn that care was taken to use a special audio setup involving chromium dioxide tape so as to be minimally disruptive, since the three of them were intruding in Lennon and Ono’s home.
The twist is that Soderbergh, in collaboration with the film’s presenter and “technology partner” Meta, has used A.I.-generated imagery to accompany passages in which Lennon and Ono turned philosophical, meaning that there weren’t obvious photographs or clips that could be wedded to their words.
Soderbergh has taken to calling the resulting imagery “thematic surrealism,” which seems like an intellectualized way of saying that the art created with A.I. almost invariably looks bogus and wrong. Whether Lennon and Ono’s deeply personal musings really needed to be accompanied by such patently inhuman imagery as a baby walking through a misty hallway or a caveman winking by a fire is, perhaps, the subject for a very short debate. But “John Lennon: The Last Interview” is far from the first documentary to have the problem of needing to match pictures to dialogue. It may be the first to solve that problem by resorting to technologically trendy clip art.
By contrast, the minimalist Argentine director Lisandro Alonso’s “La Libertad Doble” (in Directors’ Fortnight) has a bracing commitment to the real. (Indeed, it opens with a shot of an actual man at a campfire, eating meat with a knife.) In outline, the film is both a follow-up to and a rethinking of Alonso’s first feature, “La Libertad” (2001). But Alonso noted at the Q&A that relatively few people saw that film (myself included—my first Alonso was “Los Muertos” from 2004), and that he felt “La Libertad Doble” could be watched as a standalone work.
Like “La Libertad,” “La Libertad Doble” focuses on Misael Saavedra, a woodcutter in Argentina’s La Pampa province who plays a version of himself. If the actress Tao Okamoto in “All of a Sudden” stole the festival a couple of days ago simply by delivering a lecture at a white board, Misael (character, actor, or perhaps both) achieves a similar feat: There’s something disarmingly peaceful about a watching a lone man in a Mets hat saw branches at great length. Alonso’s careful attention to duration, framing, and especially sound transform the mundane into the sublime.
The way Alonso attunes viewers to Misael’s routine also turns out to serve a dramatic purpose. We learn that Misael has a sister, Micaela (Catalina Saavedra, who, despite her last name, is not related to Misael in real life), who has spent most of her life in asylums and may have a habit of wandering off. The rural center where she is living now is closing because of a lack of funds and discharging all its patients, regardless of their treatment regimens. That leaves Micaela with no alternative but to join Misael in his largely solitary lifestyle in nature. (One of the film’s small laughs occurs when Misael is told that Micaela likes to water plants. “Are there plants where you are going?” he is asked.)
From this appalling situation, Alonso shows two siblings finding their element together: Misael gently corrects Micaela on types of birds. She learns the pleasures of interacting with moss and sunlight. Without much fuss, Misael accommodates Micaela in what little space he has. (She takes his bed in his hut; he opts for a sleeping bag outdoors.) Wind, light, and—toward the end—a bit of mystery help make “La Libertad Doble” one of the festival’s loveliest films.
- Cannes 2026: Paper Tiger, Sheep in the Box (May 17, 2026)
There’s a rot in the foundation of the American Dream in James Gray’s very good “Paper Tiger,” a return to familiar territory that echoes his early films like “The Yards” and “We Own the Night” but with an even stronger current of doomed melancholy. The waters that flow through this section of 1986 New York are quite literally polluted, and the corruption that’s working its way downstream is washing average families away in its sludge.
From the minute that Gary Pearl (Adam Driver) shows up at his brother Irwin’s (Miles Teller) home in the first scene of “Paper Tiger,” we know things aren’t going to end well. Driver gives Gary a sense of dangerous confidence, the kind of classic movie character who overestimates his skill to get out of a deadly situation and underestimates his enemy’s determination to trap him. However, Driver refuses to lean into what could have been the exaggerated hyperactivity of this character, finding the truth in it instead of the clichéd fidgety nature that often typifies this role. He’s a problem solver faced with a gigantic problem.
It starts when Gary suggests that Alan come aboard a new construction consulting firm this ex-cop is starting. New work along the Gowanus Canal has led to a sort of Wild West approach to regulations, and Gary wants to bring the levelheaded Alan on to consult with companies who want to avoid the authorities, either by doing things legally, or just hiding them the right way. He warns him that they’re walking into the criminal underworld and they need to step lightly as they do. Let the street-smart Gary do the talking; he knows how to deal with these people.
After a consultation goes so well that Alan comes home with $10k in his pocket, he makes the mistake of bringing his two sons down to the worksite at night, noticing that an excavator is in a position that could get his new clients in trouble. When he walks into something clearly illegal, he pushes the domino on a sequence of events that can only lead to tragedy. Before you know it, Alan’s entire family is being threatened, including wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson).
Not only have we seen films like this before, but from Gray himself, so instead of operating as a straightforward thriller, “Paper Tiger” feels more like a study in inevitable destruction. As Gary tries to save his brother, he gets sucked deeper into the sludge himself. We know at least one of these brothers isn’t going to make it out of this alive; the only questions are who and how.
Gray directs Driver and Teller to two of the best performances of their individual careers. Driver gets the showier role: the kind of guy who brings caterers carrying Peter Luger’s over to his brother’s house and doesn’t hesitate to let his nephews see the gun he carries in his sock. And yet it’s more subtle than it sounds as Driver injects increasingly louder notes of despair into the bravado.
Teller gets the part Keitel might have played in the ‘80s: a more subdued family man who is willing to fight for his loved ones but might not know the rules of the brawl. Johansson’s work has been as divisive as any performance at Cannes this year with some saying it’s among her best and some calling it an embarrassment. (I’ve seen both Oscar and Razzie predictions.) I’m more in the middle, but where you land may come down to your tolerance for big wigs and accents.
Other than Driver’s work, what strikes me the most about “Paper Tiger” is the robust filmmaking. Gray reunites with Joaquin Baca-Asay to give the film a tight, sweaty visual language, full of fretful close-ups when it needs to be but also so confidently blocked in the wide shots. There’s a sequence in the climax of the film along a roadside that is an all-timer, perfectly directed, shot, and edited in a way that makes it feel like the closing scene of a classic noir.
I also think there’s a richer subtext to “Paper Tiger” than its simple narrative might have its critics believe. Once again, it feels like a personal film for Gray, going back exactly four decades to a time when the potential of the American Dream could be destroyed by a man trying to do the right thing. It’s an old-fashioned tale of a good man decimated by two twists of fate: a night visit to a job and a diagnosis involving his wife over which he had even less control. In that sense, it’s about how we can do our best to work and strive and plan, only for it all to come apart like tissue paper.
The biggest disappointment of the early part of Cannes this year has to be Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Sheep in the Box,” a film that fits snugly into this masterful filmmaker’s history of tales of unusual families but does so in a way that’s almost aggressively inert, so drained of emotion that it collapses when it tries to be heartfelt in its syrupy final act. It’s as if Kore-eda looked at the criticisms of Spielberg’s “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” and tried so hard to avoid sentimentality that he drained his project of all of its heart and blood. This is an oppressively sterile piece of filmmaking, one that’s so determined not to be melodramatic that it forgets to be anything at all.
Kensuke (Daigo) and Otone (Haruka Ayase) are still deep in the grieving process of the death of their young son when she receives an outreach from a company called ReBirth. They offer an incredible product for people not ready to say goodbye: An android version of their child. In this “Black Mirror”-esque concept, the new Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki) has been programmed with many of the interests of the original (especially trains, a Kore-eda motif) but he also has a few technical requirements like not being able to go far from mom and dad, and needing charging by sitting on a chair. He also doesn’t need to eat and can’t get wet. Yes, it sounds slightly terrifying, and Kensuke is admittedly reticent (he calls it a Roomba), but it feels like Otone needs this. It’s not forever; maybe it’s just a chance to say goodbye.
Kore-eda has been making films about unusual families for most of his career from the abandoned children of “Nobody Knows” to the outsiders of “Shoplifters” and “Broker.” So it makes sense that this concept would appeal to him: Can a broken family be repaired by technology? The problem is that he seems unwilling to really grapple with the ideas at the center of this drama. He’s such a deeply humanist filmmaker that he finds nice beats with his performers, especially Ayase, but it feels almost like he was hoping the story would find philosophical registers organically that it just never does.
By the time that Kore-eda decides he needs to turn up the saccharine score in his multiple endings to try to provoke an emotional response, “Sheep in the Box” has totally lost its meaning. It’s not really a cautionary tale about trying to stall the natural progression of grief as much as a half-baked thought experiment. There needs to be more blood flowing under the surface of a film about grieving parents getting to spend time with their dead child again. It may be intentional given the subject matter, but this movie has no soul.
- Cannes 2026: The Beloved, A Woman’s Life, Gentle Monster (May 17, 2026)
Bad parents is the theme of this Cannes dispatch, which features three films in competition. Each work is also from an accomplished director, which makes a couple of the misses in this write-up all the more incomprehensible because, on paper, these should have been fairly strong titles. Instead, the competition at Cannes appears to be getting off to a very slow start. But nevermind that handwringing. Let’s start with something interesting.
Legendary Spanish director Estaban Martínez (Javier Bardem) is returning to film in his home country for the first time in fifteen years. The film is a Fuerteventura-shot period piece set in 1930s Western Sahara entitled “Desert,” whose script has the meaty role of Gabriella, the wife of the lead. Esteban believes his estranged daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo) is perfect for the part. His proof? He watched her on a trash television series and he believes she did more than the material offered. Bringing Emilia onto such a high-stakes production carries its own landmines: Charges of nepotism, Emilia’s stained memories of Esteban’s drunkenness and his abandonment of her, and the pain her mother, a former actress, endured on Esteban’s breakout debut.
In Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s visually appealing father-daughter drama “The Beloved,” Esteban and Emilia use the film to negotiate their fraught relationship to uneven results. See, “The Beloved” has plenty of ideas swirling around. First off, does Esteban actually believe Emilia is a good actress or is this simply an easy way for him to make amends? Is he actually remorseful? What is the responsibility of a director as leader and visionary? The film uses the pair’s shared memories, often with conflicting reflections of what actually happened—Esteban and Emilia argue over lunch whether Esteban got them kicked out of a screening of “Kill Bill 2” when she was a kid—to embellish the potential drama surrounding each question. But no matter how much Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña’s script brings these themes up, they never quite tie them together.
Instead, we’re left to admire the picture’s visual acumen, and the actorly prowess on display. Thankfully, both are quite captivating. Sorogoyen and cinematographer Álex de Pablo freely switch aesthetics, capturing Esteban or Emilia in black and white during serious conversations, alternating to camcorder footage for psychologically complex scenes, and moving to film whenever an actual scene is being shot on set. The visual approach intimates how blurred the boundary is between Esteban and Emilia’s roles as father and daughter, director and actress, friend and enemy. That is, they’re never truly in one another’s reality. Luengo navigates that ambiguity well, melting into knotty expressions and complex postures depending on whether Emilia feels safe or traumatized. Bardem gives an equally captivating performance, dancing on the edge of madness in one scene, the film’s best, when Esteban demands a take be repeated to the point of making one of the child actors cry.
Though “The Beloved” never quite gets on the wavelength of its actors, the many threads it leaves blowing in the wind are enchanting enough to make Sorogoyen’s film a paralyzing watch.
Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “A Woman’s Life” should be the death knell for chapters in movies. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes using chapters can allow for threads and parallels to be more readily discernible, and sometimes rendered in richer contexts. They can also have a rhythmic quality, which can be broken for effect. But quite often they can unnecessarily pull one out of a story that requires immersion. Such is the case with “A Woman’s Life,” which follows the anxieties of a haggard surgeon, Gabrielle (Léa Drucker), over the course of twelve parts.
During these segments, which border on being vignettes, we bounce, along with Gabrielle, away and toward the loved ones who fall in and out of her orbit. Frida (Mélanie Thierry), an author, observes Gabrielle for a novel she’s writing. Their relationship soon becomes much more. Gabrielle’s husband feels unappreciated, while her mother is declining from Alzheimer’s. The government is also cutting back on the funding for Gabrielle’s clinic even while she plans to move everyone to brand new facilities, an upheaval that puts a strain on her personal and professional relationships. In some sense, these many parts should add up to an intriguing whole about a 50-year-old woman working to figure out the next phase of her life when the stability of the prior decades begin to erode.
But that doesn’t successfully happen in this movie. While “A Woman’s Life” is competently, and at times beautifully shot, particularly as it moves through verdant landscapes and a lyrical ballet, each part is too hemmed in for a specific purpose to form an enchanting tapestry. Each fragile character and agitated moment is so overtly calibrated toward a specific effect that, when mixed with the stop-and-go motion of the chapters, it feels as though we’re ticking off boxes to the narrative rather than being swept away by it. And while Drucker is as engaging as always—particularly in one scene with a patient that might be the most human moment of this robotically conceived film—even she’s not enough to breathe life into a picture whose narrative writing and structure zaps any intended pathos.
There’s a great movie lurking at the heart of writer/director Marie Kreutzer’s morally inert drama “Gentle Monster.” The film, by all indications, was inspired by a 2023 scandal that involved Kreutzer learning that Florian Teichtmeister, her actor from “Corsage,” was charged with possession of child pornagraphy. With that in mind, it’s tricky to make a movie about that level of betrayal and surprise so close to the aftermath of the event. There’s one exchange in the film, in fact, whereby the protagonist, a pianist, is told to seek therapy only for her to respond that the piano is like talking to someone. From that moment, one can assume Kreutzer sees film as a similarly effective method for processing her worries and regrets.
For that reason, “Gentle Monster” never quite pushes itself as far as its premise promises. An abbreviated montage introduces us to the songwriter and pianist Lucy (Léa Seydoux) and her filmmaker husband Philip (Laurence Rupp). While working on her music, she finds Philip hyperventilating in the sterile hallway of their home. The couple later decide to move with their young son Johnny (Malo Blanchet) to the furtive countryside where they can reset and unplug. It’s a quaint existence interrupted by the arrival of detective Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase), who’s armed with a search warrant for Philip’s hard drives and flash drives. Philip immediately becomes a shivering mess, and whether Lucy wants to accept the score or not, the audience can pretty much assume his guilt.
Consequently, the primary dramatic engine pushing “Gentle Monster” forward isn’t commanded by any procedural mechanics. This is a film about processing what it means to discover that the person you thought you knew and trusted might actually be a monster. Kreutzer explores that debilitating thought through two arcs: the first being Lucy coming to terms with reality, and the second being a subplot involving Kühn’s touchy father. Both are meant to be commentaries about the ways society and even women can perpetuate the violence of men. But it ultimately loses its bite when those observations don’t lead to personal discoveries. Instead, we’re offered little more than a well-shot sequencing of events that struggles to dig as deep as the complicated subject and character deserve.
The film in that sense is a notable step down from “Corsage,” particularly because it’s not as tightly calibrated. There are several false endings, instances of jumping backwards and forwards in time, and on-the-nose conversations, such as the one between Lucy and her mother (Catherine Deneuve), that merely roll us from distraction to another. Conversely, there are other moments that aren’t commented upon enough, like when a psychologist explains to Lucy why pedophiles are the way they are. Rather than further exploring that thought, the film becomes consumed by a mystery that isn’t all that mysterious. And by the time we’re halfway through the film’s meandering second hour, it truly feels like Kreutzer doesn’t know where she wants to take her film, making one wish she spent more years fleshing out her own feelings rather than haphazardly translating them into her art.
- Cannes 2026: Clarissa, Atonement, Butterfly Jam (May 16, 2026)
The Director’s Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival has become a target of debate in recent years, sometimes viewed as “the films that didn’t get into the main Cannes program.” While it may be true for a few films, there’s a lot of quality in DF, not only exemplified by the excellent clip reel of films that have played in this program over the years but just last year in a diverse slate that included standouts like “Miroirs No. 3,” “Yes,” and “Dangerous Animals.” And this year’s program boasts one of the best films of Cannes 2026, a subtle drama that has already been picked up by Neon. The first few days of 2026 revealed a second standout already; we’ll talk about the third film in this dispatch, widely considered the worst of the fest so far, later.
Let’s start at the top with Arie and Chuko Esiri’s confident “Clarissa,” a film with a tender, sensual visual language that also boasts some heady ideas about the ripple effect of colonialism. Working from the narrative of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the directors of “Eyimofe: This is My Desire” deftly navigate multiple character arcs across two time periods, not only never losing the emotional and intellectual threads of the piece but enhancing them through their craft. They’re also phenomenal directors of performance, guiding an ensemble that will surely be among my favorites of the year. There’s not a false note from a single cast member, from the ones you recognize to the new faces.
Sophie Okonedo (also so great in the upcoming “Mouse”) plays Clarissa, a wealthy women in a conflicted Nigeria, where violence breaks out daily but far away from her palatial Lagos estate. That’s where she plans to host a party, and much of “Clarissa” sees her ordering her staff around to make sure it goes off perfectly. While the party is being prepared, familiar faces spring back into Clarissa’s life, including the deeply melancholic Peter (a heartbreaking David Oyelowo), who has never gotten over the unrequited love he felt for Clarissa decades earlier. Clarissa is married to the stable-but-boring Richard (Jude Akuwudike), and one senses early on that she settled for stability over passion, but it wasn’t really with Peter, but with a girl named Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who also finds her way to the party after dropping her child off for a trip at the nearby airport.
“Clarissa” flashes back to the early days of these upper-class potential lovers, and the Esiris do a better job of casting parallel performers than I’ve seen in years. Forget de-aging; just find a casting director who’s this good. Young Clarissa is played by the captivating India Amarteifio, who a young Sally (Ayo Edebiri) clocks as pretty snobbish from a young age. Clarissa is dating Peter (Toheeb Jimoh, using that Sam charm from “Ted Lasso” effect as an emotional weapon), who wants to be a writer but withers under her criticisms.
Against this backdrop of young intellectuals who would become Nigerian elites that mingle with the leaders of the region at fancy parties, we meet a soldier named Septimus (Fortune Nwafor, a Lagos actor with a bright future who appeared in the Esiri’s last film). Septimus is faced with dwindling supplies and shaky leadership before he’s struck by a traumatic event that shapes his future in a way that the Clarissas of the world don’t have to consider.
From the beginning, Jonathan Bloom’s cinematography is practically another character in this remarkable ensemble. The camera lingers on river water, dewy grass, and blowing sand, transporting us to the region instead of just filming it. He often shoots through panes of glass in Clarissa’s house, giving us the sense of eavesdropping and framing characters like a widescreen image within the image. It’s not a showy visual language, but it’s a poetic one that adds so much veracity to the entire production.
Of course, that wouldn’t work without the grounded, subtle performances. Okonedo conveys only glimmers of regret at a life that could have been or a sadness over the one she chose, and it’s the restraint that makes her work so powerful. It’s an especially strong contrast against the more vibrant work from Amarteifio and Jimoh. Seeing the smile of young Peter and how it will become the shell of a man played by Oyelowo adds such poignance.
So many movies like this would be fractured, but there’s a coherence to “Clarissa” that’s breathtaking, a vision of people at different beaches on the river of life, connected by the flowing water of time.
Reed van Dyk’s “Atonement” couldn’t be more different in terms of storytelling but shares a similar sense of truth-seeking that elevates it from a standard PTSD drama. Genuinely harrowing before becoming deeply moving, Van Dyk’s debut looks at an act of extreme violence from three perspectives: the perpetrator, the survivor, and the witness. It has a few beats in the center that feel like they could have used a bit more restraint, but it recovers nicely, and stays anchored to truth through a trio of excellent performances from people who clearly took this project very seriously, refusing to simplify or exploit this true story into melodrama.
“Atonement” opens in Baghdad in 2003, introducing us the Khachaturian family, led by Mariam (Hiam Abbass). As the city erupts in violence, the Khachaturians survive a bombing near the relative’s home at which they’re staying, choosing to try to leave that part of the region to go back to their family house. The commute leads them into the heart of a firefight between U.S. Marines and Iraqi insurgents. Soldiers on a roof in the city center have been told to shoot on any car that attempts to pass due to how many have been used as weapons against American soldiers. With her sons and even a baby grandchild in the car, Mariam enters a nightmare of gunfire, and not everyone survives.
In these early, terrifying scenes that have a tactile realism that recalls “The Hurt Locker,” we also meet one of the soldiers on the roof shooting at the Khachaturians, Lou D’Allesandro (Boyd Holbrook). When a reporter from The New York Times named Michael Reid (Kenneth Branagh) comes to the area shortly after the tragedy, Lou confronts him with bravado. After all, why did they drive toward the shooting? What did they think was going to happen?
A decade later, Lou is deep in the grip of PTSD. He takes drugs to manage and shakes when he thinks about Baghdad. To achieve some sort of healing, he contacts Reid in the hope that he can coordinate a meeting with Mariam and her family so they can talk about that day.
Even in the heat of war, what is a soldier who takes an innocent life owed? What is a mother who had to grieve an impossible amount that day expected to give? And what roles do journalists play in connecting the two? There’s a line in a PTSD meeting about how a gun fires both ways, impacting the person it hits and the one who pulls the trigger.
Van Dyk is delicate, mostly avoiding melodrama except for a few missteps, trying to ask these questions through nuanced character work, especially from Holbrook and Abbass. The former is always good, and one hopes this is the part that finally breaks him, while the latter is incapable of a bad performance. Their scenes together have an immediate emotional power, both of them unsure of what to demand and what to give.
The final scene of “Atonement” is a beauty, an unexpected group of people working together to find that which has been lost.
Finally, there’s the opening night film of Director’s Fortnight: the atrocious “Butterfly Jam” from “Beanpole” director Kantemir Balagov. Talented people are sucked into the vortex of this brutal drama that purports to be about toxic masculinity but has absolutely nothing to say about its hot topic. Worst of all, so little of it feels truthful that its extreme violence become little more than button-pushing, an exercise in audience torture.
The best way to read “Butterfly Jam” is that it was actually written by its 16-year-old protagonist Temir (Talka Akdogan) because this is a script that sees the world through the eyes of a confused teenager. Temir is a successful wrestler at his school in Newark, and he clearly adores his father Azik (Barry Keoghan), who makes the best delens in town at the family’s Circassian diner, where they also work with Azik’s sister Zalya (Riley Keough). A troublemaking Johnny Boy character enters these mean streets in the form of Marat (Harry Melling), one of those guys who you know is going to do something wrong or horrible or both to initiate the final act of the film. And I haven’t even mentioned the giant bird or the Chekhov’s Cotton Candy Machine.
Balagov’s characters don’t have the depth for this to work as a study—a fellow wrestler of Temir’s named Alika (Jaaliyah Richards) is offensively underwritten to an almost comical degree in that we know two things about her by movie’s end: she wrestles and she has acne.
Keoghan, Keough, and Melling can be such complex performers, but you can see them wrestling (sorry) with this script in every scene to the degree that they often feel like they’re in different movies. Keough especially seems eager to rise above the nonsense around her, and not just in character.
- Cannes 2026: All of a Sudden, Think Good (May 16, 2026)
Confession: I am an absolute sucker for any movie in which a character grabs dry-erase markers and begins drawing diagrams to illustrate a novel theory about how capitalism, democracy, and the natural world interact.
That remarkable exegesis—and it is remarkable, as riveting a scene as Cannes has offered so far—takes place about an hour and 45 minutes into “All of a Sudden,” the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s return to competition after “Drive My Car” in 2021. Is every one of the film’s 196 minutes necessary? Yes and no: One way of understanding the film’s worldview is that every minute we spend truly communicating with someone else is worthwhile.
This is a film that takes the time to understand two people deeply, and to watch them taking the time to understand each other. Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) is the director of a nursing home; Mari (Tao Okamoto) is a director of experimental theater. They meet by chance in Paris, and Mari invites Marie-Lou to a production that she is staging. Perhaps improbably, each is fluent in the other’s native language. It emerges that Marie-Lou studied anthropology at Wakeda University in Japan, while Mari studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. (The stars, meanwhile, apparently had to learn Japanese and French for their respective roles. Expect both to be frontrunners for the festival’s best-actress prize.)
The similarly named women also share a basic decency and generosity. At work, Marie-Lou is trying to introduce a patient-centered care method, Humanitude, and is facing resistance. The training is demanding and—as Marie-Lou explains in nearly as much detail as Mari uses in her capitalism-vs.-nature diagrams—the method won’t achieve its full benefits unless all the staff members participate.
For her part, Mari has, up to this point, kept private about the news that she is suffering from Stage 4 cancer. (The title refers to how quickly her final, fatal spiral may come.) Her theater piece, “Up Close, No One Is Normal,” performed by her creative partner, Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka), concerns a psychiatrist named Franco Basaglia (1924-1980), who pushed for an end to mental hospitals as they existed in Italy. Instead, he favored a less carceral, more community-based approach.
Marie-Lou’s experience as a caregiver and Mari’s artistic skills make them an unlikely team. Mari visits Marie-Lou’s workplace; Marie-Lou travels to care for Mari in Kyoto. The film’s plea for careful listening and attention admittedly seems a little quixotic, even woo-woo, and the narrative might have benefited from some thorniness. There are times when I wondered if Hamaguchi was presenting a rosier depiction of end-of-life care—from the perspectives of both patients and medical professionals—than is plausible for most people. With the exception of a resentful, long-serving nurse, the characters are almost unfailingly kind to one another. And any fan of Frederick Wiseman’s institutional portraits might marvel at the relative placidity of Marie-Lou’s center, Garden of Freedom, although there is a subplot that concerns her bosses’ push to maximize profits.
Even so, the film is rooted in real life. Hamaguchi’s screenplay was inspired by a book called “When Life Suddenly Takes a Turn,” which consists of published correspondence between an anthropologist, Maho Isono, and a philosopher, Makiko Miyano. From this, he has created a narrative that has room to wander. The director has sporadically opted for drawn-out running times since at least the 317-minute “Happy Hour” in 2015, and like that film, “All of a Sudden” makes it all but impossible to distinguish between what’s indulgent and what’s essential. And frankly, I could have watched another hour of Mari drawing on her white board.
It’s been five years since the festival launched a new section called Cannes Premiere, and it’s still not clear to me what that section is supposed to be about. Some of the docket consists of directors the programmers usually like but apparently couldn’t bring themselves to put in competition (but also didn’t want to lose to Venice in the fall). The rest of the lineup seems to be films that might otherwise have landed in the long-running Un Certain Regard sidebar but were somehow deemed too commercial.
Géraldine Nakache’s “Think Good,” an engrossing portrait of a troubled marriage, falls into the mainstream category. Its main distinguishing factor is that several of its major characters are observant French Jews, a group that is not often seen onscreen. (Nor do I ever think I’ve seen a film about two French Jews who meet in Dubai and are married by a rabbi who is based there.)
In the opening scene, Gil (Monia Chokri) is shown visiting a mikvah, or ritual bath. When she returns home, she tells her husband, Jacques (Niels Schneider), that although she put her film-crew career on hold when their daughter was born, a cinematographer has offered her a temporary job. Jacques wonders if the gig will interfere with their plans to have a second child or if Gil will see her ex on the set. But that sort of pettiness turns out to be only the beginning.
Nakache uses a time-hopping structure to show how Jacques is not merely a jealous husband, but also an abusive one. He interferes with Gil’s contact with family and friends. He sets up baby-monitor cameras to surveil her in the house. He makes obsessive phone calls to keep her from her career. The title refers to a line in which Gil is encouraged to resort to self-delusion: “If you think good,” she is told, “only good things will happen.” The story’s trajectory is fairly predictable, but a powerful final shot closes the movie on a strong note, and Chokri’s volatile, layered performance carries the film.
