So far, any Cannes disasters seem to be averted for now, making my previous post seem rather alarmist. Perhaps the closest shock anyone experienced yet was in the middle of Franky Coppola’s (esteemed screenwriter of Patton [1970]) long-gestating Megalopolis (41 years in the making?) — while Adam Driver’s character was taking questions from the press, a man legit came into the theatre and started asking Driver questions? A real-life Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985) moment!
Check out our review of Megalopolis (written by Hugo Emmerzael) below, as well as tales of Chilean Nazis (good), French Cheesemakers (mid), Taiwanese teenagers (promising) and heartbroken Icelandic teens (could’ve been great).
Megalopolis Invites You To The Future Of Cinema
It’s hard to see Megalopolis (2024) as the long-gestating masterpiece that lives up to all of its hype. But it’s even harder not to be in awe of what’s put on display (and on stage) by 85-year-old film legend Francis Ford Coppola.
His self-funded opus with a 120-million-dollar price tag never seems to exhaust itself with new ideas — visually, thematically, philosophically. It’s a daring work that, without announcement, breaks the fourth wall in a baffling instance of live performance cinema, only to dive even deeper into its zany allegory that transposes New York City to the fictional metropole of New Rome.
Recalling the inevitable fall of the historical Rome, the auteur of American masterpieces like The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979) is stating the obvious here: we too live in the vestiges of a crumbling empire. And if that centre can’t hold, what responsibility do we in the present have towards the future?
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
When the Light Breaks Has (Almost) All The Right Takes
After tales of sexual assault, alcoholism and isolation, it appeared that Icelandic auteur Rúnar Rúnarsson softened somewhat with the sentimental mosaic masterpiece Echo (2019), the kind of movie that you could screen for arthouse audiences and play as a Christmas crowdpleaser.
Thankfully for Rúnarsson-ultras (“we preferred your earlier, sadder movies”), UCR opener When the Light Breaks (2024) is a somewhat successful return to his intensely-focussed single character works, with his shattered lead Una (Elín Hall) occupying almost every frame of this tight 75-minute work. Yet, within the grief that permeates every scene — filtering through like the light from the sun touching every part of the earth — is a concerted attempt to find a common humanity and emotion that develops upon the we-are-the-world vibes of Echo.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Capitalism Is a Locust
Ah-Rong’s (Yu An Shun) eatery is exactly the kind of place every local community needs. Serving simple dishes (noodles, dumplings, etc), his cheap, no-frills establishment is perfect for a quick meal after work or after a long walk. But surviving in 21st-century Taipei, where the moneyed class would rather have Sichuanese hotpot, proves immensely difficult.
Things take a turn for the worse when their landlord, tired of a country characterised by endless elections, the existential threat of China and a dying economy, sells up, leaving Rong in the hands of the smartly dressed and ruthlessly capitalist Bruce (Liu Han Chiang).
KEFF’s debut Locust (2024) bitterly laments the state of Rong’s eatery, using it as a metaphor for one of the most precarious countries in the world; constantly on the verge of being taken over by malevolent, all-powerful, and seemingly undefeatable forces. Ambitious, methodical and loaded with meaning, Locust is the definition of a promising debut, making me want to see more from KEFF while seeing lots of room for improvement.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
(Don’t) Believe The Hyperboreans
It’s telling that The Hyperboreans (Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña, 2024) opens with a television. Right from the beginning of this dazzling metafiction, the filmmakers, opening upon a washed-out, blurry, monochrome screen, seem obsessed with the power of images, and how the manner of telling is just as important as the telling itself. This collagistic fairy tale is infused with the spirit of Carl Jung and the occult, utilising stop-motion cinema, Brechtian theatre and the silent tradition to investigate the disturbing legacy of Nazism in Chile.
Antonia Giesen stars as herself, an actress/psychologist with both German and Chilean heritage. She directly addresses the camera, telling the story of a lost film shot on celluloid that this new movie seeks to reimagine. It’s mostly set in an artist’s gallery cum warehouse, where the sets are constantly moving in and out of the frame, creating an ever-shifting sense of dislocation as Giesen descends into a bizarro world composed entirely of cinematic form itself.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Holy Cow. Curdled Maturity.
It’s easy to tell when a film has been subtitled by a Brit rather than an American. In Holy Cow (Louise Courvoisier, 2024), set in the Jura region of France, women are “dead” beautiful, the men shout “blimey” and everyone drinks “pints.” Somehow it suits the regional specificity of Courvoisier’s locale, set in a world where there is little else to do other than drink beer and shag in the hay.
Except for making cheese, bien sûr!
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!