‘Mothering Sunday’: Eva Husson’s Drama Is Richly Sensual, Yet Occasionally Disjointed [Cannes Review]

Note to self: do not get old. The alternative, i.e., death, may not be very pleasant but, sedate and dignified and swathed in vaguely biblical white sheets, it doesn’t get anything like the bad press that old age does in Gaspar Noé‘s “Vortex.” Let’s not forget that in “Enter the Void,” this same director made death seem like quite the trip – infinitely preferable to the progressively demeaning ravages of dementia or the Sword of Damocles that is a dodgy ticker.

Not even a global pandemic could stop prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, but his latest film deals with ideas and tensions that echo questions and perspectives brought to the surface by this global health crisis. Playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes, “In Front of Your Face” only slowly reveals its hand.

It’s rare for the last ten minutes of a film to radically change your opinion of the movie at large, let alone your entire viewing experience, but in “Hold Me Tight” (“Serre-Moi fort”), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, director Mathieu Amalric does precisely that.

Director Vincent Maël Cardona uses western Europe in the early-1980s as the canvas upon which he paints his layered and achingly genuine portrait of young love, familial bondage, artistic aspiration, and universal chaos. Unburdened by a firm connection to any one genre or narrative archetype, “Magnetic Beats” tells a simple story with a full arsenal of source music, thoughtful set design, and crisp acting at all levels to pull off this love letter to a particular moment in time.

It’s a good thing you can’t catch a virus from an image because if you could, just a few frames of Kirill Serebrennikov‘s fabulously yeasty, bilious, dank Competition title, “Petrov’s Flu” would bring all of Cannes‘ anti-Covid measures to naught.

A man asks the first woman who enters the room to marry him and then is surprised to find she does not respect him. This sums up “The Story of My Wife” from Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi, playing in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.

In one scene of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria,” Jessica (Tilda Swinton) and a friend browse refrigerated cabinets designed to preserve flowers. “In here, time stops,” the saleswoman says proudly, gesturing at the blue cupboards.

When teenaged environmental activist Greta Thunberg made her now-famous speech at the UN Headquarters in 2019, she was met with equal parts admiration and derision, likely an unfavorable imbalance toward the latter. For every A-list celebrity who reposted a clip on their Instagram story, adorned with enthusiastic heart emojis, surely another handful of Internet trolls lurked in the comments and left discouraging messages.

A coming-of-age summer romance yarn, “Mi Iubita, Mon Amour” succeeds in shifting the power dynamic within the classic genre archetype, albeit in a way that increases the creep factor.

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.

We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having.

Those looking to enjoy “Lamb” from Icelandic director Valdimar Jóhannsson would do well not to learn anything about it beyond its admittedly intriguing premise before watching it — to enter the screening room like lambs to the slaughter, if you will. Playing in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Festival de Cannes, the film centers on a couple living on a remote sheep farm, where they one day discover an unusual newborn that they immediately decide to raise as their own.

Premiering in competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Nanni Moretti’s wild melodrama “Three Floors” is based on a 2017 Israeli novel called “Shalosh Qomot” from writer Eshkol Nevo and begins with an undeniably tragic event. One dark night on a quiet street of Rome, a drunk driver runs over a lady crossing the road, narrowly avoids hitting a pregnant woman, then finally crashes into a building, landing straight into a family’s living room.

CANNES – If you’ve already read Graham Swift’s novel “Mothering Sunday,” you’re well aware of the sensual and provocative nature of many of the scenes. The description of young English housemaid Jane Fairchild and the relatively young lord of the manor Paul Sheringham’s coupling leaves little to the imagination.

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.

One should perhaps not read too much into the fact that the press screening of Kornel Mundruczó‘s “Evolution” was timed to coincide with the final of the UEFA European Football Championship.

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.

Unconventionally, the title credits for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film, “Drive My Car,” appear on screen an incredible 41 minutes into what is an almost 3-hour long film. What transpires beforehand is so captivating it’s almost a jolt to see them, but Hamaguch’s choice is a necessary demarcation.

Cinema’s love affair with trains goes back, of course, to the very origins of the art form, and more than a century later, the flame shows no sign of dimming. To recent examples such as “Snowpiercer” (2013), “Train to Busan” (2016), and the latest of many adaptations of “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) can now be added “Compartment no.6” (“Hytti Nro 6”) from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, premiering in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.

You can never really predict what François Ozon might do next. As evidenced by his wide-ranging works, from the lush historical drama “Frantz” to the lazy summer romance “Summer of 85,” the prolific director can do just about anything with the stylistic prowess to boot.