“Their World Collapses”: A Rich Main Competition Full of Tragic Moments

“Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm,” is the official Cannes logline for Alpha. But the first three words – “Their world collapses” – effectively capture the mood of about half, maybe more, of this year’s Main Competition films. Dark, even bleak, with doomed protagonists, dire scenarios and nihilistic worldviews, this year’s selection often reflected a great anxiety with the world, and left the viewer satisfyingly and thoroughly distressed, paranoid and upset. In a good way.

Many of those films also feature a pivotal violent moment – or two, or three – that send their characters and the audience into even darker territory. Lives are lost, guns are fired, explosions explode, people die, at first-act turning points or halfway marks. This was a surprising, consistent and quite distressing feature of this crop of films, many of which, while artful and of the highest craftsmanship, may be considered ‘horror films’, if a horror film is defined as a film that horrifies.

Some of the films that featured such turns, and that I found particularly arresting, include Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, an extraordinary way to kick off the Main Competition – a rich, incredibly intricate epic of inter-generational pain, trauma and death. This very dark and painful film follows various girls at the same location – an isolated farmhouse in Northern Germany – across four generations, though the film is temporally fractured, and it takes quite a while – perhaps forty minutes (the film is two and a half hours) to start to realise what is actually going on and how what we’re seeing inter-relates. Indeed, the film keeps revealing itself, onion-skin style, all the way to the end; you may accuse it of being a puzzle box, of being deliberately challenging, but I found that the revelations of the story’s own construction was very much part of the film’s success. The specific themes and ideas the film is addressing are confrontational and bleak; specifically, the film imagines masochism, sexual abuse, suicidal ideation, familial obsession and even incest as carried on in the bloodlines.

Like David Lynch, Schilinski uses disturbing, unnerving imagery and sound design to evoke a horror movie without delivering one. There are psychologically horrifying things going on in this film – physically horrifying ones too (although there is very little on-screen violence) – but this is a deeply artful drama at its core, astonishingly rich in its thoughtfulness and observation, creativity and originality.

What truly struck me about Schilinski’s work here – as with her film Die Tochter – is her clear ability to tap into and portray the highly specific emotional and psychological terrain of childhood and particularly girlhood. In Die Tochter this was a seven year old girl. Here, we follow multiple girls of different ages and yet all of them are precisely, painfully presented. Indeed, this is a film about the pain of childhood, and, ultra-specifically, the way children think and feel about death. What an ambitious idea for a big film, and it really, really works.

Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors is an exceptionally well shot, incredibly well designed and superbly acted indictment of Stalinism. Taking place at the height of The Great Purge, it tells a very simple story, in long, simply shot scenes, but with consistent, perfect precision – indeed, it was the most formally precise film in the Main Competition. It achieves a frightening enormity: everything we’re witnessing, all of it terrifying, is possible in any society. It is a film for our immediate times.

A young provincial prosecutor, charged with enforcing Soviet law, runs up against Stalinist reality. At first the film plays out almost as a morbid black comedy of the banalities of Soviet bureaucracy, as the young fellow butts heads with constant opposition to his simple mission. But as the film progresses, the fellow quietly becomes a hero, in a time and place that has no room for them.

The production design is sublime but the faces make the movie. Every actor is not only perfect but has a perfect face – most of them brutal. When one, quite late in the film, actually smiles at our protagonist, it feels like a dam bursting. And we know what that leads to.

Procedural at its most procedural, and seemingly an ode to the honour of the French Police, Dominik Moll’s Dossier 137 manages to blend fact and fiction to the point that you’re not sure which is which. It has a lot on its mind as it follows a member of the ‘police police’ – the interior investigators of police misconduct – dealing with a situation within the chaos of the Yellow Vest movement. It’s compelling and features a superb lead performance from Léa Drucker, but may for some be a little too police-friendly.

Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt may just be the most intense experience I’ve ever had in a movie theatre (and in the Grand Theatre Lumiére at that, one of the finest screens in the world). Essentially The Wages of Fear meets Climax (take that to your Hollywood executive) but more consistently tense than both of those famously intense movies, it is a grinding assault on your senses, a experiential horror film, a freak-out.

Using electronic music, the Moroccan desert and heavy trucks, Laxe plays out a story of hard-core lifestyle ravers, a father searching for his lost daughter, and maybe World War Three. This is a bleak, nihilistic film, the cinema of hopelessness, and I’m not sure it has a tremendous amount to say. But it’s certainly a terrifying, deeply visceral experience. I loved it. It was my favourite film of the Main Competition, but it split our Jury. (Two of us loved it. One of us hated it.)

Julia Ducournau’s third feature Alpha is her bleakest yet. Love and loss are the themes; addiction and plague the milieu. The performances are extraordinary as is the craftsmanship, but there are a couple of major choices – one aesthetic, the other narrative – that mar the overall experience. Although clearly about AIDS, Ducournau invents an alternative transmitted disease that turns its victims into marble, prettifying the symptoms of a very ugly disease. And the climax of the film pulls the narrative rug so fiercely, many viewers were simply left bewildered.

Ari Aster takes on modern America with Eddington, a big, angry swing with a better first half than second. The film absolutely has one of these ‘violent swings’ about halfway through – and then things go downhill, not just for the protagonist but for the audience. Again a very long film like Beau is Afraid, and suffering the same third-act problems, perhaps Aster needs to experiment with an experience that is more around the two, than three, hour mark.

Lynne Ramsay seems to favour provocation over all, more and more. Die, My Love is a very deliberate provocation, a kind of Nightbitch on Acid. Not that this is a response to that film – the timing just doesn’t work out like that – but it does seem to be saying to Nightbitch, “You think that’s what mothering does to you? I’ll show you what mothering can do to you.”

The trouble is, it makes its point over and over, becoming very repetitive, only to be spiced up about every half an hour with a blatant jump-scare, cheapening the work. Jennifer Lawrence keeps it compelling but it’s over the top, in not a good way.

Tarik Saleh’s Eagles of the Republic truly featured a very violent moment about halfway through that absolutely jags the narrative in an entirely different direction, and the film into a very different tone. It also energises a film that had been until then starting to feel a little flat.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s very deliberately epic The Secret Agent is one of those very long films that you need to know the running time going in, so you can relax into its structure. (It’s two hours and forty-five minutes.) But if you know that going in, you can revel in its novelistic approach, that allows for digression, diversion, humour and pure character, even though essentially we’re being told a historical crime thriller.

There are many, many characters, many, many subplots and not so much twists and turns as just a general vibe of unpredictability, including the most peculiar act of  violence in the competition (although it’s not a particularly violent movie, for a crime thriller). If you get lost in its storytelling labyrinth, don’t worry: it all wraps up tremendously satisfactorily. It’s rich, strange, extremely well designed (it takes place in Brazil in 1977) and, as my fellow juror described it, juicy.

We gave our Main Competition prize to this audacious film, declaring:

“We chose a film that has a novelistic, epic generosity; that allows for digression, diversion, humour and character, to evoke a time and place, and a rich, strange and deeply troubling story of corruption and oppression. A film that makes its own rules, is personal yet universal, that takes its time and acts as a memory vessel for a world: the world of military-ruled Brazil in 1977, and the world of good people in bad times.”

CJ Johnson
©FIPRESCI