InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

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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
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InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

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