Festival de Cannes 2024, Oh Canada and Kinds of Kindness

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The competition for the Palme d’Or at #Cannes2024 continues with Kinds of Kindness by Yorgos Lanthimos and Oh, Canada by Paul Schrader.

Festival de Cannes 2024 : the competition for the Palme d’Or featured Kinds of Kindness by Yorgos Lanthimos and Oh, Canada by Paul Schrader. The event of the day was Richard Gere walking the Red Carpet on Friday 17 May, sex symbol of the time. From Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and Days of Heaven (1978) by Terrence Malick, to the revelation of American Gigolo (1980) by… Paul Schrader, and Pretty Woman, Officer and Gentleman (1982) earned him awards and nominations, including a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor. His career has also been marked by his activism and social commitment. Absent from the Croisette for 40 years, his return was widely covered by the media.

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Oh, Canada, an interview confession

In this film, adapted from the novel by American author Russell Banks, Richard Gere plays the role of Leo Fife, a famous documentary filmmaker opposed to the Vietnam War who has fled the United States. At the end of his life, he gives a final confessional interview to one of his disciples, a young journalist who has come to his bedside, to finally tell the whole truth about his life, structured like a jigsaw puzzle from a collection of scattered memories and heterogeneous formats. A confession in the twilight of his life, filmed before the eyes of his last wife, played by Uma Thurman, not seen on the big screen since The House That Jack Built, Lars Von Trier‘s very sinister feature film, presented Out of Competition in 2018.

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A regular awards-winner

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos is no stranger to awards on the Croisette: Prix Un Certain Regard in 2009 for Canine, Prix du Jury for The Lobster with Colin Farrell in 2015, Prix du Scénario at the 70th Cannes Festival for The Killing of the Sacred Deer in 2017. He is a member of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival jury under the presidency of Alejandro González. He also won the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival in 2018 with La Favorite and the Golden Lion last year with Poor Things, which also won Best Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes in 2024 and four Oscars.

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A shock film!

His 10th feature, Kinds of Kindness, is a dark psychological comedy with a prestigious cast: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley and Hong Chau. The film stands out for its minimalist but virtuoso direction, with close-up framing of faces, natural lighting and a minimalist soundtrack of high-pitched, dissonant piano chords, all of which create an anxiety-inducing but captivating atmosphere as the characters evolve in worlds bordering on the eerily zany, but not without a dark, wry and detached sense of humour. Unpredictable in its bewildering twists and turns, the film ticks all the boxes for inclusion in the 77th Cannes Film Festival prize list: disturbed, talented, inventive, virtuoso, subversive…

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Three kinds of wickedness

The story is structured around three unrelated chapters, the only thread running through being mental derangement: manipulation, paranoia, sectarian drift, with the actresses and actors playing three different roles. A common thread runs through them all, the quest: the quest of an architect for happiness lost through his refusal to commit murder, the quest of a policeman for his “real” wife, the quest of a person endowed with exceptional power to make her the goddess of a sect. Yorgos Lanthimos’ quirky aesthetic and gritty tone make him a director in a class of his own, whose talent delights viewers fascinated by the extent to which he moves back and forth between the “tangible” and the strange, the unusual and the distressing in a familiar universe. A must-see!