AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Roll up the red carpet and bring the yachts back to shore. The sun has set on another edition of the Cannes Film Festival. The 79th annual celebration of global cinema in the sunny south of France ended as jury president Park Chan-wook gave the top prize to the Romanian film "Fjord."
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PARK CHAN-WOOK: Cristian Mungiu's "Fjord."
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RASCOE: Alison Willmore was at Cannes. She's a film critic for New York Magazine and host of the podcast "Critical Darlings." She told us that after an especially great festival last year, this year's festival couldn't quite compare.
ALISON WILLMORE: The most shocking disappointment was the great Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi made this film called "Parallel Tales." It's a French film. You know, it stars Isabelle Huppert and Virginie Efira, who is in another film here, Vincent Cassel. And it just felt like this kind of silly, soapy movie about these two apartments across the street from each other in Paris, coming from this filmmaker who has made, I think, some of the great films of this millennium, these, like, incredibly delicately made, incisive, domestic dramas. To watch him make this movie that I found really silly was just pretty crushing. Yeah.
RASCOE: OK. Well, let's talk about some of the good. What were the highlights?
WILLMORE: Well, not to immediately then go and take refuge in an American film (laughter), but I will say, one of my early favorites was a film from Jane Schoenbrun that kicked off the sidebar program called Un Certain Regard. They made a movie called "Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma" that was both a riff on slasher movies, but also a movie about kind of grappling with your own sexuality and ability to enjoy, you know, your body. And then also about this idea of what it means to really react strongly and have a big affinity to work that is not, let's say, politically correct. And I thought it was just, like, funny and overflowing with this incredible imagery.
And then another one that I really loved is a movie called "Fatherland" from a Polish filmmaker called Pawel Pawlikowski. And it is a film set in 1949, when the writer, Thomas Mann, was returning to Germany, where he'd been exiled from years ago in 1933 by the Nazis, with his daughter and is traveling across a Germany that has been divided now for a few years and is being awarded basically the same literary prize by both the west German government and then the east German government, and is this really beautiful meditation on these characters' homeland after this enormously kind of, like, enraging and monstrous stretch of history.
RASCOE: You know, because Cannes is a very global festival, did you find that the movies reflected on the political mood of the world?
WILLMORE: I think, absolutely. You know, one of the great things about going to that festival is that you see the ways that different developments, major political and social and sometimes, like, developments in conflict are reflected in all of these different films. You saw Andrey Zvyagintsev, a Russian filmmaker who almost died, was one of those people who had a very rare, bad reaction to the COVID vaccine that ended with him having to be hospitalized for 11 months in Germany, I think. He had a return with his film called "Minotaur" that has been, like, one of the more acclaimed films at the festival, and it takes place against the backdrop of the invasion of Ukraine. Like many Russian filmmakers whose work you see, he no longer is based in Russia. And in fact, even though this movie takes place in Russia, it was filmed in Latvia, you know, for the purposes of being able to be as critical of the Russian government as it is.
RASCOE: Several big Oscar players of the past couple years have come from Cannes - movies like "Anora" and "Sentimental Value" and "The Substance." Do you think we'll be talking about any of this year's movies next March?
WILLMORE: I mean, obviously, a lot of these films go on to be the international film nominees. So always, in that case, we will see that. But I - in terms of seeing a movie break out into kind of the main best picture competition the way that "The Secret Agent" - which, oh, was one of my favorite films last year - or "Sentimental Value" did, I don't know that that's going to happen this year. I mean, you never know. Some of these films play much better or worse once they're removed from this very cloistered festival viewing situation. But I would not say that this year we're looking to see more Cannes films break out the way they did last year.
RASCOE: That's Alison Willmore, New York Magazine critic and host of the podcast "Critical Darlings." Thank you so much for being with us.
WILLMORE: Thanks for having me.
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