Cannes Review: Juliette Binoche In ‘Between Two Worlds’

Director Rachel Lang follows military couples in Our Men, an intriguing insight into French Foreign Legion life that closed the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight section. Lang herself graduated as Lieutenant from the French army, and served in the Sahel desert in 2017, so it’s fair to say she has more knowledge of this world than many filmmakers.

Well, that’s a wrap on the 2021 Cannes Film Festival; 56 reviews and counting (there might be one or two more stragglers to come, but we are basically done). It was a pretty great festival and strong year despite the COVID-19 protocol confusion, those changing rules, and Spike Lee spoiling the Palme d’Or prize early (Spike!!).

It’s not on the level of M*A*S*H or The Hospital, but The Divide (La Fracture) keeps you on your toes with its frenetic look at a besieged Paris emergency room hospital staff as, along with its regular patients, it tries to cope with the many people injured during a Yellow Vests protest that gets out of hand in late 2019.

There is a moment of genuine tension at the very beginning of Joachim Lafosse’s “The Restless” that is worth your attention. Damien (Damien Bonnard), is swimming with his son Amine (Gabriel Merz Chammah, the grandson of Isabelle Huppert, no less) off a boat on the rocky French coast.

Bruno Dumont’s peculiar blend of the transcendental with a clumsy kind of realism was a natural fit to “Jeannette” and “Joan of Arc,” both films dealing with the same presumed miracle — an ordinary little girl claiming to be guided by Saints.

Few films have accurately captured the definitive Millennial experience—lovelorn, cash-strapped, self-absorbed, and tech-addicted—though a few have tried, and some even succeeded. Modern love is no joke, as films and shows like “Frances Ha” and “Girls” know, and neither is modern friendship, or any part of early adulthood these days.

Bruno Dumont uses a French anchorwoman to explore his country’s media in France, a Cannes Film Festival competition entry that’s glossy and watchable but ultimately disappointing. Léa Seydoux plays France de Meurs, a TV anchorwoman and reporter so famous that she stopped for selfies everywhere she goes, from cafes to war zones. After she is involved in a traffic accident, she quits her job and ends up in a Swiss spa, but the respite she meets there isn’t quite what she’d hoped for.

The eclectic veteran French director Jacques Audiard shifts gears yet again (his last feature was 2018’s unusual western, The Sisters Brothers) with Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades), an adaptation of stories by the American comic book writer and artist Adrian Tomine.

Arnaud Desplechin returns to the Cannes Film Festival with Deception (Tromperie), a self-indulgent Philip Roth adaptation that’s only marginally better than 2017’s derided Ismael’s Ghosts. One of the late Roth’s most openly personal novels, it details a string of affairs conducted by Jewish-American writer “Philip,” here played by French actor Denis Podalydes, speaking French.

July 12th, 2021, Cannes – Reader, I ratatat out this missive in haste on my trusty Smith-Corona from the South of France, in the paltry hopes it may adequately convey my delight in viewing the latest cinematographic marvel from Mr. Wes Anderson, originally of Houston, Texas but more latterly resident of a nearby color-coded, symmetrical nebula almost entirely of his own design.

Jodie Turner-Smith appears to have been the victim of a robbery.

If Wes Anderson hasn’t already been ordained as the king of twee, he certainly will be with The French Dispatch. There can never have been a film so entirely marked and dominated by preciously perfectionist compositions, arcane detail, meticulous camera moves, ornate décor, historical and design minutiae, styles of typography, precision diction, arch attitude, obsessive attention to cultural artifacts and loyalty to Oscar Wilde’s notion that art needn’t express anything other than itself.

Of the many films playing at Cannes which have gained in resonance since the coming of the pandemic, “Zero F*cks Given” from French duo Julie Lecoustre, and Emmanuel Marre does not represent the creepiest, most alarming kind of coincidence — that description would better fit “Benedetta” from Dutch master Paul Verhoeven, which features an actual plague, face coverings and quarantine measures.

A sweeping social protest met with utter chaos in an emergency room—especially to the American festival-goer at Cannes, this brief sounds like an unpleasant evocation of 2020. And indeed, filmed in the immediate aftermath of the gilets jaunes protests in France, Catherine Corsini’s “The Divide” (“La fracture”) both reflects the past year and eerily foreshadows the true disaster in emergency rooms that followed the events of the film.

France's most famous actors, may miss the Cannes Film Festival after testing positive for COVID-19.Seydoux has been fully vaccinated but she tested positive while working on a film, her publicist Christine Tripicchio confirmed Saturday. She is asymptomatic and isolating at home in Paris, hoping that negative tests on consecutive days could allow her to still attend the festival in the south of France.Seydoux was set to be one of the most ubiquitous stars at Cannes this year.

Lea Seydoux may not be going to the Cannes Film Festival this year.

annual event on the Riviera will file past a pair of sniffer dogs posted at the entrance to the Palais where screenings are held, Cannes town hall has said. The hounds handled by the local Municipal Police have been trained to detect Covid-19 through human sweat as part of a prevention program trialled in France.

Midway through “The Worst Person in the World,” everything stops. Everyone in the streets of Oslo is frozen in an instant.

Beautifully upholstered and decked out with a starry cast, Everything Went Fine (Tout S’est Bien Passé) is the sort of comforting, thoroughly mainstream commercial film not often seen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Cannes Film Festival is just getting started, but we already can't get keep our eyes off the stunning ensembles on the red carpet!The fashion was on-point during Tuesday's opening ceremony in Cannes, France, with celebrities like Bella Hadid kicking off the days-long event in style. The 24-year-old model went full glam in a black-and-white vintage Jean Paul Gaultier haute couture gown, with her hair pulled back into a stylish updo.