Cannes Film Festival: A look at some of the films this year

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CANNES, France — Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonca Filho wanted to explore his childhood memories of life under the country’s military dictatorship and how that time echoes in the present in his competition film The Secret Agent.

“The film opens saying ‘Our story takes place in 1977, a time full of mischief,’ as if something is different today,” the 56-year-old director told Reuters.

It’s “ironic and interesting” that some of the ideas that were left behind during the roughly 50 years between then and now are once again becoming mainstream, he added.

The between 1964 and 1985 following a coup d’etat, during which thousands of people were detained and tortured, and hundreds forcibly disappeared, with many being exiled and persecuted.

The Secret Agent, which marks Mendonca Filho’s third time competing for the festival’s Palme d’Or top prize after the gory hit and Aquarius, celebrated its premiere on Sunday.

Wagner Moura, who played Pablo Escobar in hit TV series , stars as Marcelo, a mysterious technology researcher who flees to the coastal city of Recife to lay low during . However, he ends up being tailed by hitmen in what called “a vividly textured epic about a man trying to get out.”

DIE, MY LOVE
Actors Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence, who star in the competition title Die, My Love, reflected on Sunday on the difficulties of the postpartum period and how they brought their own experiences of parenthood to the film.

“There’s not really anything like postpartum. It’s extremely isolating,” Ms. Lawrence, who recently gave birth to her second child, told journalists in the French Riviera resort town.

However, “as a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she (her character) would do,” said Ms. Lawrence, for Silver Linings Playbook in 2013.

Mr. Pattinson and Ms. Lawrence play a couple, Jackson and Grace, who move to a small Montana town and have a child, which puts increasing pressure on their relationship as Grace, a writer, struggles to deal with her new identity as a mother.

“When dealing with a partner going through postpartum or any kind of mental illness or difficulties, trying to deal with her isolation, figuring out what your role is, is difficult, especially if you don’t have the vernacular,” Mr. Pattinson said.

The film, the latest from Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, known for like We Need To Talk About Kevin, received a nine-minute standing ovation at its premiere on Saturday night and has been well-received by critics.

Mr. Pattinson, who gained fame in the Twilight series before both taking on less mainstream titles like The Lighthouse and donning Batman’s suit, said becoming a parent himself last year had reinvigorated him.

“In the most unexpected ways, having a baby gives you the biggest trove of energy and inspiration,” said Mr. Pattinson.

Ms. Lawrence, of the Hunger Games series, said that becoming a parent made her realize that she didn’t know just how much she could feel — “and my job has a lot to do with emotion.”

“I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.”

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER
Kristen Stewart said on Saturday that making her directorial debut with The Chronology of Water at the felt like sending a child off to school for the first time.

“I’m so proud of it. It’s like watching your kid go to school,” Ms. Stewart told Reuters the day after her film’s premiere.

“It feels like all of a sudden the things that I’ve wanted to do for just so long happened all at the same time,” said the actor who rose to fame with the Twilight series and received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Britain’s Princess Diana in the film Spencer.

“My head is spinning, but in the best way,” she added.

Her film is adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir of the same name that chronicles the author’s attempt to escape an abusive household through competitive swimming in the 1980s and eventual path to becoming a respected author.

British actor Imogen Poots, known for Green Room and 28 Weeks Later, stars as Yuknavitch in what lauded as an “all-or-nothing type of performance.”

“There’s a line in the book that made me want to make it a movie, which is like, ‘Can you hold life and death in the same sentence?’ And that’s what cinema can do,” said Ms. Stewart.

“With this movie, we can just speak to the fact that the things that happen don’t matter as much as how you process those things and define them within your own body,” she added.

Ms. Stewart’s film is competing in the second-tier Un Certain Regard section, where actors Scarlett Johansson and Harris Dickinson are also marking their first time as directors.

The Chronology of Water was met with positive reviews, with calling it a “raw and intricately constructed take on a biopic” and giving it three out of five stars.

EDDINGTON
The premiere of indie director Ari Aster’s latest film, Eddington, attracted a particularly glitzy crowd to the s red carpet on Friday night, with Angelina Jolie, Natalie Portman, Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix in attendance.

Eddington pits Mr. Pascal, who plays a small-town mayor, against Mr. Phoenix’s downbeat sheriff in an election campaign that kicks off as tensions over COVID-19 and the protests were both reaching their apex in 2020.

Industry publication IndieWire set in the US state of New Mexico top marks, calling it the “first truly modern American Western” while said the “deranged,” star-studded thriller would leave audiences breathless.

Dune: Part Two star Austin Butler, who plays a new-age guru, and Emma Stone of La La Land, who plays Mr. Phoenix’s wife, were also in Cannes for the film’s premiere on Friday, as were Mr. Phoenix’s partner, Rooney Mara, and actor Harris Dickinson, who is in Cannes to promote his directorial debut Urchin.

Like Mr. Aster’s three other features, Eddington will be released by independent distributor and is set to hit theaters in the United States on July 18.

The new film marks the US director’s second time working with Mr. Phoenix after 2023’s Beau Is Afraid. He made his name as the maker of elevated horror films Hereditary and Midsommar.

A PALE VIEW OF HILLS
Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, set in post-war Nagasaki and 1980s England, needed to be made into a film while there were still some of Japan’s World War Two generation alive to share their stories, director Kei Ishikawa told Reuters.

“The hurdles were high, but I felt strongly that if I had the chance to make the movie, I should do it now,” Mr. Ishikawa said at the , where A Pale View of Hills is competing in the second-tier Un Certain Regard category.

“In a few years’ time, we might not be able to get to hear their stories, and that weighed heavily on me,” said the Japanese director, whose 2022 film A Man premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

A Pale View of Hills intertwines the central character Etsuko’s memories of life in Nagasaki after the atomic bombing in 1945 with her interactions with her daughter in 1980s Britain.

The film, which stars Suzu Hirose and Yoh Yoshida, premiered on Friday, with describing it as a Cannes hidden gem.

Mr. Ishiguro, an executive producer on the film, is also in Cannes. Adapting the novel, which he wrote when he was 25, was different from taking his other books, including and , to the big screen, he told Reuters.

“Not just because it’s so very personal, but because at the time when I wrote the book, it was just 35 years after the end of the Second World War,” the Japanese-born British author said.

Now there have been at least two generations since the one that experienced the war that ended 80 years ago, he said.

“For me, that’s a very special thing. Possibly this is the first time maybe the Japanese people are prepared to look carefully at those experiences,” said Mr. Ishiguro.

He praised Mr. Ishikawa, 47, for making a film that was relevant to younger audiences from what he called an “apprentice book.”

“He’s made the movie really for today’s audience, for his generation and the generation actually even younger than him,” said Mr. Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.

Director Ishikawa said he hoped the film would also alter foreign perceptions of Japanese women, who “are often seen as demure, walking a step behind their husbands.”

But that’s not the case at all, he said.

“There were definitely such strong women in that era,” he said.

“We’ve made this film from our own lived experiences and I believe that if many people see it, it could really refresh the image of Japan itself.”

NOUVELLE VAGUE
Acclaimed US director Richard Linklater initially thought his film about the French New Wave movement, Nouvelle Vague, would never be shown at theaters in France due to his nationality, he told journalists at the .

“Ten years ago, when we were thinking about this movie, I’m not kidding, at the time I said I imagine a film with subtitles. And I thought, they’ll hate that an American director did it,” he said on Sunday, a day after the film’s red carpet premiere.

“We’ll show it all over the world, but never in France, because they’ll just hate it,” the director of and recalled in the French Riviera resort town. “But as I got closer to it and I found enthusiastic partners, I realized how much it meant to them,” he said.

Nouvelle Vague, shot in a black-and-white 4:3 format with all the actors speaking in French, follows director , arguably one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation, in the making of the seminal 1960 film Breathless.

French actor Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard, while Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin play the iconic duo and , respectively.

The making of the film was well-documented, which allowed Mr. Linklater to faithfully re-enact the 20-day shoot: “We had the camera notes, we had the reports. I never knew more about a film that I didn’t make,” he said.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker, who shot Nouvelle Vague in France, also expressed his admiration for the French film industry and its focus on taking care of the sector.

“The US could use a little bit of that,” Mr. Linklater said, adding that he didn’t think US President J. Donald J. Trump’s on foreign-made films would come into force.

“That’s not going to happen, right? The guy changes his mind like 50 times in one day,” Mr. Linklater said about Mr. Trump. — Reuters