By Jake Coyle, Film Writer
CANNES, France (AP) --"Beauty is like war," says Gary Oldman, in character, in Paolo Sorrentino's "Parthenope." "It opens doors."
"Parthenope," in which Oldman plays the author John Cheever, premiered Tuesday in Cannes. It's just one of the films at this year's festival to consider beauty: its disruptive power, its cost and the sometimes dangerous portals it might pry ajar. After the competition lineup — the films vying for the Palme d'Or — got a lackluster start last week, Cannes was enlivened by a string of films both fleshy and carnal.
Foremost among them was Sean Baker's "Anora," in which Mikey Madison stars as a 23-year-old Russian American stripper in Brighton Beach-Coney Island section of Brooklyn. Baker, the director of "The Florida Project" and "Red Rocket," has a keen eye for the way social stratification seeps into even the most intimate relationships of his protagonists.
"There's a million stories to be told in the world of sex workers," Baker told reporters Wednesday in Cannes. "It's a livelihood, it's a career, it's a job and it's one that should be respected. In my opinion, it should be decriminalized and not in any way regulated because it is a sex worker's body and it is up to them to decide how they will use it in their livelihood."
"Anora," which will be released later this year by Neon, the indie distributor with an enviable Palme d'Or record, has been arguably the breakout of this year's Cannes. It begins with writhing slow-motion bodies in the strip club where Anora (Madison) works. It's there that "Ani" meets a young and goofy Russian client named Ivan (Mark Eidelstein) who quickly becomes enraptured and hires her to sleep with him for a week.
On a ketamine-induced Las Vegas escapade, they impulsively get married. Ivan is the son of a Russian oligarch so Ani thinks she's hit the jackpot. But soon after they return, Ivan's father's loyal henchmen — themselves working-class underlings — arrive to secure an annulment. What follows is farcical and funny until it's devastating, with a final act that expresses something tragic about transactional sex, and maybe even love.
It's also a fierce and fiery tour-de-force performance by Madison, for whom Baker wrote the film, and who might just run away with Cannes' best actress prize.
"What happened here?" asks the goon squad's head honcho upon arriving at the helter-skelter scene after the frantic and barely successful entrapment of Ani.
"She happened," one answers.
Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance," perhaps the most debated film of Cannes, is a blunt and gory body-horror satire about beauty standards. It, too, is a showcase for its lead actress. Demi Moore plays a middle-aged Hollywood star, Elisabeth Sparkle, who senses her status slipping. To rekindle her youth, she begins taking a mysterious serum that spawns a younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley.
The rub? They have to trade places every seven days. Any overage — getting too hooked on youth — will dearly cost her. What evolves is an extended and increasingly gruesome metaphor for a male-dominated movie industry (Dennis Quaid plays a misogynistic, over-the-top executive) and for the self-inflicted obsession of trying to stay superficially young. It's Botox as a monster movie.
"I don't know any woman that doesn't have an eating disorder or some other thing that they do that does violence to their bodies," Fargeat told reporters in Cannes. "I think this violence is very extreme."
"The Substance," which was acquired for distribution by Mubi after its premiere, was divisive — hailed by some as an instant body-horror classic and derided by others for its hyper-stylized and ironically superficial characters. What's more certain is that "The Substance" is a triumphant film for Moore, 61, who throws every bit of herself into the role, with seemingly none of her character's self-consciousness.
With its megawatt red-carpet pageants, the Cannes Film Festival, itself, is not immune to shining a harshly objectifying glare over all those that enter its cauldron of celebrity. (Elisabeth could easily be imagined having the same pangs of insecurity before coming here.) But it's part of the festival's grand contradictions: what it exalts inside its cinemas is often in direct opposition to all that's transpiring just down the Croisette.
Sorrentino, the Italian director of "The Great Beauty" and "The Hand of God," has long been a regular in Cannes, and beauty has in many ways always been his primary subject. It's more explicitly so in "Parthenope," which stars newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta as the title character, a woman of such beauty that helicopters hover above to get a closer look.
"Are you aware of the disruption your beauty causes?" asks Oldman's Cheever, a brief and melancholy acquaintance.
But while Sorrentino is clearly beguiled, too, his movie follows Parthenope on a more existential quest. She resists many of her suitors and instead devotes herself to academia and inner life. The definition of beauty in "Parthenope," which A24 will release, continually broadens: to its Naples setting, to cinema, to something achingly soulful.
"During the journey I made in making this film, it was as if I had to get rid of a younger side of me, that carefree one," said Porta, "and enter the world of grown-ups and focus on what I want to do in life."
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More