A late spate of good films transformed the final days of the Cannes Film Festival, though all of them were outside the official competition (Ruben Östlund's The Square won the coveted Palme d'Or). Here, some final notes on trends and constellations at the 70th edition of the Cannes festival:
Notre musique
A glib, misguided critic might credit La La Land, but the musical seems to be back, though in peculiar form. Bruno Dumont's techno retelling of the adolescence of Joan of Arc in Jeannette provided a full-scale example, but two other films broke into song-and-dance production numbers in the midst of otherwise dour social and political analysis: Until the Birds Return, a remarkably assured first feature from Algeria, and Pedro Pinho's three-hour The Nothing Factory, a messily splendid radical labour film about austerity-hobbled Portugal.
Elsewhere, music scores proved the ruin of many movies, from the ickily tinkling piano in Naomi Kawase's Radiance to the relentless electro in the Safdie brothers' Good Time. Even the ultra-rigorous French documentarist Raymond Depardon fell prey to prettifying, interpolating three unfortunate sequences scored by Alexandre Desplat into 12 Days, his otherwise severely formal and moving portrait of involuntarily hospitalized patients arguing for their release before a judge.
Only Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos seemed to show some musical taste by selecting music by Gyorgy Ligeti and Sofia Gubaidulina – the former composer sealing the obvious debt Lanthimos owes to Stanley Kubrick – for his pointless combo of J-horror and Euripidean tragedy, The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Double trouble
Too somnolent to qualify as camp, helas, two French entrants seemed to be inadvertent remakes of contemporary classics. The good-twin/bad-twin device in Francois Ozon's Double Lover plays less like Dark Mirror than Cronenberg's Dead Ringers if Genevieve Bujold got to sodomize Jeremy Irons with a strap-on. Roman Polanski's Based on a True Story employs the familiar personality-theft gambit in its retread of Misery, with Kathy Bates's isolated cabin replaced by a chic Parisian apartment and airy country maison, where a celebrated author (Emmanuelle Seigner) is mortally trapped by an avid fan who tries to assume her looks, clothes and persona. (The film briefly jolts to life when a crazed Eva Green, whose lipstick signals evil from the outset, bashes to bits a malfunctioning blender with a rolling pin.)
State of the nation
Several films, especially from Eastern Europe, examined the dire condition of their countries. The most praised film in competition, Andrey Zvyagintsev's Loveless, went increasingly heavy on metaphor in its diagnosis of the sick soul of Putin's empire, summoned up by the film's title and, in case we missed the point, the track suit emblazoned with RUSSIA worn by one of its callous protagonists. Directions, a caustic Bulgarian comedy about moonlighting cab drivers that transpires over a single day and night – Jim Jarmusch's cabbie vignette anthology Night on Earth inevitably comes to mind – portrays its nation as a hollowed-out place of rampant suicide, corruption, cynicism, violence and incessant humiliation. As one passenger cracks, "Bulgaria remains the country of optimists because all the realists and pessimists have left."
The kids are not all right
Previous Cannes festivals have been rife with endangered children, and this edition certainly did not lack for kids in peril. Todd Haynes's laborious fairy tale Wonderstruck, for example, burdens a little boy with so much physical and emotional misfortune – accidents both fatal and debilitating, hereditary illnesses and various abandonments – that its finale, in which a deaf woman manages to write volumes about her life history in a matter of minutes to hand over to this very child seems exponentially false. Perhaps more disturbing was this year's trend for calculating or criminal children – pint-sized arsonists, teenage telepathic torturers, throat-slitting tot sex slaves.
Blah blah
The French director-scriptwriter Robin Campillo may be positioning himself as the heir of Eric Rohmer with his logorrheic films. Campillo's 120 Beats per Minute, about the early days of ACT UP Aids activism, and Laurent Cantet's The Workshop (co-written by Campillo) defined talky in their reliance on what the French call debat – I felt like I had read rather than watched both films, given the copious subtitles – though other works ran the duo a close contest for garrulousness. Claude Lanzmann's Napalm, a recounting of the director's almost-love affair with a North Korean nurse in 1958 Pyongyang, stands or not on how compelling and important his tale finally is, given that most of it is tightly shot as one endlessly talking head.
Going wide
When digital cinema first burgeoned, several arthouse directors resisted its dominion by either continuing to shoot on film or resorting to the squarish pre-fifties Academy ratio as a last bulwark of authenticity. The quickly palling audacity of Bruno Dumont's musical passion play Jeannette appeared to take the latter tack, shot in an unusual 1.55 (still square!) aspect ratio for television, but countless other films at this year's festival resorted with alarming frequency to widescreen. (The cinephilic Todd Haynes commits the formal sin of expanding the images of a 1927 silent film to the spacious ratio in Wonderstruck.) "All that empty space to fill!" sighed a colleague, nostalgic for compositions that didn't automatically default to sprawl.
Emerging auteurs
The jury for the Camera d'Or, the prize for best first feature at the festival, doubtless had a difficult time, given the surprising number and excellence of debut works here. Astonishing in its maturity – its gawky young director, Kantemir Balagov, appeared almost waif-like on stage – and tonal control, the Russian Closeness is the harrowing true story of a Jewish family whose son was kidnapped and held for ransom in the North Caucasus in 1998, and justifiably won the international critics' prize.
What's in a name?
Film titles proved predictably ironic in the case of Happy End (didn't), Good Time (wasn't), and Wonderstruck (hardly). But the title that best summed up my experience at the 70th Cannes festival came from a late entry, reportedly unfinished and truly dreadful: You Were Never Really Here. I wish.
James Quandt is the senior programmer for TIFF Cinematheque.