InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

IN REVIEW ONLINE
SPECIAL EDITION:
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
FILM REVIEWS
THE ZONE OF INTEREST — 1
THE SWEET EAST — 2
IN OUR DAY — 3
YOUTH (SPRING) — 5
HOMECOMING — 7
ABOUT DRY GRASSES — 8
IT’S RAINING
IN THE HOUSE — 9
A SONG SUNG BLUE — 10
KENNEDY — 11
THE OTHER LAURENS — 12
INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON
SHELL — 14
AMA GLORIA — 16
May 30, 2023
Volume 1, Issue 21.5

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
THE ZONE OF INTEREST
Jonathan Glazer
The issue at the heart of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is
one of the oldest in the cinema: how does one represent the
unrepresentable? Loosely adapted from Martin Amis’ novel of the
same name, and set in 1942, the film is centered around the Höss
household: a German family who live in a large, two-story house
with tasteful, minimal decor, complete with a swimming pool, a
greenhouse, and a flourishing garden. The house also happens to
be located directly across from the Auschwitz death camp. The
film’s conceptual hook, if it can be called that, is that the horrors
of the Holocaust will be deliberately kept off-screen and only
indirectly represented — no violence will be visually depicted
within the frame. Instead, we will mainly observe as Rudolf Höss
(Christian Friedel), a German SS officer and the camp’s
commandant, goes about his job, while his wife, Hedwig (Sandra
Hüller), keeps house and tends to the children. A visit from
Hedwig’s mother, who marvels at how well her daughter has done
for herself, drives the film’s conceit home: the slaughter of the
Jews by the Nazi regime will be refracted through the Höss
family’s blinkered, bourgeois privilege.
Though somewhat specious in broad outline, this conceit is not,
in itself, cause for suspicion. Of more concern, ultimately, is the
fact that Glazer has a rather limited, thuddingly literal
understanding of representation. In each and every one of his
meticulously composed frames, he does little more than
portentously accentuate the out-of-field, drawing attention to
what lies just beyond the visible image. Thus, we will only ever
see the smoke of the trains that periodically arrive at Auschwitz.
A shot of Friedel in the camp will be angled upwards in such a
way that we see only the blue sky above him, even as we hear
screams and shooting all around. A child will play in his room,
stop momentarily to look out a window when he hears a
commotion outside, and then resume his game as before. With
Under the Skin (2013), Glazer delivered a panoply of arresting,
Kubrickian images that synced well with the film’s literally alien
subject. In Zone of Interest, he does something similar, employing
a range of visual effects that keep the Höss family at a chilly
remove, as well as irruptions of imagery meant to signal stilldeeper,
more unrepresentable layers of disquiet. But as there’s
no natural place for free-floating abstraction à la Under the Skin,
Glazer’s taste for portent here becomes wedded to a fairly
simple, and indeed simplistic, treatment of off-screen space.
1

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
The Zone of Interest modulates its approach in precisely one
sequence, where Glazer ties an incipient narrative development
— Rudolf informing Hedwig that he has been transferred and that
they may have to move — to his usual formal assertiveness in a
manner reminiscent of Alan Clarke. It’s the one scene where
Glazer does something other than keep the Höss family at an
alienating remove. Winner of this year’s Grand Prix, The Zone of
Interest has already been — and will continue to be — praised for
its unfailing control and precision; and such statements do stand
to reason. But if Glazer does not step a foot wrong, it’s because
he does not risk much to begin with. The film is, to be sure,
formally and conceptually coherent, even airtight. But coherence
is not the same thing as audacity, and with the arguable
exception of the film’s final moments, which briefly venture into
territory that recalls Sergei Loznitsa’s Austerlitz (2016), Glazer has
made a film that, very much despite its subject, plays it safe. —
LAWRENCE GARCIA
THE SWEET EAST
Sean Price Williams
An easy bit of advice to give to any filmmaker who tries, whether
with journalistic integrity or well-meaning folksy soapboxery, to
make a film about our contemporary political moment: don’t. It’s
easy enough advice to follow, and it frees the advice-ee from the
label of cringe that can only come from the same culture that
had initially welcomed, begged, for content of the now. Already,
the subcultures of yesteryear have metastasized into something
stranger and even more ephemeral in this, and the mere public
naming of any new political group is enough to destroy it as if it
were borne of a curse.
The Sweet East, the debut feature of veteran cinematographer
Sean Price Williams, does not follow this advice. Thankfully, there
is no soapbox in sight. Instead, the characters representing our
various political moments mold themselves to more ancient
sources, like Shakespearean villeins or the many ghosts of
history. They form an American landscape void of values and full
of snake oil, traversed by normies whose curiosity could get
them killed.
The normie in question here is Lillian (Talia Ryder), whose
anodyne class trip to Washington, D. C. immediately halts thanks
to a Pizzagate conspirator’s viable threats. Lillian is whisked
from her classmates by strangers modeled after antifa, who, like
all the groups here, promise that they uniquely have Lillian’s best
interests in mind until their values give way to more petty
concerns. Key among these users and abusers of Lillian is Simon
2

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023
Rex’s fascist Edgar Allan Poe scholar, Lawrence, whose true
danger lies beneath his veneer of cold, “trad” academia, even
once barking at Lillian that one cannot just make certain claims
without good scholarship. He brings her to New York City, where
Lillian falls in with a filmmaking duo (Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo
Edebiri) and the film’s lead actor (Jacob Elordi). The process
repeats throughout the east coast as a road movie, an Odyssean
journey, a riff on Alice in Wonderland, or perhaps an anti-Pilgrim’s
Progress where confusion replaces spiritual development.
Frontloading with tons of pop culture and cinephile miscellany
and esoterica, the film could easily have lost itself in games of
“spot the D. W. Griffith reference” here and “catch Nick Cave’s
kid” there. Thankfully, each of these references take a backseat
to the constantly nerve-wracking vibes each political group gives
off. The promise of violence finally erupts in a shootout that
plays as dramatic yet opts for visual gags befitting a Scary
Movie sequel — a compliment. That’s the tone of Lillian’s (likely
named for Griffith favorite Lillian Gish) journey: that these
American weirdos are worth taking seriously, but not too
seriously.
Williams, as DP, opts for his usual ‘70s verité style of
camerawork, switching from classical compositions to
shallow-focus zooms during dramatic moments. There’s a
particular sort of Kodak color grade that washes over the entire
picture that’s reminiscent of high-grade stock footage from a
bygone era, which, though never distracting, does hint that this
may already be a world that’s long passed. The budget here isn’t
quite big enough for the team to acquire the rights to a
punk-ethos soundtrack, but Paul Grimstad’s score (complete with
what sounds like a mouth harp during a rather appropriate
scene) sets a mood of cascading tension as Lillian cleverly
navigates her way out of danger.
Though rapscallion film critic Nick Pinkerton, the screenwriter of
The Sweet East, pens a rather cynical screed against the limited
factional options of 21st-century American culture, there are
nuances and caveats aplenty. Not all of his middle fingers carry
the same stature: the Nazis here are clearly the worst and most
violent compared to, say, the filmmakers or the raving Islamists,
even as Rex’s Lawrence turns up the charm by admitting to
“being afflicted with enough vainglory already,” defending the
artistic devices in D. W. Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience
(though perhaps loving the unlovable parts of Griffith’s past), and
chiding Lillian for being “grossly reductive,” unbefitting of
“scholarship” for her recollecting his labeling someone a Jew.
That said, this is still not a film that would pedantically lay out
the gradations of its characters’ morality, nor would it make
make grandiose political harrumphs, not even “fuck it all.” The
Sweet East treats America as a freak show where you can stop,
move on, join it, love it, or hate it, but you can never go home. —
ZACH LEWIS
IN OUR DAY
Hong Sang-soo
Hong Sang-soo’s second film of 2023 — and 30 th overall in a
27-year career — premieres just a few short months after in
water at Berlinale. That film found Hong investigating the nature
and process of making cinema, both in general and in his own
idiosyncratic manner. It was a bit of an experiment, of course,
being filmed, to varying degrees, out-of-focus — and ending on a
note of unsettling ambiguity, as a director walks into the ocean
(on camera, naturally) like James Mason in A Star Is Born. That
ending essentially inverts the one from The Novelist’s Film, a 2021
Hong festival entrant, which concludes with what appears to be
a moment of pure love between a director and his star, Kim
Min-hee (also Hong’s key collaborator for most of the last
decade). Now, In Our Day continues Hong’s meditations on art,
albeit with neither the potentially alienating effects of in water
nor the direct and triumphant beauty of The Novelist’s Film.
Instead, we find Hong in more conventional territory, with a split
narrative about younger people asking older artists for advice,
and not quite getting answers they find helpful.
The first of the film’s narratives stars Kim as an actress who has
returned to Korea after some time abroad and is staying with an
old friend (a designer, or model, perhaps — or just someone with
an impressive collection of shoes). After spending some quality
time with the friend’s big fluffy cat named “Us” (later to be the
subject of what is now this reviewer’s single favorite Hong zoom
shot ever), Kim is visited by her younger cousin, who wants to
venture into acting and solicits her for advice. Kim explains that
acting, perhaps paradoxically, is about truth, personal inner truth
— tapping into yourself with complete honesty and
3

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
channeling that truth into performance. The cousin says she
understands… but one has their doubts.
The second narrative stars Gi Jubong (Hotel by the River,
Introduction) as a renowned poet. A young film student is making
a film about him, and he laments to her that he can no longer
drink or smoke due to health concerns (much like Hong himself).
They’re visited by a young man who, like Kim’s cousin, wants to
go into acting. He wants the poet’s advice, though it’s not entirely
clear why (we may surmise that it has something to do with the
pretty documentarian, though she doesn’t seem to know who he
is). The young man asks the old one vague questions (what is
love, why make art, what is it all for, etc.) and gets truthful but
perhaps poorly comprehended answers. The scene is
reminiscent of the third film-within-a-film in Hong’s 2010
masterpiece, Oki’s Movie, in which two film students ask their
professor a variety of questions about life and art and take in his
pithy, reasonably profound responses. One of the poet’s answers
is essentially the same as one the professor in that film gave:
when asked why he chose to pursue poetry, the poet explains
that he doesn’t know, and more to the point, that he doesn’t know
why he does anything; in Oki’s Movie, the professor claims “In life.
. . of all the important things I do, there’s none I know the reason
for. I don’t think there is.” This, in turn, echoes Hong’s
recent comments at a New York retrospective of his work, as
reported in The New Yorker: “The most precious thing in life is
always something that is given to me. If I look back on my life,
the most wonderful things were always given to me, free or
unexpectedly. Never in life did I get something wonderful by
trying to get it or with a strong intention.” Instead, as Hong has
done in several films recently, the poet asserts a kind of
existentialism: what is important is living in the moment, in truly
seeing and experiencing what is in front of your face.
So if we combine ideas central to these two stories, we might
have something like Hong and Kim’s theory of art: radical
personal honesty and emotional truth, combined with an
openness to any possible experience of the world and of chance.
These theories are put to the test in the second half of the film.
The beloved cat Us disappears and his owner is distraught,
crying and screaming in anguish. After walking the streets
looking for him, she comes home and collapses in a heap on the
floor, as Kim calmly tries to get her to relax and focus on the
next step of the search. Song Sunmi’s performance, to this point
in tune with Hong’s usual register of relaxed naturalism, becomes
so demonstrative, the performance of her emotion so extreme
(though essentially just lying still), that it pushes the bounds of
believability. Is this the honesty Kim advised? Or is the
4

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023
scene effective despite the overplaying, belying Kim’s theory of
acting? Similarly, the poet is faced with a choice. The young
man’s questioning gives him a strong urge to drink (a point made
by a quite funny intertitle; all the scenes are preceded by such
titles, some of which describe what is to come, some of which
explain inner thoughts that otherwise are too subtly expressed to
be picked up on), and despite the documentarian’s concerns, the
man goes out and gets some soju. Several bottles later, the poet
introduces Rock-Paper-Scissors to the group as a drinking game,
and proceeds to outdrink both kids. Those two eventually leave
together, in a scene that could have come from any number of
earlier Hong films (Oki’s Movie, certainly). But we, the audience —
and by extension, Hong, who’s much older now than when those
films were made — stay with the poet, who sets up on his
balcony, armed with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, a pack of
cigarettes, and what looks like a box of donuts or some other
kind of heart-unhealthy snack. Because when your philosophy of
life is built around the pleasures of the moment, on living each
day in the moment in order to experience fully what it means to
be alive, it’s really hard to convince yourself to quit smoking. —
SEAN GILMAN
YOUTH (SPRING)
Wang Bing
Youth (Spring) arrives in the midst of something of an inflection
point: The West's orientation toward China has shifted radically
since Chinese
documentary
filmmaker Wang
Bing’s last run of
films, in the
mid-2010s, and in
light of that, the
work will be
received differently.
Even more broadly,
documentary
cinema is in
something of a
state of crisis at
the moment; it’s
undoubtedly enjoying an elevated status, but also being
swallowed into the gaping chasm of "content," at one extreme,
while at the other end of the commercial spectrum, many
prominent filmmakers have been noticeably struggling to
reconcile the contradictions at the heart of the medium in fresh
and compelling ways. Back to the China side of things: after
three fruitful decades, the vitality of the Chinese Independent
Documentary movement (also known as Chinese New
Documentary) has more or less dissipated, as State censorship’s
tightening has restricted expression and international audiences
have started to lose interest in a Chinese documentary ethos
that isn't vociferously anti-China. Wang's celebrated peers and
forebears, like Wu Wenguang and Zhao Liang, have largely fallen
by the wayside, talent undiminished but directing less and
receiving much reduced attention for that work than they did a
decade or two ago. Youth (Spring), then, arrives in the throes of
the highest profile international bow of any auteur from the
Chinese New Documentary cohort in many years.
The salvo in a planned trilogy, Wang’s comeback is an
observational portrait of the lives of young migratory workers in
small garment factories near the medium sized city of Huzhou,
in the relatively well-to-do eastern province of Zhejiang. It's a
familiar subject for Wang, who covered similar ground both
substantively and geographically in 2016's Bitter Money and 2017's
exhausting concept piece 15 Hours (an unflinching depiction of
the monotony of factory sewing that’s as long as its title says). In
5

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
Youth (Spring), we’re introduced to a set of teens and
twentysomethings who take up residence in various decaying
industrial towns; we see them live out near every aspect of their
day-to-day lives, from the most detached and impersonal
moments to the charged and intimate ones. Close friends make
jokes with each other, awkward first encounters with
prospective partners occur, long-term couples debate their
futures, bitter fights erupt, and in aimless moments they wander
the streets. Community is incubated among our cast through
living conditions of cramped, privacy-devoid dormitories filled
with their colleagues. Daily activities move the youths through
the space of dilapidated buildings, down messy streets, onto
public transportation, into internet cafes, to patronize street
food vendor stalls, and of course, land them in the workplace.
Work dominates the lives of our subjects, as it does the runtime
of this three-and-a-half hour film. Endless, repetitive mechanical
toil, repeated so incessantly as to become second nature, is
drilled down into the very core instincts of these young people.
So often have they repeated these tasks that some of the
studied shots of workers operating the sewing machines
showcase what approaches robotic dexterity, speed, and
precision. We see workplace conflict and negotiation with
employers; while only a rung or two up the societal pecking
order, the floor managers hold all the cards, and the youths have
only barefaced tenacity on their side.
The photography in Youth (Spring) is, as in other Wangs,
handheld, opting for predictable meandering long takes. The
camera is a character, acknowledged by those on screen; it
responds to events in a way that illustrates the
semi-participation of the documentarians (i.e., in scenes
involving more abrasive behavior, the camera becomes sheepish
and self-conscious about its act of intrusion). The setting is
captured with geometrical directness in a way that obscures
place, perhaps in an appeal to the universality of the lives
depicted. The camera circles, round and round, through the
same spaces, gradually building a sense of the textures of the
subjects’ daily lives in shades of human interest and monotony.
Duration tends to lend experiential weight to the more dreary
and mundane observations. But Youth (Spring) also feels
conceptually unmoored and fails to solve the fundamental
editorial question of what gets in and what stays on the cutting
room floor. The emotional highs feel distant, too; Wang grates
against the limits of what a slow, observatory direct cinema can
say. On balance, though, the film is still moving and deeply
human — a depiction of ordinary people making the best of a
hard lot in life, living in neither destitution nor with abundance.
Finally, it ends with an ostensible teaser for what’s to come in
the next installment of the trilogy: a handful of youths travel to
their hometown village to gather for the Chinese New Year.
It’s worth taking stock of Wang’s journey to this moment in his
career. His over-nine-hour debut feature, Tie Xi Qu: West of the
Tracks (2002), was a seminal moment for Chinese documentary
culminating a decade of increasingly ambitious independent and
outsider video works. With a unique visual language, one native
to digital video, Wang created a revelatory encapsulation of a
place, a social context, and a series of events completely alien to
his viewers. He was an artist more than a documentarian, and
West of the Tracks was immediately one of the greatest artworks
of the new millennium. The rest of the decade saw Wang
struggling to follow up this opus, in various ways — and to
greatly varying degrees of success. Eventually, after his to-date
only fictional feature, The Ditch (2010), Wang seemed to change
tack. He resembled less a "great modern artist" than a figure at
the vanguard of contemporary Chinese documentary as a genre,
which flowered into a career renaissance for him as the decade
progressed — aided, in part, by online file-sharing communities
disseminating his works. As a documentarian, Wang still
occasionally made vital films: Ta'ang and Dead Souls, in
particular, cemented his witness to history. And then, a few
years ago, came news of a highly anticipated feature following
Nigerian immigrants to China, which has thus far failed to
materialize, and is rumored to be subjected to the pressures of
aforesaid censorship. In this context, Wang’s proper return with
Youth (Spring) feels like more abdication: he’s retreating to the
same subjects with no change in orientation, a softer
sociopolitical touch, and less rigorous conceptual and aesthetic
scaffolds. The hard, expressive DV-native visual language of his
earlier works has completed its long transformation into
nondescript amorphous HD. The likelihood of this abdication is
buttressed further by his reported humble amazement at his
inclusion among this year’s competition slate. Wang simply isn’t
China's leading documentarian anymore, just as he abandoned
his claim to high artistry. But one hopes that isn’t permanent. —
NOEL OAKSHOT
6

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023
HOMECOMING
Catherine Corsini
Two years ago, French director Catherine Corsini was in Cannes’
Competition with The Divide, a film that used the deteriorating
marriage of two well-heeled Parisian women as a frame of
reference for considering the “Yellow Vest” protests of 2018.
However well-intended Corsini’s cinematic activism may be, The
Divide registered as an insufficient response to the French
political climate, largely because of her choice of protagonists. It
was as if Corsini understood the need to overcome her bourgeois
point of view, but simply couldn’t do it. Homecoming is a small
step in the right direction, but again Corsini organizes her
protagonists’ complex reality through a blinkered upper-class
perspective. The fact that Homecoming generally has more on its
mind than did The Divide make the new film’s shortcomings that
much more regrettable.
Corsini once again works with Aissatou Diallo Sagna, the former
medical worker whose first acting role was as a beleaguered
nurse in The Divide. Here, she plays Kheìdidja, a
French-Senegalese woman with two daughters, college-bound
Jessica (Suzy Bemba) and 15-year-old troublemaker Farah
(Esther Gohourou). In the opening moments of Homecoming, we
see a flashback to Kheìdidja preparing to leave Corsica with
hekids when she receives a phone call with tragic news. Her
Corsican husband has just died in a car accident. In the present
day, she and the kids are traveling back to Corsica for the first
time since their departure, and Jessica and Farah hope to learn
more about their late father. But this desire is complicated by a
series of family secrets that Kheìdidja has never managed to
address.
Although Homecoming is shot in a rather uninflected realist
mode, one immediately notices that once in Corsica, Kheìdidja
and her girls are literally hard to see. The underlit
cinematography allows them to almost disappear into the
scenery. There has been a fairly extensive discourse regarding
the chemistry and light sensitivity of Western image-making
technologies, suggesting an ideological bias towards the
accurate rendering of white skin. But one gets the sense that
Corsini is intentionally cloaking her protagonists in twilight to
suggest their marginality. Homecoming is steeped in conflicting
signals regarding race, class, and ethnicity. But there’s an
underlying conservatism at work. Perhaps without meaning to,
Corsini suggests that despite these characters’ intersectional
7

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
identities, and the changing face of Europe more broadly, they
can never truly belong to larger society.
As Kheìdidja explains, she never felt she belonged to her
husband’s world, and this was exacerbated when her
mother-in-law (Marie-Ange Geronimi) blames her for her son’s
death. This inability to thrive in the white world is repeated when
the family returns to Corsica. Jessica starts a relationship with
Gaia (Lomane de Dietrich), the daughter of Kheìdidja’s wealthy
employers, while Farah is antagonized, then befriended, by a
casually racist local boy (Jean Michelangelini). Corsini creates a
scenario wherein Kheìdidja, Jessica, and Farah are able to begin
new phases in their lives, but in the end they all return to the
family they know, the three of them against the world. Their
flirtation with European whiteness is tragic, nearly deadly.
Corsini seems to be attempting to examine the personal fallout
from various historical forms of oppression: racism, colorism,
classicism, and homophobia. However, simply touching on these
issues is not the same as producing an analysis. Homecoming
ends by curtailing cultural hybridity in favor of self-separation,
as if her characters’ desires for something larger are little more
than expressions of internalized colonial consciousness. In true
bourgeois fashion, Corsini depicts a multiculturalism defined by
tolerance and coexistence, which sounds fine until you realize
what that actually entails. We only encounter one another in
passing, and no one ever has to learn, grow, or change. —
MICHAEL SICINSKI
ABOUT DRY GRASSES
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
When first introduced in About Dry Grasses, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s
latest feature, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an art teacher, has been
in the remote village of Icesu for four years. Posted there for
compulsory civil service, he has been looking to leave since the
moment he arrived — and by the end of the film, he will do so.
Before the school year is out, though, he will first be involved in
two overlapping dramas which constitute the bulk of the film’s
197-minute runtime. In the first, Samet and his
colleague-cum-roommate Kenan (Musab Ekı̇cı̇) are accused of
inappropriate conduct by two eighth-grade students, and come
close to losing their jobs. The situation is all the more surprising
to Samet when he finds out that one of the accusers is his pet
student Sevim (Ece Bağci), whose innocent crush on him
evidently sours when she catches him reading a love letter she
wrote, which was confiscated by another teacher. In the second,
Samet and Kenan get involved in a love triangle with Nuray
(Merve Dı̇zdar), a disabled fellow educator from a different
school, who lost her leg during a recent bombing.
Like Ceylan’s 2014 Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep, About Dry
Grasses works primarily as a character study of an arrogant man
desperately lacking in self-awareness, developed across lengthy,
combative conversation scenes. The difference in About Dry
Grasses is how these conversations unfold in relation to Sevim
and Nuray, respectively. Sevim, who goes unseen for a long
stretch following the initial accusation, becomes a kind of
structuring absence, a void onto which Samet can project not
just his anger at the situation, but also his more general
dissatisfaction with his lot in life. Nuray, for her part, is able to
directly confront Samet in conversation. The film’s centerpiece
scene — possibly the longest in the film — comprises an
intellectual face-off between the two, in which she challenges
his somewhat cynical worldview with her own. This difference in
treatment is reflected, too, in the dramatic structure. Samet’s
unusually friendly relationship with Sevim is there from the film’s
start — and though we see nothing more inappropriate than his
giving her a compact mirror, we are not privy to how their
relationship began and evolved. His interactions with Nuray, by
contrast, are contained entirely within the film’s timeline, and we
see his duplicity in dealing with both her and Kenan.
While Ceylan may never make a film under three hours again,
About Dry Grasses showcases his dramatic flair and control of
pacing even better than Winter Sleep. What remains difficult to
account for is the film’s shape and structure, particularly during
the longest tête-à-têtes. Ceylan’s knack for dialogue and his
consistent ability to elicit convincing performances from his
actors is not to be undervalued. Indeed, watching About Dry
Grasses, it occurred to me that Ceylan’s approach to revealing his
characters’ histories, in uncovering the layers of their behavioral
personalities, might be compared to that of Mike Leigh, except
with logy dialogue and speech patterns instead of action. The
comparison, though, only drives home how much more judicious
Leigh’s use of structure is — this despite the usual critical focus
8

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023
on his reliance on improvisation. Following the centerpiece
conversation between Samet and Nuray, they make to go to bed
together, but before they do so we watch as Celiloğlu opens a
door of Nuray’s apartment, the camera following him into the
soundstage where the film is being shot. In a different film, this
rupture would reverberate both forwards and backwards into the
runtime, recontextualizing what we’ve seen, and shifting how we
take what we will subsequently see. Here, though, things simply
resume as before, as if no such break took place. Like most
every scene in About Dry Grasses, the sequence is compelling,
even thrilling in isolation. It’s the bigger picture that disappoints.
— LAWRENCE GARCIA
IT’S RAINING IN THE HOUSE
Paloma Sermon-Daï’
Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï’s 2020 documentary film
Petit Samedi profiled her own family, paying particular attention
to her brother and his drug addiction. Her debut narrative
feature, It’s Raining in the House, shifts focus, instead
considering the way that children are forced to cope with a
mother (Louise Manteau) who’s absent and unreliable for reasons
that are never clearly articulated. Seventeen-year-old Purdey
(Purdey Bloquiau) and her 15-year-old brother Mak (Makenzy
Lombet) have typical sibling conflicts, such as Mak not keeping
the house tidy or Purdey not answering Mak’s calls. But there is a
firm bond between them, because essentially, they’re all each
other has.
Whether speaking with a real estate agent or a prospective
employer, Purdey must continually emphasize that she will be
eighteen “in just a few days,” because it’s up to her to see her
family through until their mother deigns to return from wherever
she may be. Purdey, and to a lesser extent Mak, being thrown
headlong into an uncertain adulthood is the primary theme of It’s
Raining in the House, which takes its title from a broken skylight
above Purdey’s room, an otherwise major problem (in most lives)
here depicted as just another lingering crisis. To its credit, the
film mostly deemphasizes the various troubles the kids face,
since they are fairly ordinary for this poor family, even in the
best of times.
In fact, Sermon-Daï gives greater significance to the
interpersonal and psychological problems the siblings are
grappling with even as they struggle to survive. Purdey must
take a job as a hotel cleaner, putting her ambitions on hold. She
wants to study nursing, and her judgmental, upper-middle-class
“boyfriend” (Amine Hamidou) — who already keeps their
relationship a secret — tells her she will amount to nothing and
is not good enough for him. Mak, meanwhile, has just failed out
9

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
of school, and spends the summer fencing stolen bikes with his
slightly better-off friend Dono (Donovan Nizet). Although
Sermon-Daï never spells it out, Mak’s anger issues may owe as
much to anxiety about his sexual identity as they do to his
mother’s indifference.
Although It’s Raining in the House appears, stylistically, indebted
to the Dardennes, Sermon-Daï’s approach is very different.
Where the Belgian brothers’ narratives tend to be rather
propulsive, It’s Raining in the House is languid, at times even a bit
inert. The essentials of its story will call to mind other, better
films, such as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows or, perhaps
more closely, Ursula Meier’s Sister. But where those films
seemed intent on dramatizing their young characters’ plights as
signs of egregious neglect, Sermon-Daï merely observes, as if to
suggest that there’s nothing that surprising about kids left to
fend for themselves. And sadly, that may be true. — MICHAEL
SICINSKI
A SONG SUNG BLUE
Geng Zihan
A delicate and bittersweet queer coming-of-age film, A Song
Sung Blue is also, unfortunately, weighed down by all the
predictable beats that befall its bildungsroman genre. Set in the
early 2010s in Harbin, China, Geng Zihan’s debut feature follows
fifteen-year-old Liu Xian (Zhou Meijun), who’s sent off to live with
her estranged father
after her mother
takes a job in Africa.
Xian is a child whose
presence is a mere
afterthought to her
parents; in turn, she
shrinks down within
every space she
occupies, reducing
herself to silently
watching the world
from behind window
sills as it moves on
without her. Xian’s
father is a
photographer, and his studio is where Xian is forced to spend
most of her time. It’s at the studio that Xian meets Mingmei
(Huang Ziqi), the bold and assertive 18-year-old daughter of the
receptionist with whom Xian’s father is having an affair.
The photography studio offers an appropriate setting to highlight
Xian’s growing (and largely unrequited) infatuation with Mingmei.
Upon arriving at the studio, we’re introduced to Xian — who
barely spares a glance for her father — gazing longingly at
professional portraits of women. In these photographs, the
women appear cheerful; they’re donned in garish colors that
outshine Xian’s drab uniform (and stand out against this film’s
predominantly melancholic blue palette). Yet every photograph
also suggests the alluring pretense of appearances: Xian longs to
be recognized by her parents, and this desire leads her to fall for
a woman whose interest in Xian is as dead as the frozen frames
plastered all over the studio. Not surprisingly, Mingmei also
poses for portraits from time to time, thus bringing the cruel
filmic metaphor of a lonely and unrequited love to fruition.
While cinematographer Hao Jiayue creates a hazy and dreamlike
atmosphere through which to explore Xian and Mingmei’s
encounters, perfectly accentuating the fantastical and
all-consuming nature of Xian’s one-sided obsession with the
older Mingmei, at times Geng’s film seems to rely too heavily on
style to buoy a stagnant narrative of desire. The wistfulness
pervading every frame mirrors Xian’s passivity and self-defined
10

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023
smallness, especially noticeable in the scenes where Mingmei
brings her on various dates with rich and married men. Even
moments of Xian’s bold defiance — like when she initiates a kiss
with Mingmei — are undercut by a lack of passion and
introspection that characterizes the entire film.
One of A Song Sung Blue’s strongest scenes comes when Xian
casually mentions to Mingmei that the married men who abuse
their wives won’t be afraid to likewise mistreat her. The familial
dysfunction both of these women experience is a paramount
determining factor in how they spend their adolescence: Xian
retreats into herself while Mingmei lashes out. But A Song Sung
Blue ultimately struggles to substantially elucidate these
respective womens’ positions with any articulation of the
emotional devastation wrought by an unrequited affair. This, in
turn, renders Geng’s portrayal of queer desire as marginal as the
dreamlike tangents here. And so, while A Song Sung Blue is a solid
enough debut from Geng, it would have nonetheless benefited
from being explicit in documenting the vibrancy that comes with
queerness, letting its protagonist experience all the shades of
blue that can accompany desire. — SHAR TAN
KENNEDY
Anurag Kashyap
Though recent Palme d’Or wins for Parasite and Titane might
point to a changing landscape, Cannes has never been a
particularly genre-friendly festival. Most selections in this vein
have either been the diverting projects of some already wellestablished
auteurs, or the various, out-of-competition world
premiere slots frequently given to American blockbusters. The
introduction of a Midnight section, around a decade ago, should
have been an olive branch to genre fans and a path for the
festival to keep up with similar popular sidebars at Sundance
and Toronto. But the paltry offerings have usually also been of
lackluster quality. The section doesn’t hold a candle to that of its
North American counterparts — and as such, the placement of
Kennedy, the new film from Gangs of Wasseypur director Anurag
Kashyap (whose films have played Director’s Fortnight in the
past), feels less like categorization than damnation. And sure
enough, that’s a warning that’s well worth heeding: Kennedy is
hollow garbage, an overlong slog that manages the dubious feat
of being lightweight and ponderous simultaneously.
11

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
Set in Mumbai, against a resurgent wave of Covid-19 — an
offhand reference to Dune places the action more precisely at
the tale end of 2021 — Kennedy follows Uday Shetty (Rahul Bhat),
an ex-cop who, having faked his death six years ago, now works
for the police commissioner as a clandestine hitman under the
film’s eponymous name. The bodies have piled up over the years,
but Shetty is no closer to his goal of taking revenge on a
gangster named Saleem; his mounting frustration is the primary
motivator for the film’s action. There are small twists throughout,
and new characters pop up to add wrinkles to the story, but for
the most part, this is all Kennedy is: a simple revenge story
starring an unsympathetic killer cop who never manages to be
even slightly compelling.
Were this some aesthetic treat of a brutal action flick, there
might still be some entertainment value here. But Kashyap’s
direction is unexceptional and largely stylized. The film’s opening
briefly flirts with the signifiers of post-Tarantino cool — hip
music, moody lighting, an old-school yellow title card that reads
“Rahul Bhat Is Kennedy” — but soon drops the pretense in favor
of being a by-the-numbers crime movie. Likewise, Shetty is not
the sort of athletic hitman typical of action movies, but rather
just a plodding killing machine. He’s good at murder and his taste
for it is perhaps the only intriguing bit of personality he’s
allowed. The role was originally written for Tamil megastar
Vikram (real name: Kennedy John Victor), and while he might
have brought something more to the character than Bhat
manages here, there’s not much potential in this script to begin
with.
Kashyap’s attempts at pathos and social commentary frustrate
even more. Shetty kills for fun and says as much in a flashback
to his days on the force, but he’s haunted by his victims
throughout. There is little to indicate remorse on his part, though
the ghosts provide commentary in the form of overwrought
philosophical questions about the nature of death and Shetty’s
many sins. The back half of Kennedy is so leaden with this type
of voiceover that it becomes hard not to try and tune it out —
much the same way that Shetty, who remains completely
unchanged by the film’s end, clearly does. The only other space
for the character to grow is in his interactions with his
abandoned family, whom he watches via CCTV footage from afar,
seemingly desperate for reconciliation. This subplot fares better
than the question of conscience and allows for some of
the only climactic narrative beats that work. Even this, however,
can’t overcome the level of disinterest the film has invited
elsewhere.
From the soliloquies and music about police violence to the
constant presence of Covid, it’s clear that Kashyap intends for
Kennedy to say something about the state of contemporary
India. But like the main character’s psychology, these statements
are murky, confused, and playing second fiddle to the film’s
cut-rate crime plot. Kennedy’s Mumbai is clearly a city in crisis,
but what Kashyap has to say about it, if anything — beyond
fatalist discontent — is as unclear as why he chose this turgid
mess of a movie through which to express it. — CHRIS MELLO
THE OTHER LAURENS
Claude Schmitz
Belgian writer-director Claude Schmitz's third feature, The Other
Laurens, is a dry-humor thriller with an existential neo-noir
façade. Viewers expecting a tense, philosophical slow-burn akin
to Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye will be surprised to find
what could instead convincingly be described as a Coen brothers
take on David Robert Mitchell’s cult A24 film Under the Silver Lake.
The Other Laurens finds an archetypally down-and-out,
Brussels-based private investigator named Gabriel Laurens
(Olivier Rabourdin) living a life of Sisyphean monotony,
investigating extramarital affairs. His mother is dying, and to
her, he is practically dead; she regularly confuses him for his
twin, François, an exorbitantly wealthy real estate developer
from whom Gabriel is estranged. There is nobody else in Gabriel’s
life — fewer, even, when his mother dies and his niece (Louise
Leroy) arrives from Perpignan in the South of France with the
news that François has died, too, apparently having driven his
car off a cliff. This modest family reunion isn’t occasioned by
mourning: Gabriel’s niece seeks assistance from Gabriel to
investigate his brother’s death, and despite the air of nihilistic
apathy with which Gabriel conducts himself, he’s soon swept
away by a mystery seemingly both of no interest to him, and at
many moments, of no real interest to the audience, either.
Like many films before it, the identical twins at the center of The
Other Laurens fall into the lineage of cinematic doubles,
immediately bringing to mind David Cronenberg’s recently
12

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023
remade and series-ified Dead Ringers. Although Schmitz is
unable to build on this tradition’s rich history meaningfully, he’s
still able to at least brush against it in a way that’s dynamic and
playful. As the film progresses, Gabriel increasingly dissolves into
the identity of his twin; he wears his clothes, mimics his
grooming, and at one juncture, even sleeps with his brother’s
mistress. In a charming twist, even the viewer is left uncertain of
which brother they’re watching — our confusion musically
converging with that of the characters. This playfully leaves The
Other Laurens’ audience with compelling philosophical questions,
like whether people assume their identities or their identities
assume them — even as the relatively simple nature of Schmitz’s
film tends to collapse under the complexity of its own aspired
wit.
The Other Laurens is chock-full of compelling characters, ranging
from a greedy, American wife to an ex-Marine, to a Spanish drug
dealer, and even a geriatric, Harley-riding motorbike gang. These
characters joltingly orbit a complex, albeit obscured world,
without quite breaching its atmosphere. They are clumsily
assembled paradoxes that grate in and out of
scenes without friction, masses in constant movement with
absolutely no emotional weight. Only some of their deficiencies,
however, can be blamed on the awkward script. The quality of
acting in The Other Laurens ranges from somewhat inspired —
first-time actor Louise Leroy deserves credit for buoying the
film’s emotional depth — to downright terrible; during various
monologue scenes, it appears as if the speaker is being repelled,
if not repulsed, by the camera in front of them. This, alongside
hurdling dialogue, nonexistent tension, a hodgepodge plot, and a
Dadaist sense of causality — 9/11 is forcefully made a symbol of
the dissolution of the brothers’ relationship — leaves The Other
Laurens swimming against its own current.
And still, the film manages to find an ambling sort of rhythm
despite itself. To say it’s a success would be wrong; it just isn’t
quite a failure. The rich visuals are legitimately beautiful,
recalling Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, or fellow Belgian Lukas
Dhont’s recent Close, while Thomas Turin’s pulsating electronic
score equally enchants, sharing a similar sensibility with that of
Dev Hynes’ work on Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener or Daniel
Lopatin’s for Uncut Gems. Even the production design is
13

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
excellent, creating a hyperreal, uncanny effect that simulates an
atmosphere of mystery, surveillance, and discomfort. Despite
poor writing and worse direction, everything that’s virtually
inanimate at the periphery of The Other Laurens lends the film
enough of a strong enough pulse to keep viewers watching till
the end, whether or not their collective breaths are held by the
non-suspense of the film’s flaccid mystery. — CONOR TRUAX
INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL
Pham Thien An
Newly christened Director’s Fortnight General Delegate Julien
Rejl has expressed a desire to highlight new voices with his first
programmed slate — not just by selecting filmmakers who are
early in their careers, but also films still lacking sales
representation. And it’s a gesture toward the success of this
strategy that the 2023 Camera d’Or — awarded to the best first
film premiering at Cannes overall — went to a work from this
section: Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. Pham’s
film begins with a long shot in which the focal point
shifts four separate times. Starting on a soccer game, the
camera eventually tracks a mascot (who had been motionless in
the foreground) into an open air cafe, then settling on a group of
three men discussing faith — one of whom is Thien (Lê Phong
Vũ), the film's main character. Though this conversation lasts
quite a while, Pham has one more camera move in store for us:
soon outside the cafe it begins to rain, and then suddenly, a
crash is heard off-camera, before we pan over to the aftermath
of a motorcycle accident. As it turns out, Inside the Yellow Cocoon
Shell is a film composed almost entirely of long takes like this
one; it’s already earned comparisons to those from the likes of Bi
Gan and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. But from the beginning,
Pham’s film seems uniquely self-aware, intentionally
foregrounding the qualities of the long-take school of
filmmaking that tend to receive both the most praise and the
harshest criticism.
Though the plot of Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell revolves around
Thien taking care of his nephew after a deadly motorcycle crash,
it’s not the same crash as the one featured in the film’s first shot,
14

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023
as Thien won’t receive the call that his sister-in-law has died
until it interrupts a massage later in the evening. After Thien
picks up his nephew Dao at the hospital, the film cuts to what
seems to be a non sequitur, with a man explaining the traditional
meanings of various dishes at a wedding. Eventually, a still
photographer enters the shot, and we hear a voice offscreen ask
him to move as the camera shakes. The footage then pauses
and rewinds — we realize we are seeing a screen capture of
Thien’s work as a video editor. When Thien returns to Dao, he is
still unable to explain to his nephew what has happened to his
mother, and it’s here that Pham employs another fashionable
flourish: the late title card drop. Though inserting a title card 30
minutes into a film always offers a bit of a Brechtian shock, here
it follows an even more arresting breach of the fourth wall.
Because there are few to no cuts in each lengthy scene, almost
every cut means a shift not only in space, but in time, increasing
the gravity of each edit. In the case of the title card, the cut
represents a significant elision, as it is immediately followed by
a shot of Thien’s sister-in-law’s coffin — but viewers never see
the moment in which Dao learns his mother has died.
This formal inventiveness is consistent across the film’s runtime.
Its longest take opens at a relative’s home in the village where
Thien grew up. While Dao plays, the relative approaches Thien to
discuss the cost of his sister-in-law’s funeral, agreeing to split it
but also asks Thien to bring some money to Mr. Luu, who
prepared the burial shroud and had refused payment. Thien hops
on a motorbike, and the sudden mobility of the camera as it
follows him will be immediately familiar to fans of the
aforementioned Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues. But when Thien arrives at
Mr. Luu’s house, the camera is positioned across the road. There
appears to be a slow zoom on the window as Thien enters and
home and sits with Mr. Luu, but when the former rises, in
perhaps the film’s greatest formal surprise, the camera follows
him, having somehow made it inside. Later, Thien is shown
climbing a tower, reaching a broken down set of stairs and
hoisting himself up onto the wall to continue. It lands as
something of a joke, then, that Pham cuts to the top of a tower
rather than following the ascent.
These long shot escapades are intelligently utilized and
sufficiently exciting to sustain even Cocoon Shell’s three-hour
runtime, and though the film’s narrative isn’t quite as deft, there
are still pleasures to be found beyond formal invention. The
opening conversation about faith between Thien and his friends
establishes the film’s core thematic concerns, and the film’s
greatest emotional thread is found in Thien’s exploration of faith
with his nephew. And in Cocoon Shell’s final hour, it becomes
increasingly dreamy in nature, texturally and narratively, as
Thien searches for his brother, and Dao’s absent father, Tam.
The film’s final minutes ultimately combine the mystical with
Pham’s manipulation of time, and though its conclusion doesn’t
really offer any concrete answers regarding either faith broadly
or Tam’s whereabouts more specifically, it does leave Thien in a
most satisfying place. — JESSE CATHERINE WEBBER
AMA GLORIA
Marie Amachoukeli
Cléo (Louise Mauroy-Panzani) is a storm that is hard to contain:
though pure, she’s capable of so much darkness. And she’s six
years old. Raised by her Cape Verdean nanny, Gloria (Ilça Moreno
Zego), after her mother’s death from cancer, Cléo feels
possessive of the woman. Though we only see the extent of their
closeness later through the fantasy sequences of a child’s
earliest memories, marked by someone who paid attention to
her and whose affection was all hers, it’s evident early on that
Gloria is more than just a stand-in for Cléo’s mother. When the
young girl returns home for the summer and is given the chance
to stay with Gloria, she does everything in her small-fisted power
to make it happen, even if it means she will awaken to the parts
of her nanny’s life that don’t revolve around her. Director Marie
Amachoukeli previously won the Camera d’Or at Cannes for a
trio-directed feature called Party Girl, a similarly veristic and
human drama staged with amateur actors. With Ama Gloria, she
continues to trust in her actors' ability, sticking close to their
expressive faces and detailing frequent seismic emotional shifts,
to tell a story of all the depths of a child’s scorned heart.
A child’s love may be innocent, but the power this innocence
holds is beyond control. There’s a fairly direct allegory for
colonialism in the way Cléo vies for Gloria’s attention upon the
latter returning home. Gloria’s son, César (Fredy Gomes Tavares),
is still young, and resents that his mother’s attention has lain
elsewhere for years. Cléo’s clear and elementary sense of
morality holds Gloria at its center— for her, lying to Gloria is the
15

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
worst thing she could do, and effectively constitutes betrayal.
That Gloria isn’t fully attentive to Cléo outside of her job as nanny
isn’t cruel or distant in itself; it’s just the truth about life, and how
our existences can be whittled down by those we encounter to
roles and figures. But Cléo isn’t old enough, or ready, to grasp
that her guardian’s private life could ever be as important as her
own, and she is ready to try anything to win
that affection back. She’s six — her innocence exists precisely
because she has only seen the world through her own sheltered
eyes, and in those eyes, Gloria is hers. The older woman, whose
homecoming presents the rekindling of an old love and a project
in the form of a half-built hotel, cannot take the place of Cléo’s
mother. But Cléo has yet to understand this.
Ama Gloria yields a striking child performance; Cléo’s love for her
caretaker is wrapped in idolatry and a need for power. She fights
tooth and nail for love as young children do. Amachoukeli coaxes
such a strong showing from the young actress in part because
she understands that on screen power and complexity can often
be rendered through vulnerability. The last of her former
co-directing trio to release a solo feature — Claire Burger had
Real Love in 2018, while Samuel Theis delivered Softie in 2021 —
Ama Gloria makes it clear that Party Girl’s touching amateur
performances weren’t coincidental. Rather than bank on showy
workmanship and sweeping melodrama — though the film does
contain some animated sequences, the purpose of which takes a
while to become beautifully clear — Ama Gloria rests on
Mauroy-Panzani and Moreno Zego’s shoulders, their strikingly
layered performances the kind that can only come from letting
an actor, or two, simply breathe. — SARAH WILLIAMS
16

Photo Credits:
Cover - ddd; Page 1 - Cannes Film Festival; Page 2 - Marathon Films & Base 12; Page 4 - Cannes
Film Festival; Page 5 - Gladys Glover/House on Fire/CS Production/ARTE France Cinéma/Les Films
Fauves/Volya Films; Page 7 - CHAZ Productions; Page 9 - Nuri Bilge Ceylan; Page 10 - The Seventh
Art Pictures; Page 11 - Zee Studios; Page 13 - Quinzaine des Cinéastes; Page 14 - JK Films and
Potocol; Page 16 - Pyramide International; Back Cover - Gladys Glover/House on Fire/CS
Production/ARTE France Cinéma/Les Films Fauves/Volya Films