Cannes: A Critic's Take

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Javier Bardem, ...

Image credit: Victor Bello

At least there's space left to say that I am a huge fan of Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale, a bighearted, formally frisky family tale with pitch-perfect work by some of France's plum performers, among them Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud, and Chiara Mastroianni, anchored by Mastroianni's indomitable mother, Catherine Deneuve. I'm likewise mesmerized by the marvelous, exquisitely female Argentinean family drama The Headless Woman, and by the ability of La Ciénaga's Lucrecia Martel to handle mutable time and space. I admire Belgian Palme laureates Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's (L'Enfant) commitment to chronicling underclass adaptability in Lorna's Silence. And I salute Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Climates) for his commitment to photogenic downerism in the downer family drama Three Monkeys.

Finally, I'm excited by Wendy and Lucy, a fearlessly independent work from Old Joy's Kelly Reichardt, as spare, piercing, and essentially American as A Christmas Tale is French and jam-packed, starring a breathtaking Michelle Williams as a down-and-out young woman in search of her lost dog (and her lost America). And I'm grateful that, in this festival year of subject-matter darkness and Indiana Jonesy manufactured light, the torch-bright Spanish duo of Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz were on hand in Woody Allen's blithe Iberian romance Vicky Cristina Barcelona to dazzle the Cannes crowd the old-fashioned way — with crystalline performances, rather than a crystal skull.

Originally posted Jun 03, 2008 Published in issue #995-996 Jun 06, 2008 Order article reprints

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