Robert Pattinson, left, and Jennifer Lawrence star in Die, My Love, at the 78th international Cannes Film Festival, on May 18. Director Lynne Ramsay plunges audiences into a truly pitch-black abyss with the film and it is a journey that only ever works thanks to the ferocious commitment of Lawrence.Scott A Garfitt/The Associated Press
The opening weekend of the Cannes Film Festival was a marathon of poetic pain.
Across a series of red-carpet premieres – some featuring the biggest stars in Hollywood, others featuring complete unknowns who should now be thrust into the zeitgeist – filmmakers from across the globe painted a portrait of a world in collective crisis. Maybe, even, one that was too doomed to be worth saving. But while the mood onscreen was often intensely grim, the energy at which the films attacked their realities was often so fiercely committed and raw that you couldn’t help but admire, even delight in, the various meltdowns.
The fuse was lit Friday night, when director Ari Aster unleashed Eddington, a surreal tour through a deeply poisoned America. Starring Aster’s Beau Is Afraid collaborator Joaquin Phoenix, the film takes place at the dawn of the COVID-19 era, in which masks and social distancing were suddenly the norm – restrictions that don’t sit well with the otherwise passive sheriff (Phoenix) of the small New Mexico town of the title.
But what starts off as a seemingly reactionary satire that pits Phoenix’s character against the town’s faux-progressive mayor (Pedro Pascal) turns into something more wild and dangerous, with Aster running the outsider vengeance of First Blood through the filter of unhinged TikTok videos.
Aster is operating far from the somewhat accessible horror territory of his earlier works Hereditary and Midsommar, and not every element lands, including a side plot involving Austin Butler as a QAnon conspiracy-peddling huckster. But Aster’s continued determination to challenge (some might say alienate) his audience is admirable – just as is his studio A24’s commitment to give him gobs of money and star power (the film also features a standout performance from Emma Stone, who, after already starring in Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, has once again found herself playing a deeply unhappy wife stuck in New Mexico).
The rough theme of “We’re all doomed!” continued Saturday with the world premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. While nobody expected Ramsay, the Scottish filmmaker behind the dark psychodramas We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here (another Phoenix project), to deliver something sunny, the director plunges audiences into a truly pitch-black abyss with Die, My Love. And it is a journey that only ever works thanks to the ferocious commitment of Lawrence.
Essentially Ramsay’s version of Nightbitch, her new film traces the existential collapse of a first-time mother (Lawrence) who is left to her own devices in the middle of fly-over America (actually Alberta) while her dirtbag husband (Pattinson) distances himself with work and affairs.
Seemingly set in the crumbing country house that Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! built – complete with a sink that is begging to be freed from its plumbing – Ramsay’s film is a deeply unsettling and unpleasant experience, with the director positing that the all-American institution of marriage, and what is expected of women inside such a patriarchal structure, is inherently toxic. She’s not wrong, but the way in which her film puts Lawrence’s character through the wringer becomes interminable, silly and deeply obvious, to the point that you want to rise from your seat and scream, “We get it!”
The film is only saved, if it can be called that, by Lawrence’s exceptionally all-in performance, a feral circus of writhing and screaming and rage. It is fearless stuff, but to what end?
A more cogent answer to that question might be found in The Secret Agent, Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s look at how even the sturdiest of souls cannot withstand the all-powerful forces of corruption. Set in the Brazilian port city of Recife in 1977, the film follows a researcher (Narcos star Wagner Moura) who is trying to see his son while he remains stuck in protective custody, the target of various immoral forces.
Unlike Walter Salles’s recent Oscar-winning drama I’m Still Here, which tackled a similar era of Brazilian history, Filho avoids drenching his tale in righteous sentimentality, instead attacking life under dictatorship from various, slightly eccentric side angles. It also eventually leads to an eruption of violence that echoes Eddington‘s blood-soaked finale.
While Filho, best known on the film-festival circuit for his far more wild 2019 genre-hopping thriller Bacurau, takes a more conventional approach with The Secret Agent than Aster in depicting a country gone to rot, there is also a slightly bigger kernel of hope at its centre, too.
That same idea that the best of us will ultimately triumph is threaded through the best surprise at Cannes so far, The President’s Cake. The feature directorial debut from Hasan Hadi – and the first film from Iraq to ever play the festival – the early 90s-set drama follows a young Iraqi girl (the wonderful newcomer Banin Ahmad Nayef) who is assigned by her cruel schoolteacher to bake a cake in honour of Saddam Hussein’s coming birthday.
A street-level tour through a nation devastated by unchecked power, the film is a deeply empathetic look at how, even when the world looks ready to burn down, there are people who will step in to try to save it. Or at least help you walk through the flames.
The 78th edition of Cannes continues through May 24.