Are there actually films in Cannes that are simply beautiful?
They exist.
In "Un beau matin" by Mia Hansen-Løve, Léa Seydoux, who plays the hot-cold scalpel slasher in David Cronenberg's "Crimes of the Future", plays a single mother who is looking for a new beginning after the death of her partner.
In a park in Paris, she meets her old boyfriend Clément (Melvil Poupaud, the boy in Eric Rohmer's "Summer"), who is married but still desires her.
At the same time, she has to take care of her father (Pascal Greggory), who suffers from an illness that robs him of his perception and memory, which is all the more bitter as the old man (who is not really old yet) was once a famous professor of philosophy .
Andrew Kilb
Feature correspondent in Berlin.
Follow I follow
This sounds like a problem film in the retelling, but "Un beau matin" is the exact opposite: a film that looks at the ups and downs of its characters with a loving, deeply compassionate gaze.
The way Hansen-Løve balances the different themes of her story is admirable, even knowing that she's managed this feat several times since she made her directorial debut fifteen years ago.
Last year, the French director with Danish roots was in the Cannes competition with the extravagant cinema homage “Bergman Island”.
"Un beau matin", which runs in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, is the much better film, if only because it dispenses with scholarly allusions and is left entirely to participant observation.
That a library is the true portrait of a man
this is not just a sentence that has just been said;
you really see it when the professor's book collection has to be sold because he's moving into a nursing home: Kafka, Goethe, Hannah Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel, Hölderlin... "But he didn't write these books, did he?" but he has read them all.”
Or "Chronique d'une liaison passagère" by Emmanuel Mouret.
For twenty years, Mouret, who started out as an actor, has been telling stories about people who meet, desire and lose again, about loyalty and betrayal, playfulness and malicious seriousness.
This time it's Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Macaigne, who have an affair that oscillates between routine and passion, in which she reveals much more about herself than he does, until the two get the fatal idea of looking for a partner for a three-night trip on the internet .
They find a shy literature teacher who initially seems like a miscast in the threesome fantasy, which is a deception.
Because Charlotte/Kiberlain falls in love with the other woman, the cards are reshuffled and Simon, who initially seemed so cool and serene, takes on the role of the sufferer.
You've seen it all a hundred times, but Mouret has a way of making the mundane soar that you forgive the film for all its lengths and gaps.
And because the director has found his perfect alter ego in actor Vincent Macaigne for a number of years, there is a harmony between the camera's gaze and the actors' acting that is rare in cinema.
The center of the film, however, is Sandrine Kiberlain, who sovereignly lets all projections directed at her character, which result from the constellation Mouret/Macaigne, rebound on her.
She is the true mistress of this “liaison passagère”.
Emily Atef's film "Plus que jamais" ("More than ever") is the only contribution by a German director in the main program at Cannes.
Vicky Krieps, who plays Empress Sissi accelerated to #MeToo pace in Marie Kreutzer's Austrian costume drama "Corsage", is a young woman in Atef who is preparing for her death.
Hélène suffers from an illness that is destroying her respiratory system and has only a few months to live.
Instead of clinging to the hope of a lung transplant like her partner, she travels by train from Bordeaux to Norway to visit a man she met on the Internet through a blog for the terminally ill.
The film wants us to see the landscape of fjords and heather-covered mountains through the eyes of a dying woman, and it succeeds.
But what Vicky Krieps manages to do in “Plus que jamais” is even more.
She lets us look into the soul of a person who knows that he has to go too soon, and yet at some point realizes that there is no longer any point in fighting back.
The way she gradually teaches her partner Matthieu that she wants to walk her final journey alone, while gradually saying goodbye to him is deeply touching and painfully comforting.
The fact that Gaspard Ulliel, who played Matthieus, died in January at the age of thirty-seven as a result of a skiing accident is one of the coincidences that exist in life and in the cinema.
However, one must constantly remember
"Plus que jamais" and "Chronique d'une liaison passagère" are in the main program in Cannes, but not in the competition, but in the series "Un certain regard".
That's a good thing, because you don't have to compare them with each other.
And the awards they don't win don't hurt them.