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If you’ve been following along, you’ll notice that most of these capsules have been grab bags that aren’t necessarily linked by their festival placement or even themes. But this one is different. Every film here not only played as part of the Main Competition. They also premiered on the same day. These works are further linked by their interest in memory and loss, preserving the past and struggling to look toward the future—ideas that could also be applied to other festival highlights like “Renoir” and “My Father’s Shadow.” Two of these three films might also be among the best at Cannes. So let’s begin on a high.
In writer/director Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” a quietly seismic familial dramedy, are two close sisters, a distant father and an indispensable home linked to generations worth of emotional turmoil. Trier’s gnawing, intimate follow-up to “The Worst Person in the World,” finds the profound in the mundane, resolution in ambiguity, and healing in pain. This is also a film about filmmaking and artistry, which asks these bewitchingly flawed characters to forgive by creating.
It begins with the personification of a family home, a resplendent red and green Victorian house that’s been passed down from generation to generation. Through narration we learn the history of this cozy abode, the love that’s happened, the fights that have rattled it, and the departures that have altered its verve. Right now, sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are experiencing a major change, the death of their mother. Due to her passing, the home will revert to Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), their aloof father. A famed film director, Gustav is close with the often peaceful Agnes, who often acts as his research assistant, but is estranged from his far more vulnerable actress daughter Nora.
Nevertheless, Gustav comes back into Nora’s life brandishing a script with a lead role he’s written for her. As you’d expect, Nora isn’t really keen to be in her pop’s film: they bicker and hurt each other, and lately, she’s been battling stage fright. After a chance encounter at a film festival, Gustav, instead, offers the part to American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning, with her best performance since “The Beguiled”). But even that sidestep causes raw wounds to be scraped again.
Trier is moving innumerable parts here: He pulls the film back in history to the country’s Nazi occupation, comments upon suicidal ideation, expresses the power of sisterhood, and even finds time to throw in a few pot shot at Netflix. His film transcends time and, to a point, through lines, by waiting to reveal the connectivity of the many eras and moods he’s depicting until fairly late in the game. Trier is fascinated by art as a therapeutic tool whose medicinal qualities are only apparent to the artist long after the process is complete, which is why the film is broken up into so many parts. These aren’t chapters per se, as each time one part is finished, the screen fades to black. But these are the natural exhale points for a film whose taut writing commands you to hold your breath.
In “Sentimental Value,” we’re gifted Trier’s usual aesthetic command: the light shines with ethereal force, the colors in the frame are warm to the touch, the camera moves with an almost godlike assuredness. But the actors shine brightest in a film concerned with performance, particularly the emotional labor necessary to commit to a penetrating self-exploration. Skarsgård scores as a lovable, albeit often defeated cad. A devastating Lilleaas delivers several gut punches. Reinsve returns with her immeasurable range. There isn’t a choice by Reinsve that isn’t a total surprise or a complete revelation, particularly in her eyes, where melancholy and humor swim with equal speed.
“Sentimental Value” isn’t a tear-jerking affair. It’s actually quite funny. But the film’s resonance takes ample space and length to find its intended depth. When it finally sneaks up on you—breaking you down before building you back up—it does so with a distinctive easefulness that merits rewatching.
When the orphaned 18-year-old Marina (Llúcia Garcia) travels back to Vigo, Spain, the birthplace of her parents, she arrives with one goal in mind: She wants to be officially recognized as her father’s daughter. See, when her father died of AIDS back in 1992, he and Marina’s mother weren’t married. To compound the problem, her father’s family is a well-to-do bunch. They’d rather let it not be publicly known that their formerly heroin addicted son and daughter-in-law had a child out of wedlock. But Marina still makes the trip, reconnecting with her uncles, aunts, cousins, and conservative grandparents to learn about the family she barely knows.
“Romería,” writer/director Carla Simón’s semi-autobiographical competition title, traverses through memory and loss for a quiet, visually creative coming-of-age story.
Though Marina was orphaned at a young age, she isn’t totally in the dark: She arrives in Vigo armed with her mother’s detailed journal, which spans 1983-86. She also holds dear the stories told by her side of the family about her dad. Like a game of telephone, however, she soon learns that her stories differ from her new family’s recollections. Simón’s agile script further shows how the passage of time can morph our perceptions of people and events: She nimbly intertwines Marina’s family get-togethers with scenes involving her deceased parents, rendering them as a kind of residue on both this seaside town and those they left behind.
Romería moves meditatively, buoyed by Simón’s enchanting rendering of the blindingly blue Ria de Vigo. Garcia as Marina is equally captivating, drifting through this new milieu silently but continuously observant. Marina visits her parents’ old haunts and speaks about her parents with her uncle, Lois (Tristán Ulloa), and her cousin, Nuno (Mitch Martín). An aspiring filmmaker, she also carries a camcorder with her, recording the area with a level of devotion that makes one believe she’s fearful of even this place disappearing.
Similar to Simón’s “Alcarràs,” “Romería” is a vibrant film about all the scandals, divides, and connections that can be contained within families. Conversely, “Romería” is more dreamlike and fractured but no less emotionally direct. The aforementioned Garcia is a large part of the film’s pathos, transmitting an ebullient hollowness on her visage that defies any neat interpretation. And when Simón finally decides to pull us back into time fully, it’s not done as a cheat. The move encapsulates the tender heart that pushes this shy girl toward defining her existence, making for a stunning portrait of loss and recovery.
How do I put this delicately? Oliver Hermanus’ queer period film, “The History of Sound,” is a trite bore. It begins in 1910 Kentucky. The camera skims over a river’s water, where a weathered voice recalls their musical ability, “My father said it was a gift from God.”
We first glimpse Lionel (Paul Mescal), the only son of two hard-working farmers, as a boy listening to his parents sing folk songs on their porch. The older Lionel (voiced by Chris Cooper) further explains that his musical gifts were enough to win him a spot at the New England Conservatory of Music. Fast forward to 1917, when Lionel, sitting at a bar, hears fellow music student David White (Josh O’Connor) crooning a folk song he recognizes, and you’re smack dab in the middle of a movie that wants you to believe the restricted Mescal is an otherworldly singer. Lionel and David will eventually become inseparable before David leaves for World War I, returns for an expedition, and disappears again.
Adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own same-titled short story, “The History of Sound” sorta spins away from Hermanus (“Living”). You get the sense this could’ve been like Terence Davies’s “Benediction,” another film that mixes memory and regret, sexuality and war to consider the lives of queer people from a century ago. But the film’s strong start, which is filled with soothing folk ballads and traditional tunes, runs out of steam with every half-hearted reach by Hermanus for weighty themes. Take the song collecting expedition David and Lionel under in 1919 down America’s dirt and back roads, here, the pair encounter wonderful music but nothing else. Lionel makes some vague argument about the thin line between preserving and looting these tunes and David takes a feeble stance against racism, but these are blips in the larger story. Likewise, the film struggles to make any meaningful comment on the divide between the rural and urban, and the potentially different lives each one offers for queer men.
“The History of Sound” is further hobbled once O’Connor leaves the picture. The flat, incongruous directing becomes far more apparent without his wit and guarded vulnerability. Seriously, Hermanus and his cinematographer Alexander Dynan (“First Reformed”) choose some unflattering angles to frame their handsome leading men. Mescal works overtime to hold it all together, only to fall apart. Though this is the kind of nuanced, interior-based role he excels at, after the failure of “Gladiator II,” it’s becoming increasingly apparent that he’s uncomfortable as the primary lead. He needs a capable scene partner, such as Andrew Scott in “All of Us Strangers,” for his notes to work in harmony.
Hermanus destroys any opportunity for “The History of Sound” to conjure some resonance by making an incomprehensible decision for its conclusion. Rather than ending on Cooper, who delivers a shattering performance, he shifts back in time, reaching for a narrative neatness that betrays the tragic complexity this film wants, but can’t offer.
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