Only the anti ‘Pretty Woman’ by Sean Baker and the trip to the East by Miguel Gomes smell like great cinema in Cannes | Culture

In the final stretch of the Cannes festival and with only one day left, two films have managed to maximize the low quality of the Official Selection in competition: Anora, by American filmmaker Sean Baker, and Grand Tour, by the Portuguese Miguel Gomes. They are light years ahead of most of their rivals. And without being alike in anything, they agree on something: that way of understanding cinema as an incomparable adventure to awaken the imagination and emotion in the viewer.

Anora was screened on Tuesday and the enthusiasm was instantaneous. Sean Baker’s new film managed to bring critics to agreement thanks to its infectious grace, its inevitable sadness and its formidable characters. Anora is the name of the protagonist, a smart and foul-mouthed prostitute from Astoria (Queens) who prefers to respond to the sexiest alias of Ani. The young woman, played by an incredible Mikey Madison, one day meets a young boy, the son of a Russian oligarch, willing to go all out with her, and there begins an epic that has it all: wild night, thriller night with the Russian mafias of Coney Island, drops of screwball comedy, an unexpected romantic vein and a collection of characters to remember. Baker returns to the heights conquered with his jewel The Florida Project (2017) to tell one of those stories about street princesses and trash.

With a contemporary language that never leaves its characters behind, it once again portrays a girl who survives thanks to sex without judging or stigmatizing her, with an exciting humanity. Baker has filmed an anti pretty woman, Garry Marshall’s nineties comedy, which turns the fairy tale on its head to enter a nightmare that refers to the Safdie brothers and their fascinating Rough diamonds (Uncut Gems, 2019), but with so much love for its main character that it elevates it to another dimension. Ani’s dignity defends itself, but Baker introduces an unforgettable witness, that quiet guardian angel played by Yuriy Borisov, a Russian actor whom we discover in Compartment nº6 (2021).

If the melancholic streak of Anora emerges with a hopeless vitalism, Grand Tour, The captivating journey of the Portuguese Miguel Gomes through Southeast Asia, is from beginning to end an ode to the beauty that emanates from all sadness, that saudade Portuguese that this film elevates to a monument. Gomes takes us through the colonial East at the beginning of the 20th century with a man, Edward, who is fleeing his fiancée, Molly, whom he has not seen for years. In this blind stampede about which we basically know little, we travel through a map of ancient oriental spells and surprising tunnels in time.

Edward flees from Molly, and Molly chases Edward from Rangoon to Chengdu, and from Saigon to Manila, Osaka, and Shanghai. The spectator accompanies them in that grand tour, in the style of English travelers, who by grace of an impossible love slides into another dimension of time and space. Gomes returns to the past with a fatalistic haze that seems to evoke the oriental fantasy of Josef von Sternberg. But that distant place is only part of the film, which Gomes deconstructs from the present through current documentary archives full of astonishing details: ferris wheels moved by men, puppet theaters, Chinese shadows, motorcycles, panda bears… In the same way that sadness would not exist without joy nor joy without sadness, Gomes creates a film about the past that does not exist without the present. An unusual new place located between reality and fiction, between document and imagination.

If it weren’t for these two films, the only ones that – in the absence of the last day’s films – deserve the Palme d’Or, and for Caught by the Tides, That other impressive trip to the East by the Chinese Jia Zhan-Ke, the balance of this edition of Cannes would border on suspense. In recent days, two new nonsense have been added. He thriller Brazilian Destination Motel, by Karim Aïnouz, offers very little beyond its photographic play with fluorine colors and its anguished sound around sex. The characters are all serious geeks and there is a certain bad feeling about so many fluids on nylon sheets, but in the end it is an absurd and expendable film about a criminal trapped in a love hotel of road.

The bad body that causes Marcello Mio It is a different type, one that borders on the shame of others. Christophe Honoré’s film stars Chiara Mastroianni, who, faced with an identity crisis, convinces herself that she is her father, Marcello Mastroianni. The actress, who undoubtedly shares a striking physical resemblance, dresses up as Marcello and that’s it. The result is an occurrence, a vague and frivolous whim that at no time justifies this impersonation on camera. Maybe it would have made some sense if Chiara Mastroianni had really faced the shadow of her father, drawing out some of the pain and anger at her absence, turning the costume into an emotional catharsis, removing all the masks until she found something. really in itself. But not. The only saving grace in the film is her mother, Catherine Denueve, who has a couple of funny moments trying to convince her daughter that her last name also runs through her veins, or when in a strange and touching moment she kisses her daughter on the mouth. believing it to be him and says “my love”.

That moment occurs in a hotel on the Roman coast, a place far from Naples to which Paolo Sorrentino takes us again in Parthenope. The Italian filmmaker’s new film is too redundant despite its flashes. Gary Oldman has an episode as John Cheever that is one of those Italian anecdotes without much meaning that result because he knows how to choose actors very well and Oldman does it wonderfully. The common thread is the Parthenope of the title, a lost woman-goddess who wanders in search of a life that will free her from the tragic sense of her beauty. The same beauty that she has unfortunately become so elusive in this Cannes that she will draw the curtain on Saturday.

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