Cannes Review: Emmanuelle Nicot’s ‘Love According To Dalva’

Jessica Kiang If the unmarked enemy aircraft, mirrored visors and carefully evasive language of Joseph Kosinksi’s “Top Gun: Maverick” tell us anything, it’s that Hollywood has learned to avoid political specifics in the delivery of grandstanding blockbuster entertainment. So one can be forgiven for coming to “Rebel” with hackles raised and offence-o-meters on red alert, as it milks Hollywoodish action-movie thrills (and even a few surreal musical numbers) from the highly charged scenario of one young Belgian’s recruitment into a Syrian ISIS cell.

“Tori and Lokita,” the refugee drama from two-time Palme D’Or winning directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.The film stars Pablo Schils and Joely Mbundu as a young boy and adolescent girl who have traveled alone from Africa to Belgium and face a serious test of their friendship as they grapple with the difficult conditions of their exile. The film received a special award at Cannes in honor of the festival’s 75th anniversary.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentSideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights for “Tori and Lokita,” the latest film by two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, which world premiered in competition at Cannes. The movie was one of the best reviewed films of the competition and earned the Dardenne brothers the festival’s special 75th Anniversary Prize.A story of human perseverance, the film is set in contemporary Belgium and follows a young boy Tori (Pablo Schils) and an adolescent girl Lokita (Joely Mbundu) who have traveled alone from Africa and pit their invincible friendship against the difficult conditions of their exile.“Tori and Lokita” stars Pablo Schils, Joely Mbundu, Alban Ukaj, Tijman Govaerts, Charlotte De Bruyne, Nadège Ouedraogo, and Marc Zinga.

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights for Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Tori and Lokita which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and was lauded with the Festival’s Special 75th Anniversary Prize. A theatrical release from Sideshow and Janus is being planned.

EXCLUSIVE: Coda producer Pathé has concluded a raft of sales on its Cannes slate including for starry French drama Masquerade, Directors’ Fortnight entry Paris Memories and Penelope Cruz title L’Immensita.

Reports on Sunday have linked Manchester City defender Taylor Harwood-Bellis with a move to Burnley next season, with the Clarets potentially appointing former Blues captain Vincent Kompany as manager.

As a procedural drama centrally interested in the radicalization of a young Muslim boy in Belgium, Adil & Bilall’s “Rebel” pulsates with terrible inevitability. Falling behind at school, with an adored older brother already having made the trip to Syria and a trafficker whispering in his ear, it’s less a question of if Nassim (Amir El Arbi, another tremendous kid actor for Cannes ’22 to tick off) is going to find himself on the Jihadist frontline, but when.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticCANNES — The awards show for the 75th anniversary Cannes Film Festival is underway, bringing 12 days of competition between 21 international features to a close. “Benedetta” star Virginie Efira is hosting, while several directors can be spotted in the audience waiting to receive their awards, including Claire Denis (“Stars at Noon”), Park Chan-wook (“Decision to Leave”) and Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (“Tori & Lokita”).Guillaume Canet presented best actress honors to Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, who plays the reporter who risks her own life to catch a serial killer in “Holy Spider.” The tense true-crime thriller exposes the crimes and aftermath of a man who targeted prostitutes, and that portion of society which accepted his religious justifications he claimed for cleaning the streets.

After taking home the Un Certain Regard Fipresci prize in 2018 for the trans-female ballet dancer feature Girl, filmmaker Lukas Dhont returned to home to find himself staring at the blank page for his next project.

Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) are more than just friends and not at all lovers. At only 13 years of age, they’re too young for that – and what’s more, their bond transcends simple labels. First seen running through the lush meadows of rural Belgium, the duo share a complicity that is as natural and abundant as the late summer harvest.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticSPOILER ALERT: The penultimate paragraph of this review contains spoilers.Few of us are fortunate enough to have a friendship as intimate and effortless as the one shared by 13-year-old Belgian boys Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) in “Close.” That connection, and the responsibility that comes with it, is at the heart of Lukas Dhont’s sophomore feature, so subtle and sensitive in the first half, so devastatingly false from its tragic twist on. This beautifully evocative film, which hails from an openly queer director, offers as pure a portrait of innocent, innocuous same-sex affection as we’ve ever encountered on film.

Belgium’s Lukas Dhont takes a deserved step up to the Cannes Film Festival competition with Close, only his second film — a minimalist melodrama that shows a definite growth in visual style but may be confronting to some with its deliberately unhurried, Eric Rohmer-esque aesthetic. The international success of Dhont’s well-intentioned debut Girl, about a young trans-female ballet dancer, was somewhat blunted in the U.S., where G.L.A.A.D. amplified complaints of misrepresentation on behalf of the trans lobby. Close is a much safer proposition, but may yet sail into choppy waters with its themes of youth suicide.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentAndres Ramirez Pulido’s “La Jauria” won the Grand Prize at Critics’ Week, the Cannes Film Festival’s sidebar dedicated to first and second features. The Colombian film also won the SACD prize.

Naman Ramachandran Indian actor Jackie Shroff (“Sooryavanshi”) will play the lead in Singapore-France-India co-production “Slow Joe,” it was revealed at the Cannes Film Market.Shroff will play the late Indian musician Joseph Manuel Da Rocha, known as Slow Joe, a former heroin addict and drug dealer who was born in Mumbai, was disowned by his family, heartbroken at 50 and who moved to Goa and cleaned up. On a trip to Goa in 2007, Lyon-based French musician Cédric de la Chapelle met Joe, now a frail 64-year-old who was making ends meet as a hotel room broker. Joe, also a poet and musician, sang for de la Chapelle, who was captivated by his voice and recorded some of his a cappella songs.Back in France, de la Chapelle played Joe’s songs for music producer Olivier Boccon-Gibod of Horizon Musiques, who was also entranced.

For decades, Italian filmmakers dominated Cannes.If the 1960s saw Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti reign supreme, somehow the 1970s were even richer. Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi won shared top prizes in 1972, while for two consecutive years later that decade the Taviani brothers and then Ermanno Olmi hoisted Palmes across a border that sits just 40 miles away.This year’s lone competition title from an Italian director (the only other Italian language film, “The Eight Mountains,” comes courtesy of two Belgians), Mario Martone’s “Nostalgia” will probably not break that particular drought, but the Neapolitan director can take solace in another modest honor: Telling a story about mothers and sons, about gangsters and priests, and about a peculiar kind of longing for the past in a place where little has changed for hundreds of years, “Nostalgia” is a nigh perfect candidate to wave il Tricolore.Taking a thin amount of plot and stretching it as far and wide as it can go, the film itself is far from perfect, but it does benefit from “The Traitor” star Pierfrancesco Favino’s terrific lead performance as a man who learns the hard way that there’s no going home again.After forty years abroad, Felice (Favino, of course) returns to his native Naples a stranger in a familiar land.

Gregg Goldstein Belgian director Lukas Dhont is in rare company. His 2018 Un Certain Regard debut, “Girl,” won the Caméra d’Or and three more Cannes prizes, besting the number of first-time feature wins from the likes of Steven Soderbergh and Steve McQueen. And while his rise has come with some controversy, he earned a place in competition with the May 26 Lumière gala premiere of his sophomore effort, “Close.” The story of two 13-year-old boys whose powerful friendship ends when their relationship comes under scrutiny “started from a very personal place,” says the out director, who penned the script with “Girl” co-writer Angelo Tijssens.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian brothers who have directed a series of films notable for quiet naturalism, are a prime example of how at the Cannes Film Festival, familiarity breeds not contempt but contentment.Year after year, Cannes puts the Dardennes’ films in the Main Competition; they’ve made nine features since “Rosetta” in 1999, and every one of them has vied for Cannes’ top honor, the Palme d’Or, with “Rosetta” and 2005’s “L’Enfant” winning and four others taking additional awards. The Dardennes now have a chance to make significant Cannes history by becoming the first directors to ever win the Palme for a third time.If they win for “Tori and Lokita,” which premiered in Cannes on Tuesday, they’ll also set a new record for the longest time elapsed between Cannes wins, with the 17-year gap since “L’Enfant” breaking the record of 14 years between Shohei Imamura’s wins for “The Ballad of Narayama” and The Eel.”But familiarity may also be working against the Dardennes at this point.

You can pretty much bet that whenever the Dardenne brothers show up with a new film in Cannes, it will walk away with some sort of prize. That has been the case since 1999 when their first competition film, Rosetta swooped in at the last minute and won the Palme d’Or and Best Actress. They won a second Palme d’Or in 2005 for The Child, the Grand Jury Prize in 2011 for Kid With A Bike, Screenplay in 2008 for Lorna’s Silence, and Director in 2019 for Young Ahmed. No matter what the jury, the Dardennes continue to impress, yet none of their films has ever brought them an Oscar nomination. 2011’s Two Days, One Night did get a surprise Best Actress nomination for Marion Cotillard but that has been it.

Bad Boys 4 is still in development following reports that it had been halted due to Will Smith’s slapping incident at the Oscars.After the actor struck comedian Chris Rock on-stage during the ceremony in March, a report claimed that Sony had paused development on the sequel.Speaking to Deadline, Sony chairman Tom Rothman has since denied the reports, deeming them “inaccurate” and describing the Oscars incident as “unfortunate”.“That movie’s been in development and still is,” Rothman said. “There weren’t any brakes to pump because the car wasn’t moving.“That was a very unfortunate thing that happened, and I don’t think it’s really my place to comment, except to say that I’ve known Will Smith for many years, and I know him to be a good person.