Cannes Review: Jean Dujardin In Cedric Jimenez’s ‘Novembre’

s’il vous plaît!Over at the French film festival on the Cote d’Azur, which wraps up this weekend, it’s long been popular to give comical and undeserved standing ovations to just about anything that could be feasibly called a film. Next year the Claudes and Claudettes will be hopping to their feet for a dancing toad on TikTok (more deserving, honestly, than Lars von Trier.)The trade publications time these performative participation prizes like they’re Olympic runners.

When his mother spoke, Ernest remembers, everything sounded important. “I cling to her light,” he tells us in voiceover, an adult remembering how that felt. The Ernest he is recalling is just a little boy (Milan Doucansi), snuggled against Rose (Annabelle Lengronne, a wonderfully vivid presence), with his grave and clever older brother Jean (Sidy Fofana) sitting opposite on a train taking them from Cote d’Ivoire to a new French life.

This year has produced several films if terrorist attacks in France. One Year and One Night by Isaki Lacuesta (which premiered in Berlin this year) and November by Cedric Jimenez which is being shown out of competition at Cannes, and Alice Winocour’s deeply personal Paris Memories (Revoir Paris) which was inspired by Winocour’s own brother who was in the midst of the November 2015 attacks at Bataclan. The film follows a woman’s journey to recovery after surviving a mass shooting. 

Catalan artist and director Albert Serra (The Death Of Louis XIV, Liberte) returns to Cannes Film Festival Official Competition with a rarity for him, a contemporary feature film, not what we have come to expect from this filmmaker who usually works in period pieces. And even though he is not French he has made a fascinating movie all in French and set in the colorful French Polynesia island of Tahiti.

Given the combustible subject matter and the director’s reputation, French auteur Claire Denis has made a remarkably listless and unpersuasive film in Stars at Noon. Set during the Nicaraguan Sandanista revolution circa 1984, this adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novel published two years later centers on a couple of Americans of dubious character who misspend time in Central America before finally deciding it’s time to split when, in fact, it might be too late. This is the sort of misfire that, just because it comes from a hallowed French auteur, sometimes gets programmed in the Cannes competition even when it manifestly doesn’t deserve to be there.

In the late 19th century, two French psychiatrists coined the term “folie à deux,” literally translated as madness for two, to describe what is now widely referred to as shared psychotic disorder, or when two — or more — people transmit delusional beliefs and occasional hallucinations to one another. The condition is most common in people closely related, who live in intimate proximity, and has been lengthily dissected by academics.

Based on her own time spent in the acting school Les Amandiers, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” aims to recreate a very specific time and place both in her life and in France, more than it cares to inform her audience about what, exactly, was so special about this school. Funded in the 1980s by Patrice Chéreau, a successful and daring director of theatre, opera and film, Les Amandiers did not last very long but for a few years it was considered to be one of the most exciting places in France and even Europe for young actors to develop their crafts, and for directors to find new talent.

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.

Observed in isolation, detached from the body or in extreme close-ups, organs and other vital viscera resemble moist masses of soft tissue plucked from alien landscapes in the unflinchingly immersive medical documentary “De Humani Corporis Fabrica.” Alternating between footage from cameras inserted into patients for the purpose of treating ailments and grisly shots from the operating room, directors Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the team behind the striking non-fiction film on fishing “Leviathan,” apply their fascination for uncanny imagery with relativist intent to the inner workings of French hospitals and, in turn, the human body.

So many stars stepped out for 75th Anniversary celebration screening of The Innocent during the 2022 Cannes Film Festival!

Director Léa Mysius expertly crafts a queer, witchy movie in her Directors’ Fortnite debut film, The Five Devils, which received a five-minute standing ovation at the screening I attended. Mysius takes concepts like identity, sexuality, and mysticism and creates an intricate genre film that’s part time travel, part drama, and all heart. 

Director Emily Atef’s Cannes Un Certain Regard drama More Than Ever is a careful, fastidious, Tradition of Quality film about impending death that’s easy to admire but won’t exactly pack ‘em in.

The challenges of street casting are explored in The Worst Ones (Les Pires), an Un Certain Regard drama about a film within a film. Directed by Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, it sees a film crew hit a working class French town, with thought-provoking and sometimes darkly funny results.  
 Flemish director Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh) is casting kids in Picasso, in the suburbs of Boulogne-Sur-Mer. His feature is about a pregnant teen and her younger brother, and he wants authentic local residents. The neighbors are surprised that he’s only casting “les pires” — what they consider to be the worst ones, or the hoodlums. But there’s raw talent in Lily (Mallory Wanecque) and hot-headed little Ryan (Timéo Mahaut).

The films of French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux are at their best when they combine his penchant for ludicrous but simple what-if scenarios, with his perceptive eye for humor in everyday life and banal interactions. He would probably hate his cinema to be pinned down in this way: though he has proven that he can subscribe to straightforward storytelling with “Deerskin” (which premieres at Cannes in 2019) and “Incredible But True” (Berlinale 2022), the French director and absurdist also enjoys leaving the demands of logical plot developments behind in favor of a freer style.

Jean Dujardin and Cédric Jimenez, the star and director of French Paris terror attack film Novembre, have said they did not want to portray the police who caught the attackers as “heroes” but were aiming for an uber-realistic representation of a “deeply secret” department.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticIt took the French police just five days to catch the men responsible for the Nov. 13, 2015, attacks on Paris. In the meantime, the country was put on high alert: President François Hollande declared war on Daesh (ISIS), and police were given carte blanche to bring the terrorists to justice.

“Sexism is everywhere — so are we.” It’s just one of many slogans plastered across the streets of France in the timely documentary Feminist Riposte (Riposte Féministe) which is in the Special Screenings section at Cannes. Filmmakers Marie Perennès and Simon Depardon follow 10 groups of women around the country who are protesting about harassment, rape, femicide — and about the police response to these crimes. “Les flics” — aka the cops — are a silent force in this film, policing protests with grim faces. This is about giving a voice to the young women, recording their dialogue about the cause.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent“1976,” the awaited first feature of Chile’s Manuela Martelli, has closed first new major territories for sales company Luxbox before its world premiere in Directors’ Fortnight later this upcoming week.The film is produced out of Chile by writer-directors Omar Zúñiga (“The Strong Ones”) and Dominga Sotomayor (“Too Late to Die Young”) at auteur-focused Chile-based Cinestación (“Too Late to Die Young”) as well as Alejandra Garcia and Andrés Wood, another celebrated Chilean director (“Violeta Went to Heaven”) at Wood Productions. Nathalia Videla Peña and Juan Pablo Gugliotta at Argentina’s Magma Cine co-produce.“1976” is set, as its title implies, in 1976, one of the bloodiest years of Augusto Pinochet’s hugely bloody dictatorship.