CARRINGTON (Christopher Hampton, UK/France)
Screened in the main competition
Hampton’s directorial debut, a passion project he created with the leverage provided in part from the massive success of Dangerous Liaisons in 1988, definitely doesn’t hide the fact that it’s you know, a debut. Denis Lenoir’s camera rarely does anything surprising, and while Hampton’s bright pace and dashed-off tone are utterly beguiling (all the better to bite us on the ass in the endgame), the direction generally seems besotted with the screenplay and eager to foreground it at every opportunity. Where he lucked out but good was in securing Emma Thompson as the titular painter and Jonathan Pryce as her older homosexual boyfriend, both of them providing effortless performances that flit between classic theatricality and naturalism, giving the whole film a boost of spirited energy and plumbing the mysterious ways of romance and sexual desire with a delicate insight that even Hampton’s literate, crisply-constructed screenplay hasn’t come up with. Its unprecedented “official fourth place” prize is maybe a bit overstated, but this is rich and human without being showy, infinitely fresher and freer and truer than a pre-WWII 20th Century biopic has any reason to be. 8/10
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA (Marion Hänsel, Belgium/France/UK)
Screened in the main competition
A drama about a sad sailor and a wise-beyond-her-years little girl who gives him a sardonic window in the life of the Hong Kong poor. To its credit, its austerity makes it less hokey and twinkly than it sounds from that description, but this is pretty far from sophisticated filmmaking. Hänsel makes no points delicately when they can be hammered home, whether it’s the literalisation of metaphors, or close-ups to clarify that the characters feel feelings, or the shameless use of kittens and babies as ironic counterpoints. Now, it helps a lot that the kittens and babies are adorable; and as the girl, amateur Ling Chu has a knowing world-weariness which helps situate the film’s tone in a more secure place than the writing or directing. But casting Stephen Rea as a Greek-Irish man with Chinese ancestors, and then requiring him to play every scene like he just found out his whole family died in a plane crash undoes all of that. When people talk shit about Very Serious Art Films, this is exactly why. 5/10
The main competition film STORIES FROM THE KRONEN, directed by Montxo Armendáriz, is not currently available in an English-friendly form