InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

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
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