SHARAKU (Shinoda Masahiro, Japan)
Screened in the main competition
The first hour is the best part of this unconventional “what if” biopic about an artist whose identity has never been uncovered. For during that time, the film’s slippery approach to its subject leaves it less a straightforward story of Tonbo (Sanada Hiroyuki, marvelously precise in his creation of an elusive, retiring personalty), the crippled actor who’d become the great caricaturist Sharaku, and more of a fantasia on the way society appreciates or fails to appreciate art as it changes, stagnates, challenges, and titillates. The flow of scenes at times feels like a dream set in Tokugawa-era Japan with Jazz-age orchestrations providing the ragged spine for a series of impressions that only vaguely imply a plot. It’s heady, clever stuff, which does somewhat disappointingly turn towards conventional artist biopic beats – the triumphant creation of the biggest hits, the angry admiration of the rival. It’s a good, surprisingly funny version of the genre, mind you, and its heights are so uniquely special that the film as a whole benefits from their aura. 8/10
GEORGIA (Ulu Grosbard, USA/France)
Screened in Un Certain Regard
A tale of two sisters, the mercurial wannabe rocker Sadie Flood, and the talented folk singer Georgia, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham as the best matched set of female performances in American cinema of the 1990s. The film doesn’t slot into easy codes of sibling rivalry or reconciliation; it’s a prickly and at times unforgiving depiction of how families are supportive, antagonistic, and undermining. Written by Leigh’s mother Barbara Turner, it’s a deep plunge into the kind of specificity that comes from people who are totally comfortable together helping each other into ever richer states of emotional expression, typified by the shockingly intimate, utterly present song performances leveraged by Grosbard into the film’s most powerful moments. This is neither generically nor aesthetically my type of movie, so my great affection for it it is all the more testament to its strength and truth. Dismayingly unknown among anybody but the self-selecting audience that seeks out Best Supporting Actress nominees, and Leigh’s inability to swing a Lead nod alongside Winningham is a black mark on the Academy. 8/10
The main competition film WAATI, directed by Souleymane Cissé, is not currently available in an English-friendly form