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’ve 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. Estaban believes his estranged daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo) is perfect for the role. His proof? He watched her on a trash television series that he believes she did more with than the material offered. Bringing Emilia onto such a high-stakes production carries its own landmines: charges of nepotism, Emilia’s stained memories of Estaban’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 about his past actions? 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 Peña’s bring 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 Estaban 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.
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