The Shape of Streaming to Come: Cannes Film Festival 2022 Final Report

After pushing daddy issues to the edges of the cosmos in Ad Astra, James Gray brings his preoccupation with fathers and sons to a more grounded and immediately personal register as he recreates the New York of his boyhood for this moving work of fictionalized memoir — his finest film in who knows how long. Jewish youngster Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta, quite a find) dreams of one day turning his doodles of rocketships into art-world greatness, but the challenges of common life keep him plenty busy: parents (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong, both at their best) who wish he’d just buckle down at school, a beloved granddad (Anthony Hopkins) in flagging health, a transfer to a private academy crawling with little Reaganite creeps. Gray renders it all with granular detail (he and his crew built a scale replica of his former house on a soundstage using home movies and old photos) even more poignant than the heartrending monologues for its intimate specificity. It’s like peering into someone else’s memory.

Crucially, however, Gray sees his mini-me’s choices through the clear eyes of an adult. The moral core of the film concerns class — how it affects Paul in ways too subtle for him to understand, and his parents in ways they’d rather ignore or rationalize away. Paul’s friendship with a Black classmate (Jaylin Webb) is sweet and innocent, until the radically different circumstances of their lives thrust them in opposite directions, a divergence that Gray’s palpable guilty conscience suggests might not be all that passive. As for the parents, they’re constantly weighing their principles against their practices, ditching the public school they claim they’re not above and looking down on people they claim to support. Gray refuses to iron out the discomfiting wrinkles of an imperfect past, an honesty that’s key to the beautiful truth in every frame of this sharply observed stroll down memory lane.

The most buzzed-about marquee title of the festival, David Cronenberg’s grand return to his kingdom of body horror feels like a comeback in a broader sense — a great artist descending from Olympus to remind all these fakers and poseurs how it’s done. Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux star as a pair of performance artists with a ghastly act: she mans the remote-controls of a surgery machine and opens him up for crowds of gown-and-tuxedoed onlookers, removing the horrifying new organs generated by his body’s Accelerated Evolution Syndrome. Being Cronenberg’s first film about artists in a non-metaphorical sense, it’s both tempting and satisfying to project his own outlook regarding the current landscape of weak-tea depravity cinema onto his characters and their stances, a trying-too-hard “Ear Man” (his many grafted-on ears don’t even hear!) standing in for the imitators peddling a knockoff of his style.

But even after an eight-year feature hiatus, Cronenberg’s still in a class by himself. His methods have only gotten stranger, and more distant from the straightforward purview of genre some fans would like him to fit into. Everyone (especially the tittering Timlin, played by Kristen Stewart) speaks in baroque catchphrases or paragraphs of theory; “Infections — what happened to them?” is an instant favorite. The cinematography’s texture has an unnatural plastic anti-sheen, appropriate for a film that opens with a small child crunching into a wastebasket for sustenance. The world of tomorrow is malnourished literally and spiritually, littered with rusted-out boats on Greek beaches with the faint flavor of dystopia, synthetic materials being our final source of food. It’s mind-boggling that Cronenberg scooped real life by writing this script prior to the recent Guardian article about microplastics, but his prophecies have only gained in potency as Earth slips further into its twilight years. He, conversely, could keep going forever.

Speaking of bodies, and their horrible potential to misbehave in unpredictable and sickening ways: this documentary from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab (the folks who gave us the deep-sea fishing head trip Leviathan) checks in at a handful of hospitals around Paris for an unprecedented peek inside the squishy, slimy wonderlands that we take for granted every day. Directors Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor facilitated the development of new micro-cameras capable of getting higher-fidelity footage from within small intestines and rectal chambers, splitting the difference between pure avant-garde geometry and flee-the-theater visceral intensity. Yes, you can never unsee the urethral sounding scene in which a long metal rod is set to “Kalashnikov mode” and rammed down a guy’s peehole, or the eyeball cleaning that sees a needle stuck into the iris of the bravest person to have ever lived on the planet Earth. But if you, like me, enter each new film hoping to be shown something you’ve never seen before, there’s no surer guarantee.

And besides, there’s more to it than simple gross-out exploits. We learn that hospitals themselves function much in the same complex, interconnected way as a human body, with various organs all working in harmony. During a prostate-prodding, we hear a surgeon chewing out his nurses and assistants for problems beyond their control, a nod to the issues of under-funding and under-staffing very much on the mind of Americans right now. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor take a wide-eyed interest in the basic doings of these large institutions, the most thrilling shot coming from the POV of a document-transporting capsule shot at warp speed through the network of pneumatic tubes that criss-cross the buildings. A final dance sequence — set, perfectly, to “I Will Survive” — plays like a tribute to a class of worker the average person thinks about as much about as the involuntary beating of their own heart, so invisibly essential to the continuation of life, only until we stop to consider how miraculous it is that we can keep going on at all.

EO (pronounced with a braying ee-aw, which I heartily recommend you do a few times out loud right now) is a donkey, and moreover, a very good boy. The 84-year-old Polish master Jerzy Skolimowski’s first film in seven years follows this ass that just won’t quit as he goes around the countryside doing stuff, mostly surviving tribulation and bearing witness to suffering. If that sounds like a parody of deep-dish Euro-arthouse highbrowism — this is a loose remake of the 1966 classic Au Hasard Balthazar, after all — don’t be dissuaded by the stony-faced minimalism. This is a feast of pure vibes, as chilled-out and meditative as the icy lake one jaw-dropping shot drifts over upside-down to turn the trees into stark, reflected skyscrapers. Astonishing camera games in that expressive vein keep this 88-minute marvel lively, with regular interludes of EDM-ish stroboscoping and unhinged experiments with the color red.

And there’s no discounting the fundamental charms of the four-legged star himself, portrayed by six animal actors united in their guileless, Christlike purity. EO eats a carrot. EO falls in with some soccer hooligans who think it’d be a gas to get him loaded on beer and shotgunned puffs of weed. EO kills a guy! (He had it coming. No jury would convict.) It’s difficult not to love EO, or to become invested in the picaresque misadventures he wanders through mostly as a distant watcher. Considered as a whole, the film’s assorted episodes paint a picture of a Poland in spiritual crisis, crystallized with a surprise appearance from the unimpeachable Isabelle Huppert as the lecherous stepmother to a defrocked priest. But it’s just as easy to bask in the becalming energy that radiates off of our new donkey hero and the natural vistas through which he leads us, slowly and steadily. EO forever.

After racking up some critical accolades and thousands of crushes for his work on Normal People, Paul Mescal makes a compelling argument for his own movie stardom in Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis’ first film since 2016’s outstanding, underseen The Fits. With an easy charm belying the nasty stuff lying beneath it, Mescal stars as Brian, a prodigal son returned to the Irish fishing village he abandoned years ago for a new start in Australia. He’d like to get back in the oyster harvesting game dominated in town by the local seafood factory, and so he convinces the mother (Emily Watson, giving one of the festival’s standout performances) who work there to nick a few traps for his own use. She believes he can do no wrong and gladly goes along with his little scheme, a minor relaxing of her ethics that will soon be tested with far higher stakes.

Something terrible and best left unrevealed then happens, which pits the two stars against one another in an acting showcase of uncommon depth, Watson shining as she’s eaten up inside by doubt she’d rather stuff down. Davis and Holmer (their impression of Ireland guided by Shane Crowley and Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly’s devastating script) let the percolating pressures rise and rise to an unbearable intensity that combusts in a shocking climax, leaving us with unsettling questions about how we’d behave in the same situation. All the while, we can luxuriate in the gorgeous cinematography from Chayse Irvin, locating clever sources of light in the many nighttime scenes and finding a rugged luster in the grey daylight. He’s at his best shooting all the foreboding, forbidding water that swirls around this morality play, an inky void that stretches into infinity like the depths of the human soul plumbed without compromise or mercy.

Netflix would be fools not to snatch up the directorial debut of Lee Jung-jae, better known for starring in their blockbusting Squid Game. (Put that in your algorithmic synergy pipe and smoke it!) Ambitious, twisty, and hysterically violent, it pushes a lot of the buttons favored by the Big Red N in their other post-facto Originals, and it does so with enough large-scale panache to explode the small screens it may one day inhabit. The espionage epic takes place during a particularly turbulent moment in South Korean history, as a military dictatorship cracked down on protestors and their skulls while tensions flared with their hostile neighbors to the north. Amidst the chaos, a cat-and-mouse game breaks out within the Korean CIA, as the head of the Foreign Unit (Lee Jung-jae, pulling double duty) and the Domestic Unit (Jung Woo-sung, who’s already appeared in such netflicks as Steel Rain and Illang: The Wolf Brigade) race to sniff out the mole they both think is hiding in the other’s team.

As their investigations wend through a thicket of red herrings and dead ends that eventually lead to a Presidential assassination plot, the two elite agents pool their wits and jointly ascend to a plane of god-mode ownage. I cannot emphasize enough the staggering volume of people killed within this film’s sprawling two-and-a-half hours, as if Lee was contractually obligated to blow away at least twenty-five guys with each scene. And he orchestrates these symphonies of carnage with old-school know-how, keeping CGI to a minimum and maxing out the squib packs, so numerous as to keep the industry in the black for years to come. A labyrinthine script demands every grain of your attention, a big ask for a run time this hefty, but those not thrown by the convolutions can savor an exceptionally gnarly specimen of the spy picture. (And those who get lost can still bathe in blood.)

It’s a real freaky film, man: Brett Morgen’s coming-soon-to-HBO David Bowie documentary can’t even be contained within that simple description, more like a rapid-fire collage of images and references revolving like a solar system around one of history’s most endlessly fascinating musicians. The opening minutes rocket through a collage of clips, not just featuring the art-rock alien himself but any allusion that might give us context for his whole indescribable gestalt. Alongside flashes of the “Ashes to Ashes” video or a live performance of “All the Young Dudes,” we can catch hints of silent-cinema classics like Nosferatu (a fellow lanky outsider afeared by normal squares), Metropolis (a vision of the industrial German maximalism favored in Bowie’s Berlin years), or Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (another Weimar artifact, about a man able to cast spells over his audiences). Even when the connections seem tenuous, we can do the work of making them make sense, and take away whatever insights we generate from these pop-culture Rorschach tests.

As the film rolls through its admittedly overlong two and a half hours, it migrates away from the experimental and toward convention. Where the first hour concentrates on overarching themes like Bowie’s bisexuality or his sartorial sensibilities, the remainder follows a more chronological arrangement as it takes us through the sojourns in Los Angeles and West Germany, his marriage to the mononymous supermodel Iman, and his ‘90s pivot to populism. (His dalliance with cocaine, however, is respectfully skimmed over.) These sections provide a serviceable crash course for Bowie newbies, and for those already well-versed, a fine way to revisit a handful of the stone-cold bangers he cranked out by the dozens. Morgen doesn’t have much in the way of major revelations about a rock star subjected to thorough coverage for five decades, but the free-associative manner angle from which he approaches can still reenergize an enigma who’d never go stale anyhow.

Every Romanian film concerns just how terrible it is to live in Romania, a land of governmental corruption, dysfunctional public infrastructure, and nasty-tempered villagers fueled by hate. This latest film from past Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu, still the only director from his country to nab the festival’s top prize, focuses on that last part. In a small, secluded community somewhere in Transylvania, a pressure-cooker of xenophobia threatens to explode once a few Sri Lankan immigrants come to town for work at a local bread factory. The residents’ response sounds like a stream of racist consciousness that Americans will understand as a close cousin of Trumpist thought: they’re coming to take our jobs (the ones none of them can be bothered to take themselves), they want to replace us, they’re agents of foreign powers with bad intentions. A stunning one-take sequence during a town meeting releases a river of bile, the mask of logic slowly dropping as townspeople admit they just don’t want to look at anyone different.

If this sounds like a miserable slog, there’s enough ideological fire and cool, masterly camerawork to keep even the most drained festival audiences rapt. Mungiu takes us through snow-dusted woods and dirt-paved roads, shooting all of it with a detached remove that can conjure beauty as readily as ugliness. The plot has more beguiling curlicues than the political battering-ram approach might suggest; bears figure prominently into things, as does the cello-playing of the bread factory’s owner. She’s part of the moral quandary as the center of a film with strong partisan principles, too, her seeming altruism to the immigrants a possible smokescreen for exploitation of what she ultimately sees as low-cost labor. No one comes out of this one looking particularly good, a fierce and uncompromised pessimism we just can’t get from the cinematic output of Hollywood, or for that matter, the States’ indie circuit. The American equivalent of this could never exist, though the national pathologies are so similar that we may as well be looking in a cracked mirror.

Take an art-world satire, with all the competition and petty resentment and starving desperation implied therein, and shrink it down to the lowest-stakes terms imaginable. Add Michelle Williams in what may be a career-best role. Then remove as much action as the script can sustain without disintegrating, as if pitched to viewers who found director Kelly Reichardt’s previous feature First Cow too jam-packed with thrills. That’s the long and short of this exquisite character portrait of a woman facing down the limits of her own talents in a field that doesn’t seem to want much to do with her anyway. Williams shines as the beleaguered Lizzy Carr, a small-time sculptor at the now-defunct Oregon College of Art and Craft, trying to level up with her forthcoming exhibition and waylaid by distractions everywhere she looks: her landlord/friend (Hong Chau, increasingly the former over the latter) won’t fix her water heater, a wounded pigeon requires her constant care and attention, the serene condescension of the fussed-over visiting artist in residence drives her nuts.

But Reichardt’s stroke of tragic genius lies in her suggestion that Lizzy just might not be cut out for this. Her sculptures are okay, when uneven kiln heating hasn’t charred them on one side. Her father (Judd Hirsch) is a well-regarded ceramicist, her mother (Maryann Plunkett) runs the department, and her mentally unstable brother (John Magaro) possess the spark of inspiration that Lizzy would kill for. The climactic gallery show — though even using the word ‘climactic’ feels inappropriate to describe a film so determinedly low-key and chilled-out in its West Coast college-town vibe — unfolds like gentle farce, the little indignities of her life piling on top of one another as she hisses at her brother to take it easy with the free cheese. For Reichardt, a longtime Bard professor, the lampooning of her own approximate circumstance comes across as more affectionate than caustic, marked by a certain appreciation for any setting that allows unambitious weirdoes to be themselves on their own time.

The best-of-the-fest credit sequence belongs to this psychodrama from Poland’s best-kept secret Agnieszka Smoczyńska, making a successful first foray into the English language. Each name gets read and then commented upon by a couple of girlish voices, cooing “oh, I love that name!” as Michael Smiley flashes onscreen, for instance. It’s not just a good bit, either; it’s an introduction into the insular universe created and inhabited by June (Laetitia Wright) and Jennifer (Tamara Lawrance) Gibbons, a pair of Black girls who really did live in Wales during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Out of place in an otherwise entirely white hamlet, they took refuge in their relationship to one another and fell into selective mutism, their tight-lipped withdrawal from their surroundings eventually landing them in the abject bedlam of Broadmoor mental hospital. Within this factual account, Smoczyńska and writer Andrea Seigel explore the abnormal mental interiority shared by the girls, imagining what such extreme experiences may have felt like from the inside out.

Just as they must have been for the girls, the breaks with realism dazzle in a way that the dreariness of their day-to-day lives couldn’t hope to compete with. Superbly crinkly stop-motion sequences see bird-headed people wandering through dimensions of crepe-paper and felt, and the occasional musical number conveys the sisters’ tormented inner states in declarative language, Greek choruses to themselves. (Same deal as with Smoczyńska’s brilliant killer-mermaid-stripper extravaganza The Lure, from back in Poland.) June and Jennifer imagine themselves into a color-saturated sanctuary where everything can be perfect and right, until smash cuts back to real life jolt us with the unromantic reality in which jocks try to sport-fuck them after getting the sheltered girls high on gasoline. As their joint condition worsens and courts drive them apart, we can only watch while hostile forces obliterate their private haven, a series of formal backflips that sticks the landing in commentary on the lacking mental-health services of the UK.

With Mad Max now in his rearview, George Miller makes a grand return with this unlikely modern fairy tale concerning a hotel room back-and-forth between a narratologist named Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton, top form) and the genie (Idris Elba, resplendent and giant) she’s just released from a bottle acquired the previous day in an Istanbul bazaar. You know the drill, he’s here to grant her three wishes to use as she chooses, but because she also knows the drill, she’s reluctant to walk into some be-careful-what-you-wish-for trap. To convince her of his good intentions, he spins a wondrous tale of how he’s spent the last three millennia, a CGI extravaganza with more imagination in any given minute than most comparable studio projects can muster in their entire run time. From the Queen of Sheba’s castle to the court of Suleiman the Great, magic and trickery and passion course through a voyage across the ancient Middle East.

But this fantastic journey has an unexpected destination, ultimately arriving at a delicate love story between these two wayward kindred spirits. They break through their loneliness through the shared pleasure of storytelling, doubled down on by Miller’s structure of nested narratives. As Alithea explains in an academic conference speech near the top of the film, we invent mythologies to make sense of the baffling world around us, and Miller has accomplished the considerable feat of bringing that sense of reverence and invention to a modern world choked by technological knowledge. Though of course the filmmaker’s no Luddite; visual effects fetishists will be ravished by the savvy usage of digital embellishment and full-scale creation, whether it’s a stunning shot following the bottle from a bird’s talons into the ocean or the instant nightmare fuel of an assassin who turns into a Gigeresque spider-mutant and then dissolves into a puddle of scarabs.

Riley Keough settles into the director’s chair alongside Gina Gammell for an auspicious start to their careers’ seeming next phase. (The pair already have another joint project in the works.) They’ve shed any hint of Hollywood vanity by going lo-fi in this neorealist look at life around South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation, where the Oglala Lakota tribe carve out a living for themselves however they can. For local kid Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) and elder teen Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), that mostly means stealing and selling, dealing the odd bit of meth, logging hours at a nearby turkey farm and factory, or playing the longer game by breeding poodles for sale. There’s not much else to do when you haven’t got the cash to do anything, a truth understood by a film that’s mostly content to hang out with youngsters just trying to find something to fill the unoccupied time.

If this sounds like outsiders Keough and Gammell are putting an overly romantic shine on poverty or going in the other direction toward exploitation, think again; they deftly thread the tonal needle that identifies hardship without fixating on it, guided by the steady hand of scriptwriters Bill Reddy and Franklin Sioux Bob, as well as the cast made up of real-life residents from Pine Ridge. These characters must contend with a lot of shit from the adults around them — Matho’s sporadically abusive dad, Bill’s white a-hole boss — but like real-life youths, the tribulation mostly slides off their backs once they can resume hanging out and making mischief with their friends. A transcendent climax reaffirms the film’s basest intention to celebrate and empower a people marginalized by a white-dominated society that thinks of them in dismissive terms when thinking of them at all. The Keough-Gammell directorial brain trust will be here to stay, and hopefully so will their charismatic collaborators, the most watchable non-professional actors we’ve seen since Chloe Zhao’s The Rider.