THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE (Nicholas Hytner, UK)
Screened in the main competition
Alan Bennett’s drily sarcastic screenplay and Nigel Hawthorne’s delectable turn as the imperious, then terrified, then deeply confused George III of Great Britain are the clear justifications for a movie that does a great job of exploring the nasty world of 18th Century British politicking, and not such a great job of populating it with characters worthy of it, His Majesty notwithstanding. It meets my cardinal rule for costume dramas, making the period it depicts feel tethered to living human emotions rather than locked away for our stuffy, privileged edification; but Hytner’s somewhat choked direction and the largely one-note performances of most of the cast some don’t make the humans themselves feel all that lively (very nearly including Helen Mirren, the recipient of a frankly baffling Best Actress citation from the Cannes jury, and I say that as an unrepentant Mirren fanboy). It’s thoroughly entertaining, witty, and historically literate in the best way, but nobody who isn’t already in the bag for British period pictures will be swayed by this particular example of the form. 7/10
THE CONVENT (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France)
Screened in the main competition
Unconventional, at very least: American professor Michael Padovic (John Malkovich) arrives at a Portuguese monastery so excited to find the documents that will prove his theory that Shakespeare was of Spanish-Jewish descent that he all but abandons his wife Hélène (Catherine Deneuve) while falling for his research assistant Piedade (Leonor Silveira). Alas, but this plays right into the plan of Baltar (Luís Miguel Cintra), the monastery-keeper who also happens to be, probably, the actual embodiment of Satan, and has Faustian pacts lined up for both of the Padovics. I am incapable of being unmoved by any project so unafraid to look completely ridiculous, or one that’s so willing to grab right on to the Biggest Possible Themes of good and evil, all the more so when it’s being shepherded by a fearless 86-year-old director with nothing to prove. But damn, is it a muddle, with the actors going every which way, the ill-chosen music queues insisting that an Italianate portal-to-hell extravaganza is right around the corner, and far too much obvious coding of its themes. 5/10
DON’T FORGET YOU’RE GOING TO DIE (Xavier Beauvois, France)
Screened in the main competition
This somewhat inexplicable recipient of the Prix du Jury (the festival’s third-place award, essentially), is more than anything a routine slice of realist-adjacent European art cinema. That means long, slow shots; a showy lack of clear story development; joyless explicit sex; and a general sense that everything is more or less awful. It is, by all means, a sturdy example of that genre, assuming that genre is your bag, but it’s certainly not enough of a stand-out to feel like it earned a Cannes berth at all, let alone an inordinately high-profile prize. The movie is a series of elliptically-linked anecdotes centering around Benoît, a young bisexual man with HIV played, not terribly well, by the director; the script (by a five-member writing team) wins lots of points for refusing to clarify what it can deftly imply, but there comes a point where opacity about the main character’s psychology outside of a general background radiation of suicidal ennui feels like an unnecessary wall between the film and the viewer. 7/10
DESPERADO (Robert Rodriguez, USA)
Screened out of competition
It’s probably an overreach to suggest that Rodriguez was already starting to go wrong in just his second feature. I do think, however, that for all its eager style and filmmaking brio (it positively oozes “you’re going to let me have how much money?” in its conception of the action sequences), those things different between Desperado and El Mariachi, to which it is sequel and remake, are exactly the things that tend be most problematic with the director’s films. The desire to make a slick, cool impact in the moment is so intense that he doesn’t do much if any work to stitch those moments into a greater whole with its own building momentum and sense of purpose; it’s really not much more than a clip reel with an excessively great soundtrack. That said, some of those clips are mighty good, and for every moment that’s patently an unnecessary indulgence, there’s a better one that’s B-movie cartoon zaniness at its freest. That climactic shootout centered on guns built into guitar cases covers a lot of sins… 7/10