Starting with a week of rain was perhaps a sign that this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival was bound to be an exceptional, fertile one. Although the 2023 competition jury of this usually sunny event seemed chaotic and, with two-time Palme d’Or winner Ruben Ostlund at the helm, unpredictable at first, it proved to be a thoughtful bunch, awarding prizes that most critics and spectators attending the festival could at least get behind.
Every festival has its own rules, and the rules this year certainly played a major role in how the Palme d’Or and the Grand Prix were awarded. German actress Sandra Huller had already wowed Cannes audiences in 2016 with her turn in Maren Ade’s father-daughter comedy Toni Erdmann, but she hadn’t been awarded (although the film itself won the FIPRESCI prize). This year, she returned with leading roles in both Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, and she was deserving of recognition for both of those roles. The issue, however, was that the two films were also favorites for Cannes’s biggest awards, and a Best Actress prize can’t be combined with a Palme d’Or and is rarely combined with a Grand Prix prize. Huller may not have received the accolades she so evidently deserved, but Triet’s Palme d’Or and Glazer’s Grand Prix are also the actress’s victories.
In Anatomy of a Fall, Huller plays Sandra, a writer whose life is turned upside down when her husband dies, seemingly having fallen out of the third-floor window in their chalet. Whether it was a suicide or a murder becomes the key question, but as the French police investigate and Sandra strategizes with and confides in her old friend/lover and lawyer, Vincent (the suave silver fox Swann Arlaud), the distinction between these two potential scenarios and their implications becomes almost irrelevant. Sandra’s son, Daniel, a blind young boy played by promising newcomer Milo Machado Graner, witnessed the event, but he struggles to remember what he heard (besides an instrumental steel-drum version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” that ended up rocking the whole Croisette), and he doesn’t know what to make of all that he discovers about his parents’ conflictual private lives. Anatomy of a Fall goes further than traditional procedurals by taking the notion of guilt beyond hard facts and toward the idea of toxic influence, exploring gender dynamics in the process. Whatever the outcome of the trial, Daniel will never forget what he’s learned about his mother and her behavior toward his father. Every moment we spend with Sandra feels like an opportunity for a deeper understanding of her personality and of the facts—a kind of suspense that recalls the iconic documentary series The Staircase, which followed in real time the investigation into Michael Peterson for the suspicious death of his wife, but also the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial, which painfully exposed a messy and violent relationship and resolved very little for the two people in it.
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While Triet’s focus is on Huller’s face and its sophisticated unreadability, Glazer employs the actress as a pawn and a shape in space in the role of Hedwig Hoss, wife of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss. Placing cameras in different corners of the house that the two characters occupy next to the camp, Glazer has a CCTV-like approach and breaks all the conventions of fictional filmmaking. Glazer often cuts to another point of view to keep the characters in the frame as they move from room to room, irrespective of the 180-degree rule (which Glazer, who previously made Under the Skin and countless commercials and music videos, perhaps jokingly claimed he’d never heard of during the press conference for this new film). The low-angled cameras capture the daily life of a seemingly regular family—from when dad goes to work next door in the morning, to when the kids are going to sleep at night—but makes it feel off and unnatural. The haunting sound design, too, continuously reminds us that people are being exploited, murdered, and burned only a few feet away. The effect is one of uncanniness, in the sense Freud had for that concept—the familiar is made to look unfamiliar, the home looks foreign (“uncanny” being a translation of “unheimlich,” literally, “not from the home”), and life sounds like death. The discomfort we feel is due to these contradictions—the good and the bad collide and blur, and evil couldn’t look more banal. While the Hoss family continues to live in denial, Glazer reveals to us what they are running away from, until they can’t help but share in our disquiet. A feeling of déjà vu and existential vertigo creeps over them, which Glazer boldly and unapologetically illustrates without ever depicting violence directly. He instead finds it in that contrast between what the Hosses are willing to see and what is in fact happening.
Taboo and what to do with it was the theme of two other films playing in the competition. Both Todd Haynes’s May December and Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer address, in wildly different registers, the topic of adult-teen sexual relationships, the former from a more satirical angle and the latter at a personal and psychological level. In May December, Julianne Moore plays Gracie, who is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher who was convicted of raping her sixth-grade student in the late 1990s and who later had his child in jail and then married him. Our way into the story is Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an actress visiting the family in preparation for a film adaptation of the case in which she will play Gracie. Haynes uses humor to bring out the outrageousness of the situation. Gracie’s character generates laughs, but her immaturity and persistent denial are chilling; Elizabeth, meanwhile, has an intrusive and superior attitude that feels like an echo of Gracie’s own rapaciousness. Dramatic music cues, crash zooms, and sun-kissed images heighten how fragile, artificial, and almost sickly this household’s domestic bliss is. As Elizabeth slowly steps into Gracie’s shoes without scruples and brings back to the surface old questions about the couple, every interaction between the two becomes more volatile, and several scenes are shockingly funny. With some occasional and thematically appropriate Arrested Development humor (Gracie compliments her daughter’s bravery for trying on a prom dress that shows her arms), May December nevertheless builds to a devastating and horrifying scene in which all pretenses fall apart, but perhaps too late.
After a 10-year absence, the provocative French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has returned with a somewhat unexpected project, since it is a remake—but the subject matter does fall in her wheelhouse. As in the 2019 Danish drama Queen of Hearts (which the new film is a loose adaptation of), Last Summer follows a successful lawyer who has a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old stepson. Known for her interrogations of sexuality and family dynamics in films such as Romance and Fat Girl, Breillat here ventures even deeper into the dark territory of forbidden desires, not out of perversion but rather to push our understandings of ourselves and our impulses further. Unlike Gracie in Haynes’s film, Anne, played with steely reserve by Léa Drucker, is well aware of the gravity of what she is doing with Théo (Samuel Kircher). Yet that knowledge doesn’t stop her from continuing to do it. Breillat shows the progression of Anne’s interest in her stepson with cold and uncompromising images—a scene that hasn’t left my mind sees Anne get drunk and flirt with Théo in public. The camera doesn’t shy away from the more explicit either, showing the power dynamics at play between the privileged woman and her stepson, who may not feel like he’s being taken advantage of but certainly is. In her perfect, chic dresses, with her perfect marriage and perfect adopted children, Anne has it all, and even her desires emerge from that feeling of righteousness and superiority. Going after what she knows is forbidden, she reaches a level of satisfaction that Breillat reveals for its selfish and dangerous nature in a long close-up post-act—a disturbing yet simple image that is a testament to the filmmaker’s incisive mastery of her craft.
Real, good love was also present in the festival’s main competition in different flavors. Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves, winner of the Jury Prize, sees the Finnish filmmaker behind Le Havre and, more recently, The Other Side of Hope suggesting love as the one thing that makes life worth living in our cruel world. Capitalism rules the lives of Ansa (Alma Poysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), who lose their jobs and try to find new ones while, on the other side of the world, the Ukrainian invasion is raging on. Alcoholism, loneliness, and doubt are the results of this difficult context, but solace can be found in a few places: listening to the radio, going to the karaoke bar (a national sport in Finland), and, of course, going to the cinema. All of those things make each day more tolerable—but so does meeting someone who will do those things with you. Kaurismaki has made more overtly political films, but Fallen Leaves is the distillation of all that makes his work so powerful. Humble but playful with his usual beautifully composed images, acknowledging that answers are hard to come by but offering some respite, the filmmaker offers an optimism grounded in reality—a poetry born out of difficulty.
For Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hùng, love is all about dedication, attention to detail, and sensual pleasure. The Pot-au-Feu, for which Hùng rightfully won the Best Director award, begins with a long, almost wordless cooking sequence as the camera carefully follows the complex maneuvers of Eugénie (a radiant Juliette Binoche), who is preparing a huge feast in the kitchen of Monsieur Dodin (Benoît Magimel). With each new elaborate dish prepared by Eugénie for this table of only five guests, the Cannes audience giggled more and more, delighted by these visions of not only appetizing food, but also impressive craft and care. Both Eugénie and Dodin, for whom Eugénie’s been cooking for over 20 years, are passionate about food from many angles—its history, its science, and its social significance—and Dodin’s ability to talk at length about a certain wine or the order of a menu is endearing and exciting, but the filmmaker never mocks this enthusiasm. That passion exists between the two protagonists, too, and Dodin has been asking Eugénie to marry him for years, but the cook is more than satisfied with their current dynamic. The filmmaker could have easily depicted her contentment as a resignation to her lower social status, but Dodin himself fully understands Eugénie’s importance and, in a way, her superiority to him. His admiration and love for her and her gift are sincere, and it is through food that he proves it to her and to the audience. More than a love language, however, cooking is a way of life that must be carried out no matter what, a tradition and a knowledge that has brought together and will continue to bring together people of all kinds—much like film festivals persevere in paying homage to our sometimes ridiculous, sometimes endearing passion for cinema.
Manuela Lazic is a French writer based in London who primarily covers film.