Cannes: An unabashedly melodramatic and sexy film offers an unflinching anatomy of a couple

That dress

No, Natalie Portman did not rob The Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were spontaneous combustions among fashionistas when Natalie Portman, attending the premiere of Todd Haynes’s future camp classic May December, arrived in a Juno dress on the red carpet. Designer Christian Dior’s intricate 1949 frock – a landmark achievement in skirt construction – is currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And with good reason: (a) it’s priceless, and (b) the petals are made of gelatin and would instantly dissolve if surrounded by the heaving paparazzi at Cannes. Portman’s gown was a replica of the 74-year-old design, as interpreted by Dior’s current creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Check out sewing guru and TikToker @kat.makes for a terrific fangirl history of the original gown.

Cannes in numbers ...

2 – Significant drama scenes featuring dog vomit in competition. No, really. Not for the fainthearted but dogs eating vomit feature in pivotal scenes in Justine Trier’s engaging courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Fall, and Jessica Hausner’s edgy eating disorder satire, Club Zero. Side note: Snoop is our current pick for the coveted Palm Dog.

Kajillion or so – Diamonds worn by Carla Bruni. On the red carpet for Jonathan Glazer’s monumental The Zone of Interest, the former French first lady set a new Cannes record, according to Vanity Fair, by wearing a necklace comprised of 69 carats of sapphires, 69 carats of diamonds, plus a 20-carat emerald-cut tanzanite. That record stood for only a few hours before it was broken by Carla Bruni at the Chopard Trophy a few hours later, where she wore a 170-carat diamond necklace, accessorised by an additional 62 carats for the bracelets and earrings.

Zero – Sharon Stone Sightings. Zero. Alas. Shazza-watchers were hoping for an appearance when Basic Instinct costar Michael Douglas received his Palme d’Or d’honneur last week. Still waiting. Still hoping.

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Michelle Yeoh bosses Cannes

For several years, Kering’s Women in Motion programme has become a bigger deal. And a bigger and bigger party. Michelle Yeoh, recent Oscar-winner and this year’s recipient of Kering’s Women In Motion Award for 2023, did not mince words: “For too long, we as women have been left out of rooms and conversations. We have been told the door is closed to us. Well, Virginia Woolf once said, ‘There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.’ Our ideas are endless. Our passion is infinite. And we have come to knock that door down.” In that spirit, she danced until 2am at a bash that was so impossibly glamorous that Salma Hayek changed into two ball gowns and a glad-to-be-here Leonardo DiCaprio was spotted taking a selfie. The best thing that has happened Yeoh post-Oscar? She gets scripts that: “(don’t) describe the character as a Chinese or Asian-looking person.”

Biggest Cannes laughs so far

1. “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs,” Julianne Moore’s arch-manipulator in May-December says, accompanied by a crash-zoom and dramatic music. (Soft spoiler: She’ll later have a nervous breakdown over blueberry pie.)
2. “I thought it was like Bresson’s The Dairy of a Country Priest,” a misguided cinema patron emerging from the zombie flick The Dead Don’t Die in Aki Kaurismäki’s hilarious comeback film, Fallen Leaves. “No. Godard’s Bande a Parte,” replies his friend.
3. “He’s Gordon to me; he’s Sting to you,” announces the strangely-likable, comically self-absorbed Michel Gondry substitute in the director’s riotous The Book of Solutions, before segueing into an epically amusing Sting cameo scene.

Cannes review: Along Came Love

Katell Quillévéré's Along Came Love opens with an uncomfortable sequence culled from archive footage. As Allied forces roll into France after second World War, French women who fraternised with Germans are shaved, marked, stripped, and marched around various public spaces. Simultaneously, French women are visibly unnerved by kisses and unwelcome pawing from their US liberators.

The film cuts to two abused women, inked with swastikas, running for their lives. One of these women is the pregnant Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier), a character based on the writer-director’s own grandmother, who had to leave her hometown after becoming pregnant by a German officer.

Five years later, she’s working as a waitress in a Normandy resort, with her young son Daniel in tow, when she meets François (Vincent Lacoste), an archelogy student and the son of a factory owner. At first, their relationship is one of convenience; François also has a past he’d prefer to keep hidden. Slowly, however, the marriage blossoms into love. The restless young couple come to manage a dance hall in the 1950s in Chateauroux, where American soldiers from the nearby base party like a lost painting by Hieronymus Bosch, and where the marriage expands into polygamy. It’s no place to bring up a child, but Daniel, who early in the film, prays that his mother will love him someday, is accustomed to his carers putting their desires above his.

Unabashedly melodramatic and sexy, Quillévéré's compelling fourth feature offers an unflinching anatomy of a couple, of military occupations, and of many peccadillos. As per the central couple, it’s hotblooded against all odds.

Cannes review: Firebrand

This atypical new film from art house auteur Karim Aïnouz opens with a note about historical interpretation: “For the rest of humanity we must draw our own – often wild – conclusions” – which is a nice way of saying: facts, smacts.

A wincingly revisionist portrait of Henry VIII’s last wife, Catherine Parr (Alicia Vikander), Firebrand offers a roll-call of fangirl facts and figures.

She was a great regent when Henry went off to fight the French! She was the first woman to be published in Britain! She was practically a Protestant! She loved Henry’s children from his previous marriages!

The project may be adapted from the 2013 novel Queen’s Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle but it seems to exist to appeal to fans of the musical Six. There are even musical numbers of sorts.

That wouldn’t be so bad if the film wasn’t torn apart by competing impulses at the level of Henrietta Ashworth and Jessica Ashworth’s script.

One the one hand, the film wants to be a feature-length episode of Succession set in “a rotten, blood-soaked island kingdom” and centred on Jude Law’s brilliantly and hilariously evil, Henry. On the other hand, there’s a very modern depiction of how women can bond and protect one another against domestic abuse and coercive control, especially when your husband had two of your five predecessors beheaded.

Neither strand works. Individual scenes can alternately resemble Blackadder, 9 to 5, and Josie Rourke’s underwhelming Mary Queen of Scots.

Junia Rees, the young actor who essays Elizabeth, is a bright spark in a cesspool of counterhistory and terrible fake beards. The trouble with ahistorical sassy movie broads is that erase the real and terrible things that happened to women.

An amusing final note pays tribute to Parr for shaping Elizabeth I into an enlightened, progressive leader whose reign was “not defined by men nor war”. The Catholic priests and Spaniards Bess had executed might beg to differ.

Cannes review: About Dry Grasses

One of the great joys of Cannes and other major festivals is that it’s a place to find correctives to the prevailing studio wisdom that all flaws must be buffed out.

This year’s Official Competition is populated with characters that are complicated, fleetingly sympathetic, and genuinely appalling. The dual – and duelling – protagonists of May-December are thrillingly horrible. The murder suspect Sandra Hüller) at the centre of Anatomy of a Fall is definitely guilty of being a mean lady.

About Dry Grasses is, in its unhurried three-hour plus way, the level up from Rashomon. Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to the snowiest peaks in Anatolia, where Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), a 39-something city-boy has been assigned a teaching post for the past four years.

He’s popular with his students, especially Sevim (remarkable newcomer Ece Bağci) a young teenage girl who he, inappropriately favours and gifts upon. But once a love letter from her personal diary is confiscated by another teacher, all hell breaks loose. The misanthropic Samet, always prone to outbursts, turns on his students.

“You’ll plant beets and potatoes so that the rich can live comfortably,” he roars. His friendship with fellow-teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici) is strained when they start competing romantically for Nuray (Merve Dizdar), an English teacher from a larger nearby town. Ceylan’s Anatolian Cannes-winner, Winter Sleep, adapted the novella The Wife by Anton Chekhov and a subplot of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

About Dry Grasses, similarly, feels inspired by Russian literature. Samet’s longing to escape his government mandated teaching service in a forbidding environment might be understandable but his bitterness and isolationism becomes a slow poison. A stand-off between Samet anf Nuray imakes for dense philosophical reckoning at its most vigorous, culminating in a stange Brechtian flourish. The director has said he could have made the longer; surprisingly, most viewers will agree.