POMO

An extraordinarily gentle, quiet and slow film with a pure melancholic soul. It starts out as a profile of overpopulated, rain-soaked Mumbai with a look into the lives of two friends living there and later shifts to a calmer, quieter place. As the debut fictional film of an experienced documentary filmmaker, All We Imagine as Light reminds us of the interest and thoughtfulness with which original, high-quality Indian dramas can tell us about the feelings of their characters. The socially inhospitable setting and the difficulty of living life in it adds depth to their impressiveness. To be happy here means living in an illusion. [Cannes FF]

If you don’t read anything about Anora in advance or see the trailer, it is flawlessly unpredictable not only in terms of plot, but also in terms of genre. The situation in which the protagonist finds herself easily varies in its degree of seriousness, shifting from tensely comedic to cruelly dramatic. The film masterfully straddles this thin line, eliciting hearty laughter while holding us in suspense and apprehension. Sean Baker is the Steven Spielberg of independent film, an extraordinarily imaginative screenwriter and director with a unique feel for sociology and the ability to tell the stories of people and their souls like no one else. Anora is both an exceptional comedy and a drama that bares the heart from a perspective that you wouldn’t expect. An absolute knockout with extraordinary emotion. Thank you. [Cannes FF]

Don’t be put off by the shallow premise and the B-movie stylisation. The reflection of the rules of television show business is deliberately superficial. Those past their prime must be replaced with young people with perfect bodies. And because of that, celebrities are willing to do anything to their own bodies. For roughly the first one hundred minutes, I didn’t want to believe that such a cheaply stylised trash flick could appear in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival. Of course, Coralie Fargeat has a grander plan for us and takes it in unexpected directions with the inner psychological conflict of the main character and, in terms of genre, with a nod to Peter Jackson’s early splatter flicks. This is taken almost to the point of a transcendental body horror spectacle in which the director doesn’t shy away from humorously using the music of Herrmann from Vertigo and Strauss from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Demi Moore is cast perfectly in the role of a fading celebrity, and Margaret Qualley excels as the up-and-coming star of a television show.  Qualley, incidentally, is enjoying a truly golden period in her career, as she also appeared in Lanthimos’s new film Kinds of Kindness in this year’s Cannes competition. Tarantino deserves thanks for discovering her! If the film hadn’t worked so clearly and predictably with B-movie elements in those first hundred minutes, I would have given it five stars! ___ It occurs to me that female directors are starting to show far more female nudity in their films than their male counterparts. I can cite two examples of this phenomenon just from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, namely Les Femmes au balcon and this film, The Substance, where we see both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s breasts up close, not to mention their curves in leggings. Yum! [Cannes FF]