Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Cannes Film Festival, MUBI, DR, Adam Newport-Berra
This year’s Cannes may not have been one for the record books, but even a muted version of the world’s glitziest and most revered film festival features plenty of stuff that’s worth knowing about. This year’s Cannes may have been short on Hollywood A-listers, but it was queer as hell, from Jane Schoenbrun’s joyful riff on slashers and sexual liberation Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma to directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s ode to Federico García Lorca’s legacy The Black Ball. More on those two and six more of the movies we loved this year.
Sebastian Stan makes an unexpected turn as a conservative evangelical patriarch in this new film from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days director Cristian Mungiu. It’s unexpected not just because he performs half the role in Romanian, but because he leans into the character’s brusque unlikability. Fjord is a squirmy drama in which Stan and Renate Reinsve play a married couple who move with their five children from Romania to Norway to be closer to Reinsve’s mother, only to draw the interest of child protective services when a teacher at school spots bruises on one of the kids. Mungiu, always brilliant at depicting what it’s like to run up against a perverse and indifferent system, achieves something intentionally, provocatively uncomfortable here.
In a year rife with two-and-a-half hour epics, Paweł Pawlikowski’s 1949-set black-and-white drama stands out for running just 82 minutes, and for being nearly perfect. At its core is an incredible Sandra Hüller as Erika Mann, who accompanies her famous father Thomas (Hanns Zischler) on a trip across a recently divided Germany to receive the same Goethe Award from both the West and East Germans. It’s a deliberate narrow aperture from which to look at this immense moment in history, when the country was trying to contend with what it did by either wallowing in denial about collaborating with the Nazis or throwing the past away entirely in pursuit of an already fracturing utopian rebuild.
This marital thriller is based on the same 1969 Claude Chabrol film that Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful was based on. It represents a welcome comeback for Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev, who almost died after having a rare bad reaction to the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, for which he had to be hospitalized for almost a year. Zvyagintsev, who remains unflinchingly critical of corruption and abuses of power in his homeland, shot Minotaur in Latvia, but set it in a provincial Russian city in which Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) is a local big shot. The reveal that Gleb’s stunning wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) has been cheating on him isn’t a surprise — what is is the masterful way that Zvyagintsev adjusts the original story to a Russia that has just invaded Ukraine, so that the movie shifts from tragedy to an almost subliminally dark comedy.
Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut became the biggest sale at Cannes this year, sparking a bidding war before ultimately going to A24. But the revelation of Club Kid, in which Firstman stars as a mess of a party promoter who has to get his act together when the kid he never knew he had gets dumped on his doorstep, isn’t that Firstman is (obviously) capable of being very funny. It’s that he’s also good at crafting what is an inherently commercial film about arrested development, a delayed coming of age, and what it means to learn to take care of someone else (as well as yourself). Club Kid runs right up to and then darts around so many potential cliches in a way that’s really satisfying.
Much like Jane Schoenbrun’s first two films, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is about nostalgia, our relationship to the cultural objects that raised us, and what they can teach us about ourselves. It’s also, much like the other two films, queer as hell. This one follows Hannah Einbinder as a fledgling indie director who treks into the woods to convince the star of a popular ’80s slasher franchise (Gillian Anderson) to return for a “woke” reboot she’s writing. Their meeting becomes something much different than either of them had imagined, as does the film, which becomes a visceral, bloody, funny, and erotic love story.
James Gray revisits his own past, and some of his favorite themes — the complexities of brotherhood, 1980s New York, loss of innocence — in Paper Tiger. Miles Teller is Irwin Pearl, an engineer in Queens happily married to Hester (Scarlett Johansson) with two sons and a cheerful, family-man demeanor; Adam Driver is Gary Pearl, his older brother, an ex-cop with Peter-Luger-delivery-on-a-weeknight money who pulls Irwin into a government contract to clean up the Gowanus Canal that ends up running them both afoul of the Russian mob. Gray perfectly ramps up the dread, and both Irwin and Gary’s senses of guilt and anger, as things spiral out of control for both brothers and ultimately the whole family, including Hester, who’s dealing with her own secrets.
After it played on one of the last days of a decidedly slow festival, La Bola Negra was declared a masterpiece by many on-the-ground critics. We were a little cooler on it, calling it “an ecstatic, imperfect ode to the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.” The film, directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (“Los Javis”), takes place across three separate timelines in 1932, 1937 and 2017, following the lives of several gay men, both closeted and not (including, briefly, Lorca). All of the men are linked by an unfinished Lorca play, which shares the same title as the film; our modern-day protagonist, Alberto (Carlos González), inherits a mysterious script from his recently deceased grandfather Sebastián, whose younger self, a soldier during the Spanish civil war, is played by musical artist Guitarricadelafuente. The three stories wind around one another, grappling with repression and shame and death and art and love, in ways both poetically beautiful and tragic.
Rami Malek gives his best performance in years in The Man I Love, all sharp angles and haunted eyes and irresistibly seductive body language. He’s Jimmy George, a performance artist in 1980s New York who’s sick with AIDS but refuses to let that stop him from making art — in this particular case, starring in a small, local adaptation of a 70s French-Canadian film. When he isn’t castigating himself for his inability to remember his lines, or charming everyone at a dinner party, he’s bouncing back and forth between his longtime lover Dennis (Tom Sturridge) and his new downstairs neighbor Vincent (Luther Ford), who’s become obsessed with Jimmy. The Man I Love is a moving study of a magnetic person and a devastating period in queer history, pulling you into its complicated rhythms and sounds.
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