Cannes Review: Jacques Audiard’s ‘Paris, 13th District’

Director Rachel Lang follows military couples in Our Men, an intriguing insight into French Foreign Legion life that closed the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight section. Lang herself graduated as Lieutenant from the French army, and served in the Sahel desert in 2017, so it’s fair to say she has more knowledge of this world than many filmmakers.

It’s not on the level of M*A*S*H or The Hospital, but The Divide (La Fracture) keeps you on your toes with its frenetic look at a besieged Paris emergency room hospital staff as, along with its regular patients, it tries to cope with the many people injured during a Yellow Vests protest that gets out of hand in late 2019.

There is a moment of genuine tension at the very beginning of Joachim Lafosse’s “The Restless” that is worth your attention. Damien (Damien Bonnard), is swimming with his son Amine (Gabriel Merz Chammah, the grandson of Isabelle Huppert, no less) off a boat on the rocky French coast.

Bruno Dumont’s peculiar blend of the transcendental with a clumsy kind of realism was a natural fit to “Jeannette” and “Joan of Arc,” both films dealing with the same presumed miracle — an ordinary little girl claiming to be guided by Saints.

Tatiana Huezo’s eye for lyrical truth has materialized in documentaries like “Tempestad” or “The Tinniest Place,” works that penetrate some of the most tenebrous corners in recent Latin American history with shimmering compassion. Her stance as an acute observer of the people that survive and persevere through tumultuous sociopolitical and economically disadvantaged contexts produces thought-provoking filmic meditations.

Few films have accurately captured the definitive Millennial experience—lovelorn, cash-strapped, self-absorbed, and tech-addicted—though a few have tried, and some even succeeded. Modern love is no joke, as films and shows like “Frances Ha” and “Girls” know, and neither is modern friendship, or any part of early adulthood these days.

Bruno Dumont uses a French anchorwoman to explore his country’s media in France, a Cannes Film Festival competition entry that’s glossy and watchable but ultimately disappointing. Léa Seydoux plays France de Meurs, a TV anchorwoman and reporter so famous that she stopped for selfies everywhere she goes, from cafes to war zones. After she is involved in a traffic accident, she quits her job and ends up in a Swiss spa, but the respite she meets there isn’t quite what she’d hoped for.

quartier.We follow Emilie, played in a memorable debut by Lucie Zhang, who is third generation Chinese; the character works in a call center and lives in the apartment of her ailing grandmother, who is now in a nursing home.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticAmerican cartoonist Adrian Tomine uses the graphic novel to do what that other form of literature — the standard, gray-words-on-white-paper short story — simply hasn’t been able to achieve. Like any writer, he can go inside his characters’ heads, taking the X-ray of their most private insecurities and rendering it visible to the reader.

Kim Kardashian West admits that like a lot of people, she too had anxiety about reentering the world after quarantining at her home for so long. In a bonus clip for, the mother of four shares with Khloe Kardashian that isolating at her home amid the coronavirus pandemic impacted how she was recovering and coping after being robbed at gunpoint while in her Paris, France, hotel room in 2016. «I feel like I had agoraphobia definitely after my robbery in Paris,» Kim tells her sister.

Sean Baker must have a thing for donut shops, the distinctly American small businesses have now been a centerpiece of two of his more celebrated films.

What do we really know about children? Until the Renaissance, artists were still painting them as freakish shriveled adults. Only in the last century-ish did American society decide they probably should go to school instead of laboring all day in sweatshops.

Arnaud Desplechin returns to the Cannes Film Festival with Deception (Tromperie), a self-indulgent Philip Roth adaptation that’s only marginally better than 2017’s derided Ismael’s Ghosts. One of the late Roth’s most openly personal novels, it details a string of affairs conducted by Jewish-American writer “Philip,” here played by French actor Denis Podalydes, speaking French.

Having been a mainstay of the Croisette for years and a Palme d’Or winner in 2015 for “Dheepan,” French filmmaker Jacques Audiard (“The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” “A Prophet,” both Cannes prize winners), is no stranger to the Cannes Film Festival. Since 2005, all of his films have debuted at Cannes save one (2018’s “The Sisters Brothers” that went to Venice).

July 12th, 2021, Cannes – Reader, I ratatat out this missive in haste on my trusty Smith-Corona from the South of France, in the paltry hopes it may adequately convey my delight in viewing the latest cinematographic marvel from Mr. Wes Anderson, originally of Houston, Texas but more latterly resident of a nearby color-coded, symmetrical nebula almost entirely of his own design.

If Wes Anderson hasn’t already been ordained as the king of twee, he certainly will be with The French Dispatch. There can never have been a film so entirely marked and dominated by preciously perfectionist compositions, arcane detail, meticulous camera moves, ornate décor, historical and design minutiae, styles of typography, precision diction, arch attitude, obsessive attention to cultural artifacts and loyalty to Oscar Wilde’s notion that art needn’t express anything other than itself.

Of the many films playing at Cannes which have gained in resonance since the coming of the pandemic, “Zero F*cks Given” from French duo Julie Lecoustre, and Emmanuel Marre does not represent the creepiest, most alarming kind of coincidence — that description would better fit “Benedetta” from Dutch master Paul Verhoeven, which features an actual plague, face coverings and quarantine measures.

Just a few days on the heels of “Stillwater,” another American entry in the Cannes Film Festival main competition section explores the complicated relationship between a father and daughter rooted in down-home Americana and close brushes with the law. “Flag Day” marks Sean Penn’s latest directorial return to Cannes since the critically-lambasted “The Last Face” from 2016.

A sweeping social protest met with utter chaos in an emergency room—especially to the American festival-goer at Cannes, this brief sounds like an unpleasant evocation of 2020. And indeed, filmed in the immediate aftermath of the gilets jaunes protests in France, Catherine Corsini’s “The Divide” (“La fracture”) both reflects the past year and eerily foreshadows the true disaster in emergency rooms that followed the events of the film.

Dir: Sean Penn; Starring: Dylan Penn, Sean Penn, Katheryn Winnick, Josh Brolin, Dale Dickey, Jadyn Rylee, Eddie Marsan. Cert tbc, 108 mins. Is Sean Penn’s new film a fond tribute from a father to his daughter, or just the Hollywood version of Take Your Child to Work Day? The intentions are as flatteringly fuzzy as the glowing 1970s-style camerawork in this adaptation of the American journalist Jennifer Vogel’s memoir Flim-Flam Man, about her strained relationship with her father John, an