The Shape of Streaming to Come: Cannes Film Festival 2023 Final Report

As the dust settles on the Croisette, the 76th Cannes Film Festival draws to a close with the annual misallocation of the awards. (Justine Triet’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall amply deserved the Palme d’Or, that’s fine, but the jury — led by Force Majeure, The Square, and Triangle of Sadness director Ruben Östlund — couldn’t find anything for Todd Haynes’ superlative melodrama May December?) In a year marred by ticketing calamities and spates of driving rain, the epicenter of the cinema world still offered its fair share of offscreen sights to behold, reminding the harried press corps why they’d made the schlep halfway around the globe: handsomely-chapeau’d Un Certain Regard jury president John C. Reilly strutting down the main promenade like the dandy mayor of a small Mississippian town; Harrison Ford moved to tears by the earsplitting cheers for his latest and surely final outing as Indiana Jones; Martin Scorsese moving some eye-water of his own upon receiving a question from Roger Ebert’s widow Chaz at a press conference. There’s a heady mix of excitement and terror in the air around this rarefied locale where you might think you’re having a private conversation with your friend about the effects of travel on your bowel movements, but then it turns out you’re in earshot of Jennifer Lawrence. 

As Decider’s man on the scene for the past couple of weeks, I’ve already covered Best First Film winner How to Have Sex and its distributor MUBI, the game-changing Ultimate Cut of the carnal epic Caligula, and new releases from such heavy hitters as Martin Scorsese (Killers Of The Flower Moon) and Wes Anderson (Asteroid City). But that left too many strong titles for time and my finite mental energies to accommodate with individual reviews, demanding a digest-style wrap-up to spread the good word on the shiniest gems to expect in theaters and streaming channels over the year to come. A pair of European legal battles with defendants testing audience sympathies, a South Korean somnambulant freakshow, a big juicy bite of the forbidden fruit in from France, a romance with a more literal-minded relationship to indulgent feasting, a critically-beloved comedy of despair from Finland — the lowdown on all that and more waits below. Now more baguette than man, I bid the Cote d’Azur au revoir until next year, and goodbye to the subterranean Marché in which low-rent sales agencies peddle incredibly not-real computer-animated films no human eye will ever see. I’ll come back for you, Fleak.

• Anatomy of a Fall

  The Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize, went to Justine Triet’s slippery, trilingual courtroom drama, which sets itself apart from the rest of a rigorously formulaic genre through its refusal to cast the prickly defendant Sandra (Sandra Hüller, better here than in Jonathan Glazer’s staid, detached anti-Holocaust picure The Zone of Interest) in a sympathetic light. Relatable isn’t the same thing as innocent, but as her lawyer explains to her, it may be even more important in convincing a jury that she did not kill the husband (Samuel Theis) who allegedly fell from the top floor of their snowy French home not long after one of their not-infrequent drag-down fights. As Triet peels away layers of obfuscation toward an unflattering truth, the resultant battle of words and wits plays like an episode of Law and Order with the semi-self-aware goofiness replaced by a fragile conviction in the subjective, imperfect process of justice. Down to the last moment, we can’t be sure if she did it or not, and Triet dares us to wonder whether that even matters. (Featuring the most contagious needle-drop of the festival in the Bacao Rhythm and Steel Band’s reggae-tinged cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.,” heard in the film multiple times, striking a radically altered emotional note on each playing.)

• Fallen Leaves

  After six long years, Finland’s proudest son Aki Kaurismäki has returned with another wry, downbeat tragicomedy about the microscopic indignities of common life and the brief gasps of respite we find within them. Two lives intersect, one belonging to a “zero-hour contract” worker (a dehumanizing arrangement in which an employer owes the employee no minimum of hours per week) stocking shelves in a market by day and sorting recyclables by night, the other to a barely-functioning alcoholic getting kicked from one factory gig to the next to his utter indifference. The force bringing them together wouldn’t be accurately called love, as they all but state outright in one characteristically blunt yet oblique dialogue. All the same, they establish an improbably intimate bond, a dynamic pointing back to the odd couple of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (as do the suggestive yellow-red colorations, expressionistic lighting schemes, and gorgeously dingy bar the pair frequents). Gentle in manner, tender in its wounded romanticism, yet with a touch of cruelty in its sense of humor, Kaurismäki’s sensibility elegantly weaves complicated, contradictory currents of feeling. (MUBI has already picked the title up, with an eye for a theatrical run later this year before taking it streaming.)

• Last Summer

  Ahh, the French — who else could’ve made this delectably soapy drama about a self-possessed career woman who just can’t stop banging her nubile stepson? Filmmaker and agent provocateur Catherine Breillat may not have intended this as a romp rife with muted comedy-through-editing, but even if her sense of eroticism (articulated mostly through breathy, heaving close-ups of faces mashed against other faces) misses its intended mark, it lands somewhere more telling and perversely entertaining. Our gal Anne (Léa Drucker) has so many opportunities to cut off this illicit affair and make the right decision, she even knows what that choice is and says so out loud, and yet she can’t quite stop herself from doing the wrong thing every chance she gets. There’s a scandalizing intimation of confession in the adulatory way Breillat shoots the hairless, slight Samuel Kircher, taking us inside the taboo perspective of his grown admirer, though she’d also have us believe that he was the one putting the moves on her. (For an added layer of queasy subtext, the currently-eighteen-year-old Kircher must have been seventeen while shooting the rather frank sex scenes with the unclothed Drucker.) The heart famously wants what the heart wants, an axiom that Breillat pushes to its breaking point with this near-parody of Gallic transgression.

• Pictures of Ghosts

  Though this year saw Wang Bing’s fabric-factory exploration Youth break into Competition, Cannes generally goes light on the documentaries, which makes this quasi-autobiographical slice of life in the Brazilian city of Recife from Kleber Mendonça Filho all the more welcome. The relaxed vibe of his lockdown project, a combination of local and personal history overlaid on one another by his easy-on-the-ears voiceover, befits a place where locals prefer to take it easy when the harsh sociopolitical realities of the region let them. Dogs laze in the sun and cats nonchalantly tiptoe through coils of razor wire while Mendonça reflects on how Recife has influenced cinema in general and his movies in particular, a moving creative symbiosis between an artist and his home. An elegiac tribute to the area’s palatial theaters (some preserved, some crumbling in a brutal reminder of time’s steady passage) and broader cultural heritage including traditional music and capoeira demonstrations, this far-from-minor work conducts a guided tour through a beautiful, significant locus of global cinephilia. Devotees of Mendonça’s work will get even more out of this, as he lays out the subtle ways in which the geography of the town has sculpted his oeuvre far beyond a mere backdrop.

• The Delinquents

  Heist movies tend to concern themselves with the what and especially the how over the question of why, but with his off-beat drama of contemplation, Argentine writer-director Rodrigo Moreno takes less interest in the details of process and the action of execution than the existential fallout of suddenly having money. When two pals (Daniel Elias and Esteban Bigliardi) decide to rip off the bank where they work, it’s not much more complicated than one of them walking away with the cash while the other sits in at work to create an alibi, then holds onto the hot duffel bag. The years stretching out in front of them offers more intimidating, abstract hurtles to clear; without the obligation to work, what’s to stop a person from turning their back on society for a utopian farming commune and the soul-nourishing lifestyle it offers? As one culprit festers in jail, the notion of freedom takes on an unfamiliar meaning, oriented around richness of spirit rather than being simply rich. Enlivened by deadpan absurdist humor and brought back down with weighty considerations of futility and how we might break out of it, Moreno’s film charts a path toward the bracing, frightening, liberating unknown. 

• The Goldman Case

  The Directors’ Fortnight sidebar section opened with a legal procedural of a different sort, featuring a man every bit as difficult to root for as he argues for his own freedom. The abrasive bits on the perma-irate far-left militant activist Pierre Goldman (Arieh Worthalter, nitroglycerine in his veins) speak more to theme and idea than character, meant to cast doubt on the bourgeois court system whose authority he refuses to recognize during his trial in ‘70s France. He’s been accused of a double homicide; as he makes his case that he’s guilty only of bank-robbing and incendiary thinking, he categorically rejects the notion that he would be judged by an apparatus of an inherently fascistic, racist state. Though they were a ways ahead of his time, the man made some points, his unyielding antagonism to the concept of the law itself made convincing by virtue of his fiery intensity. Acrobatically shot and leavened by the occasional dose of levity — the mounting enmity between Goldman and his increasingly exasperated lawyers turns into a dry running joke — it’s a charged-up iconoclastic screed channeled into a familiar narrative mode, the ideal meeting of highbrow ideology and lowbrow genre thrills. 

• The Pot-au-Feu

  Not long into this epicurean delight from Best Director recipient Trần Anh Hùng, a viewer may catch themselves thinking that all movies should open with a solid half hour of Juliette Binoche preparing a lavish, eye-poppingly sumptuous French dinner. She’s a virtuoso chef cooking under the private employ of a master restaurateur (the great Benoît Magimel) in the late 19th century, with a soupçon of attraction blooming between them as they’ve communed over the godliness of food across a course of decades. When the camera doesn’t linger on appetite-enflaming culinary porn, it watches respectfully as the two gourmands give in to their taste for one another, the two fused in the single most important match cut since Kubrick’s apes threw that bone in the air. The subject matter and the presence of the inimitable Binoche harken back to the agreeable middlebrow period pieces Miramax peddled in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, but nixing corn from the recipe places this closer to the principled pleasures of Babette’s Feast than the overcooked goop of Chocolat. The liberating power of sensuous indulgence, whether in cuisine or sex, makes for a higher calling this film generously and gratuitously (in the best way) answers. 

• Sleep

  There’s something touching — in a disturbed, disturbing way, one sicko’s homage to another — that Jason Yu, one-time first assistant director to Barking Dogs Never Bite auteur Bong Joon-ho, would also fill his debut film with the corpses of unfortunate pooches. The world-renowned Korean penchant for extreme content is alive and well in this Critics’ Week sidebar selection, which gets the party started with a man (Lee Sun-kyun) attempting to scratch the skin off of his own face. An unrestful spirit in the cozy yet derelict apartment complex he inhabits with his wife (Jung Yu-mi) seizes control of his body by night and forces him to do all manner of unspeakable things, a predicament that his spouse won’t take lying down. Her efforts to outwit their spectral tormentor degenerate into a twisted battle of wills pushing her to her psychological limit, her headlong leap into insanity with the third act an effective reversal of  expectations as protagonist and monster swap roles. Yu’s cunning may be modest at this early stage of his career, but he’s got a strong foundation of sadistic inventiveness, an attitude willing and able to reach for new standards of depraved behavior. 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.