Young Mothers

Immersing yourself in a new film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is akin to reluctantly catching up with an old friend. As of late, there’s something almost too familiar about the brothers’ tried and tested brand of social-realist cinema that mines the fringes of Belgium for disquieting stories of its working class denizens. They once changed the vernacular of realist filmmaking with their Golden Palm-winning Rosetta (1999), and returned for Cannes’ top prize with L’Enfant (2005), but ever since the Adèle Haenel-starring The Unknown Girl  (2016), the pair inhabits the Cannes’ main competition with increasingly diminishing returns. In particular, the bitter memories of the contrived radicalization narrative at the heart of Young Ahmed (2019) could barely be replaced by the somewhat stronger, yet still unconvincing immigration drama-thriller Tori and Lokita (2022). 

That’s why their latest Cannes entry, Young Mothers, comes as a pleasant surprise. It’s the strongest Dardennes picture since 2014’s Two Days, One Night — one that sees the fraternal duo reaching a level of urgency and intimacy we haven’t seen from them in a while. However, to call their 13th feature a return to form would do Youth Mothers injustice, as the Dardennes do something relatively novel here by composing a mosaic-like narrative around its quartet of protagonists. Jessica, Perla, Julie, and Ariane are teenage girls who, under the care of a maternal assistance home in Liège, are bracing themselves for motherhood. Burdened by poverty, depression, and/or substance use issues, these girls find themselves in a pressure cooker situation, in which they have to rapidly reach a level of adulthood in order to be able to provide a life for their children that was never available to them. 

The Dardennes’ oeuvre usually pivots around single characters who circle closer and closer toward the abyss. Obviously, the teenage moms of Youth Mothers also face a myriad of emotional, familial and financial setbacks, and yet it’s the aspirational drive of the narrative that ultimately shines through. By dividing the weight of their severe cinematic form on multiple characters, the Dardennes essentially deliver a series of micro-narratives that are refreshingly modest and earnest. Instead of sensationalising the politically sensitive topic of teenage pregnancy with heavy polemics, Youth Mothers rather presents itself as an inspired exploration of female resilience. Additionally, after all their grim stories of governmental neglect, this film feels like a genuine celebration of the essential institutional support the maternal assistance home provides these girls with. 

In the relative calm of such cautiously optimistic narratives, the hyper-focused style of the directing duo also finds new relevancy. As the most prominent auteurs of social-realist cinema, the Dardennes hold a unique position, in which they can afford to almost endlessly rehearse the staging of their meticulously crafted mise-en-scène. In the worst cases, this level of directorial control results in a tiring form of hermeticism, expressed in technically impressive but ultimately bloodless films. Here, however, their thorough cinematic style feels appropriately alive and vibrant. This is arguably their most vivid approximation of what a fictionalised observational documentary can feel like. 

Especially impressive is the way Benoît Dervaux’ agile cinematography hops between the multiple characters in the chaotic hallways of the maternal assistance home. It boggles the mind to imagine how a film crew navigates such an environment, inhabited by anxious teenagers, dedicated social workers, and about a dozen babies. While the Dardennes are widely celebrated for the pitch-perfect performances they extract from non-actors, working with numerous newborns posed a new challenge for their highly controlled shoots. The sudden crying of babies “are things that we have incorporated, and they’re incorporated quickly when they happen,” explained Jean-Pierre Dardenne in an interview published on Cannes’ official website. He adds: “It adds tempo — a completely different rhythm. Something that happens, like that, is part of life and it creates rhythm.”

It’s exactly this sense of rhythm that distinguishes Youth Mothers from the brothers’ previous — and especially, recent — directorial efforts. By limiting the scopes of all the intersecting stories, they have found a way to rejuvenate their cinematic sensibilities, proving that with the right material, they remain masters of their craft. — HUGO EMMERZAEL

Resurrection

Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Chinese auteur Bi Gan has come to be lauded for his seductive and hypnotic cinematic form, a form inextricably fostered from the sheer technical prowess which saw both features induce trance-like reveries by way of their use of the long take. More so than those afforded traditional slow cinema (e.g., Ozu, Tarkovsky, and Béla Tarr), the long take in Bi’s oeuvre signifies the continuity of dreams, just as his other more scattershot scenes typically embody the fragmentation of latent dream rebuses, to be made manifest once again upon waking. In both Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey into Night, a lone man wanders into his past, in search of a hometown or history. Despite the aching romanticism with which they plunder the streetscapes of memory, neither film quite relished the bittersweet warmth of nostalgia; the effects of their psychoanalytic reconstitution, rather, found meaning in the very movement of dreaming, remanding the ecstasy of exorcism while reviving the literary impulses that have effectively consecrated their director’s auteurial status.

With Resurrection, his fourth feature (including 2011’s crudely realized student film, Tiger), the 35-year-old Bi has largely kept to this register, assembling what will inevitably be received as five disparate narratives woven together by the fiat of dream logic, but the scale and size of its ambit by far exceeds his previous works. Amounting to no less than a history of cinema itself, Resurrection situates this history squarely within the history of the 20th century, a matter of chronological fact but also a veritable conduit for the inventions of fiction. Taking from Fernando Pessoa his belief in the reality of dreams as more vivid than reality itself, the film renounces the scenario it posits — that of a future when immortality is achieved precisely by not dreaming — through two quasi-mythical characters. One, the Fantasmer (Jackson Yee), is a dreamer turned monster, shuffling off his mortal coil into the light of a candle flame, destined to dream until death. The other, a young woman (Shu Qi), seeks to awaken the Fantasmer in order to also right the passage of time, rendered out of sync by the fixation and specificity of his dreaming.

It would be foolhardy to graft this metanarrative onto what follows, and Bi’s coy attempt at supplementing interpretation proves to be a red herring which nonetheless historicizes and politicizes the cinematic dream. Much like Qiu Jiongjiong’s A New Old Play, whose chronicling of Chinese history from Japan’s WWII invasion to the Cultural Revolution took shape from the recollections of a deceased Sichuan opera actor, Resurrection undertakes a historical survey of modern China that quietly doubles as a representation of historical periodization itself. Beginning with a labyrinthine tribute to the silent film aesthetics of the German Expressionists such as Lang and Murnau, the film settles into the sights, sounds, and senses of different cinematic registers. A wartime spy noir set sometime in the ‘30s first embodies the Fantasmer in the body of a dashing young man, who searches in vain for a mysterious suitcase amid much gloom and paranoia. And then a derelict monastery, ostensibly sometime during the ‘60s, finds the Fantasmer a wayward monk who crushes his bad tooth to release the spirit of an annoyed and vaguely comic deity.

Thriller morphs into fable, and then into the humanist sojourn of the Hong Kong ‘80s, when the Fantasmer, now a vagrant card sharp, coaxes a young girl into a scam of scent and trickery; through these transitions, a brief interlude describes the Fantasmer’s stalker and savior watching over his dream, a “Big Other” attending out of pity to his dwindling, century-long fantasy. The candle wax burns, and the oft-unseen woman — like her Lacanian counterpart — affirms and regulates its burning. Is cinema, then, the drug of dreams and consequently that which kills, as the film’s intertitles suggest, or does its very medium forestall mortality, not so much for its dreamers but for the histories and lives it represents? Both interpretations have a maudlin, sentimental ring to them; both constitute the romantic aporia that Resurrection brazenly ascribes to the seventh art of the world. As both the opium of the masses and its restorative cure, cinema occupies an ambivalent spot in the film’s metaphysical netherworld, not merely a necessary illusion to be blindly restored, but equally not the violent act that precedes the plenitude of its representations.

The netherworld in which the film’s final sequence takes place stands at the precipice of Y2K, momentous in its historical designation (both for China and the world at large), but also portending mystery and maleficence: cinema, according to its premise, is ending, and the jouissance accrued throughout its preceding milieus will inevitably melt away. It is also here that Bi transplants the technical sophistry of his long-take into a deeply soul-stirring one; reportedly improvised by his actors, the 35-minute tracking shot through the seedy alleys by a harbor sees the Fantasmer pursue his vampiric love interest (Li Gengxi), while being thwarted by a demon of the night. In one segment, the gag that kickstarts the Fantasmer’s journey — riffed off of Louis Lumière’s 1895 short L’Arroseur arrosé — is repeated by the very placement of Lumière’s film, played at regular speed, against a foreground of breakneck movement. Diachronicity jams up; synchronicity whirls away all at once. If the “beauty of the act,” as Leos Carax sought to realize in Holy Motors, could be found in the kineticism of action, the beauty of cinema may be revived from the kineticism of stasis, of dreaming of untold possible worlds and the illusions they conjure into being. More than anything, Resurrection proffers dreams and little else. But only in dreams do the dead come back to life. — MORRIS YANG

Mirrors No. 3

No matter how common the surroundings or how ordinary the story may be, a Christian Petzold film always catches the viewer by surprise. His films depict worlds where familiar colors, worn-out songs, and well-known emotions operate according to an entirely different logic — and as mesmerized passers-by that we are, the real pleasure lies in trying to find our way there. From one film to the next, we think we have finally grasped what the color red feels like, what emotions water can carry, or between whom love can truly exist. But it’s only to be fooled again, left dumbfounded — like a siren out of water, an amnesiac woman, or, as in Mirrors No. 3, a troubled car crash survivor.

With his new film premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight parallel section at Cannes this year, one might think the Berlinale regular Petzold would feel out of place too — but seemingly, he has never been more in his element (though, unlike Undine and Afire, not in a metaphorical sense!) to the point that Mirrors had many saying: “It’s just another Petzold film!” It is — and yet, it’s not. The first surprise in Mirrors No. 3 comes right at the start, where the beginning doesn’t actually feel like a beginning at all, but instead as if we’ve been dropped in the middle of something — namely, a troubled couple’s weekend getaway. 

In her fourth collaboration with the German filmmaker, Paula Beer plays Laura, a piano student whose troubled mood casts a shadow over the plans her boyfriend Jakob has made with another couple — music industry professionals he hopes to impress. Laura wishes to return to Berlin, and Jakob reacts in the nastiest, most macho way possible — yet he nevertheless agrees to drive her to the train station. Their sullen, tension-filled car ride is abruptly interrupted by a violent, off-screen accident, revealed only in its aftermath. The red convertible they were in is now a total wreck, while Jakob’s lifeless limbs already appear stone-hard — like a statue cursed by providence. It’s striking how vividly Petzold channels both life and death within the same frame: the bright reds, light blues, and greens suggest the world has already resumed its normal course, while the image’s stillness hints at a life, prematurely frozen in time. 

Slightly bruised and emotionally shaken, Laura survives the crash — and a middle-aged woman named Betty, who lives near the site of the accident, takes her in and looks after her during her recovery. Beer, ever the elusive, fluctuating, and energetic force in Petzold’s films, carries herself here with a contrastingly downcast, standoffish presence. If she was once a wild, fierce, fox-like animal in his earlier works, in Mirrors No. 3, with her curly hair and aloof eyes, she appears more like a wounded lamb. Yet whether this look works is debatable, as Petzold seems to be chasing a certain impression of youth in her features, while Beer already appears quite mature — her character resembling a piece of old clothing one keeps trying to wear, even if it no longer quite fits. But since Laura is meant to feel and appear out of place, the incongruity of her performance doesn’t stand out all that much.

During her first few days at Betty’s house, Laura remains largely passive, accepting her caretaker’s help with quiet compliance — settling in and adapting to the rhythm of Betty’s daily life. As they fall into this silent harmony — cooking, cleaning, biking, and painting the fence together — Laura’s mood begins to lift. It’s refreshing to see Petzold explore a different kind of relationship, one that moves away from the magnetic, desirous heterosexual push-and-pulls his recent films have leaned toward. The roles the two women adopt are drawn with subtle nuance. There is mutual affection between them, but Betty remains puzzled by Laura’s apparent lack of trauma, while Laura senses a deeper, perhaps stronger attachment that Betty harbors for her — one that transcends simple care. It’s when Betty introduces Laura to her husband Richard and their son Max — who run a nearby repair shop — that the film’s pace begins to quicken. In line with the male-deprecating humor he explored in Afire, Petzold here injects a comical tone into the picture. At first, both men strongly oppose Betty’s attachment to Laura, but they gradually warm to this strange, makeshift family dynamic.

Petzold is never short of surprises — in the case of Mirrors No. 3, it’s the predictability of the plot that comes as one. The transference of identity, the emotional and mental projections we cast onto others, have long been central to his films — and to cinema more broadly. Haunting, too, is the medium’s privileged sensation, with each film carrying the ghosts of countless forms, genres, and characters that came before.  Among these many variations on illusion and the disillusionments that follow, Mirrors No. 3 offers a relatively quiet and unassuming resolution. It’s as if Petzold’s rejection of narrative climax mirrors Laura’s own refusal of performing the breakdown those around her seem to anticipate. And at the end, one can’t help but wonder what Petzold saw and heard in Ravel’s Miroirs No. 3 — also known as Une barque sur l’océan (A Boat on the Ocean) — the piece he chose as the namesake for his film. Perhaps it was the image of a modest film trying to stay afloat against violent narrative currents, climactic tides, and the ebb and flow of cinematic pathos.

. — ÖYKÜ SOFUOĞLU

Peak Everything

Peak Everything (or Amour Apocalypse, its easily translatable French title) is only Anne Émond’s second film to premiere internationally, following Our Loved Ones — easily her best film — which bowed at Locarno in 2015. What’s happened to Émond’s filmmaking in the decade since is a tale of what it means to target success in Quebec’s box office market, which is usually seen as an oasis or a fantasy version of Canadian filmmaking compared to the English-speaking part of the country.

Émond’s subjects for her first handful of films concerned characters on the margins — self-sabotagers, depressives, and people who can monologue, craft, or write, but never take satisfying action. While her tendency to root these characterizations in transparently theatrical stagings could be a liability, in a film like Our Loved Ones a conceptual hook — a time-leaping narrative that never stays in a stable orientation to the present for long — suggested that Émond was a director ahead of most talents of her generation. The mixed response to her follow-up to that film, a fiction-biopic hybrid about the writer Nelly Arcan, meant that her eventual return from a hiatus came in the form of that most reliable Canadian career starter of a film: an underdog coming-of-age story (Jeune Juliette).

Following a pared-down theatrical adaptation last year (Lucy Grizzli Sophie), Peak Everything represents Émond’s pop-refashioned version of a filmmaking perspective, in the form of a zeitgeist-chasing screwball satire, albeit one that catches its breath to flesh out characterizations. Whether this latter impulse is a sign of Émond’s still intact sensibility or not, it’s a tendency that works against the effectiveness of the film’s satire of climate-change-age anxiety.

Adam (Patrick Hivon), a dog kennel owner, is aimless and lonely — easily taken advantage of, or just pushed around, by his father, “friends,” and the one employee he manages. When he orders, then damages, a light-therapy aid (a glowing pyramid in his dark apartment), the hyper-engaged call center voice belonging to Tina (Piper Perabo) suggests a manic escape from the dull predictability of his suburban existence. When multiple phone calls to Tina are interrupted by the radio-play theatrics of disasters striking, he drives to her, eager to play hero, at least in his own mind.

While Émond’s script is staked on its proximity to familiar headlines (earthquakes, storms, and other wild swings in weather), its tone is confused. The humour relies on dog reaction shots and running gags that aim broad, and its characters — each pathetic and thinly drawn to start — grow in sympathy, rather than reveal or implicate the contours of the film’s ultra-relevant situation. That is to say, that the film is pitched like a ripped-from-the-headlines screwball, yet Émond, perhaps subconsciously, pushes the film in the direction of drama. Despite the film marking her debut at the Quinzaine, Émond’s position here is unfortunately not as a bold auteur. Whether by coincidence or strategy, the film feels akin to recent Quebecois titles that similarly pine for a prelapsarian salve to modernity’s complications, in terms of environmental and sexual politics.

In its warm color-timing, snap-zoom camera direction, and spikes in flirty conversational energy, Peak Everything will all but surely be positioned as a film in the wake of Monia Chokri’s Simple comme Sylvain, one of the most successful Quebecois films of last year. And its yearning for offline connection feels of a piece with the role-playing romance of Sophie Deraspe’s Shepherds, which won last year’s Best Canadian Film prize at TIFF. While models of success, these are also films that condescend to their subjects and audiences, spicing up the moribund form of the marriage comedy with quirks from first-year philosophy (Sylvain comme Sylvain), escape-from-society fantasy (Shepherds), and end-of-the-world catastrophizing (Peak Everything).

The form of the satire, even when blended to be barely noticeable with comedic or romantic genre elements, is inherently conservative. The newly neurotic is a deviation from the norm, and must be isolated and identified, if not pathologized. It’s not a coincidence that Adam’s father, who rants about his son’s generation and its inability to form traditional families or purchase houses, is the one who literally talks him down from the ledge. Or that the film’s ultimate tonal value isn’t pointed or scathing, but wistful for the comforts of authority, which Adam experiences via meditation podcasts or the responsibilities he assumes to confront the film’s disaster sequences.

Whatever he may represent, Adam is, for the most part, an annoying figure. As for Tina, whose family also appears, albeit in a clumsily executed shading in of her backstory, she exists as a mirror of this condition. Despite the film’s invocation of the limited range of action people feel when facing the destruction and death caused by extreme climate events, the far more worrying aspect of the film is that Émond’s voice as a filmmaker appears to be buried, maybe for good, in hackneyed material. — MICHAEL SCOULAR

Yes!

In the face of ongoing, ever-intensifying genocide, nuance is arguably out of order, and so agit-prop wisdom becomes a creative’s necessary juice. But for Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, most well-known internationally as one of the nation’s harshest critics, agitation comes as second nature. Though Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians have been committed with impunity ever since its founding in 1948, its retaliation against the offensive perpetuated by militant group Hamas on October 7, 2023, has plumbed new depths of depravity — and is rightly condemned for it. Lapid, having fervently opposed Israel’s moral and cultural bankruptcy with such films as 2019’s Synonyms and 2021’s Ahed’s Knee, has presently concocted a highly toxic artistic statement on impotence with Yes!, an unwieldy behemoth clocking in at 150 minutes and extolling the dumb virtues of submission.

Conceived before 2023 but heavily reworked to render the hellish aftermath of October 7, Yes! makes its anti-Zionist stance unreservedly clear from start to finish. Clear, in Lapid’s playbook, is nonetheless cribbed from a state of mind, which is anything but: the film opens with a menagerie of grotesque exhibition, its perverted excesses doubled down on as Lapid unleashes the fury and irresponsibility of life in Tel Aviv as perceived through a prism of wanton subjectivity. Y (Ariel Bronz), a jazz pianist by day, hustles by night: smeared in fruit punch and dunked into a pool at a drug-fuelled party with Israel’s military elite in attendance, he and his dancer partner, Yasmine (Efrat Dor), contract their bodies in service of all manner of debauchery — a tongue-in-ear threesome being one of the film’s most overt scenes — and sell their souls to the state for a chance at leaving it. A sea of green somewhere in Europe, Yasmine contends, would befit their year-old son compared to the gleaming but soulless metropolis of greater Israel. Y is less optimistic, strolling along the promenade with the baby and gesturing with wry resignation around at the good soldiers and citizenry. “Submission,” he avers, “is happiness.”

This self-negating tendency foregrounds the aggressively emotive bravura of Yes!, whose paradoxically sincere and ironic dispositions are never quite resolved by its howls and jabs of garish obscenity. As both the film’s subject and its conditions of production, Y’s artistic impotence is very much the point of a work which proves irreducible to either phenomenological expression or symbolic meaning. But Lapid, arguably, does more to presuppose this representational handicap than to depict it, and his insistent solipsism tunes out the film’s inescapable clarion call as a result. An abstraction both in name (Y’s Hebrew translation, yodh, interestingly approximates the German Jude) and in person, Y lives and breathes very much in unreality, shuttered off to cocktail parties with monstrous Russian billionaires and returning to an apartment where music — loudly blasted, never mind what kind — keeps the couple’s national conscience at bay. Whether this unreality is the schizophrenic state of life in Israel isn’t the point; the focal point of Yes! lies, instead, in its obsessions with metaphor and maximalism.

As with Synonyms and Ahed’s Knee, Lapid’s latest rebuke to the state he has since renounced works precisely because of these obsessions. Yet the way the film wears and beats its audience down lacks the finesse that one might come to expect from a director no stranger to smuggling subtlety under the cover of rabid bluntness. A blood-stained sheet containing the lyrics to a genocidal anthem Y is commissioned to write, or a boot-licking circle jerk among the echelons of cowering sycophants, are simultaneously forceful and formulaic, and where this combination may have pulverized the viewer’s sensibility in Starship Troopers, the jingoisms inherent to Israel’s national identity here are not remotely steeped in sci-fi fantasy. That the film’s main backer — the Israel Film Fund — has actually been independent from state funding for some time should also be a mitigating fact against the shock and awe towards the very notion of an Israeli film being critical of Zionism.

One of Yes!’s most chilling sequences, however, sees Y accompany an old flame (Naama Preis) to the Gazan border where she, now working as an interpreter and propagandist for the Israel Defence Forces, belts out a lament for the victims of October 7, her tone and pitch intensifying as the acrid details of destruction pile upon the audio mix. Y, subsequently, heads into the distance, where the backdrop of Gaza under live siege is apparent, and hurls his anthem of retribution toward Gaza in a pathetic display of the death drive. The raw documentary power of this sequence needs little narrative dressing, all the more with the anthem’s derivation from a very real music video sung by kids calling for a wholesale Palestinian wipeout. But little else, regrettably, offers such abject terror in a film otherwise content with provocative but pointless dashes of surrealism. Like the balmy soul tunes of “Lovely Day” in Ahed’s Knee, much of Yes! has already accepted the victory march of vulgarity from the get-go, and a stronger film — one with an even greater aptitude and moral responsibility — would peel off the shtick of sound and fury and learn to say “no!” — MORRIS YANG

Nino

“I’ve got to start something,” Nino, the eponymous protagonist of Pauline Loquès’ feature debut, announces early in the film to his mother at the kitchen table. It’s a Friday afternoon, and barely hours have passed since Nino learned about the diagnosis that will drastically alter his life. Not that you’d be able to tell from his face, a face as impenetrable as they come, belonging to up-and-coming Québécois actor Théodore Pellerin. If you remember that uncomfortable scene in a New York subway station in Eliza Hittman’s Sundance breakthrough Never Rarely Sometimes Always, it might, to no small effect, be due to Pellerin’s discomforting performance — though things have ultimately gained traction through a remarkably different, yet similarly engrossing, lead role as sycophantic videographer in Alex Russell’s Lurker, which played at both Sundance and Berlin earlier this year. While collaborating with any one of these young filmmakers could be shrugged off as mere happenstance, Pellerin’s standout performance in Pauline Loquès’ tender slice-of-life dramedy Nino (which won the actor a “Rising Star Award” at this year’s Cannes Critics Week) proves a trend. 

Back at the kitchen table, Nino’s mother, irrespective of the reticence in her son’s carefully selected words — “I’ve got to start something” — seems less concerned with the nature of this embarkation than excited at the prospect of any change at all. If there is more to her impromptu exclamation — “Great!” — it’s no doubt relief, which not only plays to offbeat comedic effect, but also reveals an underlying truth about Loquès’ sedulously observed protagonist.

The film is hardly past its opening, yet Nino already seems so well introduced as a character that seeing him falter after a brief surge of courage feels inevitable. Realizing that he maneuvered himself into a dead end, that this filial kitchen talk doesn’t hold the kind of comfort he is grasping for, he fends off his mother’s feeble attempts at inquiring into his condition, resorting to an answer both delicate and vague: depression. It speaks to the maturity of Loquès’ direction that she allows the moment to take on complexity without sentimental overcharge: there is Nino’s inner resistance against confiding, his spontaneous deflection from the actual disease, and his mother’s hilariously inept attempt to respond to the invented one. And as fun as it might be to watch her, somewhat reluctantly, follow the dictum of excessive sensitivity in the face of depression, as the film, set over a mere weekend, unravels, you may start to wonder whether there might not be an emotional truth to it.

There is a more thoroughly articulated joke on the state of the French medical system in the opening scene, when it turns out that no one ever informed Nino that he’s caught a Papillomavirus infection, a widespread yet under-discussed sexually transmitted disease. Nor did anyone tell him that the same infection has triggered throat cancer, with his first chemotherapy session already scheduled for Monday. But Loquès uses these systemic jumbles rather as a backdrop to the confused mind than as an excuse for low-hanging jokes. Which is all the more striking considering that humor, despite the overall melancholic tone, is crucial to Loquès’ project, and it speaks to her directorial confidence that she hinges it much more on fleeting glimpses than strident punchlines.

In undergoing treatment, Nino will also lose his fertility, which renders Monday not only an ominous beginning, but also an endpoint. (Barely time enough to produce some last potent sperm, to be preserved in case he ever decides to become a father.) Amidst all this, Nino, after a long day, quasi-stumbles into his own surprise birthday party, a moment well built up through our close proximity to his perspective and an awkward encounter with one of the party guests (whom, fittingly, he’s never met before). Every now and then, however, this privileged perspective of ours is questioned by slowly panning wide shots, in the course of which we, recurringly, lose sight of Nino through urban obstructions such as bridges and walls.

These spatial separations remind us that some situations Nino must navigate alone — stripped even of our lenticular company. Though if with us, the native Parisian often blurs all too well into the city’s washed-out monochrome. Which makes what less confident directors might frame as some grandiose reveal — that Nino is very successful at his job, and in fact the superior of many of the guests at his surprise birthday party — another plausible facet to his character.

Toned down to a degree that allows any given moment to swing one way or the other, Nino — the film — oscillates between nostalgia, subtle humor, and, despite everything, intrepidity toward the future. The exquisite and in many ways central party scene encapsulates this restless sway, with Nino and his friends propelling us back into the aughts as they roar to Foals’ “Cassius,” before we see the birthday boy in talks with his friend and roommate Sofian (William Lebghil), who eagerly dispenses his podcast-born philosophies — “The secret is to start!” — and later see him bathroom-locked-in with a woman who, not unlike him, injects hormones for Oocyte cryopreservation. In other words: to freeze her eggs.

Now at 29, Nino has not only outgrown most of British post-punk revival bands of the 2000s, but also the sweaters of his adolescence, one of which — exposing his belly button — we see him absentmindedly put on as he rummages through the relics of his teenage years. With Monday lining up as a preliminary finish line, the remaining weekend seems suddenly to have opened up, holding in store a wealth of chance encounters, as if to reward his dedicated roaming. One of them sees him reunite with a former classmate, who remembers him as the boy who did not take time off from school when his father died, but, against all predictions by the teacher, showed up right the next day in class. Which suggests that if there is sadness in Nino’s life, it might be caused by its absence. And while conscious of the fact that a fundamental shift of this paradigm would betray the pursued realism of her debut, Pauline Loquès insists that any moment inheres the possibility of a new beginning — especially when all we can see is an end. — PATRICK FEY

Dead Does Not Exist

Canadian animator Félix Dufour-Laperrière has described his third and most ambitious feature, film Death Does Not Exist, as a tonal experiment, dropping characters possessed with the urgency of something like the radical FLQ into the time-distended fantasia of Alice in Wonderland. The film’s show-stopping opening scene makes clear why this approach is necessary: after a failed tactical strike on a luxury mansion, a single survivor, Hélène, escapes into the garden on the grounds, which envelops her in a liminal space. There, she can contemplate how her choices — and her inability to fully act with her fellow revolutionaries — led to the deaths of her friends and the survival of their symbolic assassination target, a white-haired matriarch who has, in Hélène’s head, a brutal comeback for every naive slogan she can summon.

Dufour-Laperrière’s choice of animation means we never need to be concerned with the particulars of strategic maneuvers, escape routes, or even the rendering of Hélène’s friends as real characters. Everything is a slightly surreal mirror, awash in a single colour palette depending on the tonal quality of the scene — burgundies, greens, and yellows suggest variations in her dazed rush through the thickets of a dreamed path. The opening action set piece, which slides through space as if each comrade’s death is a panel in a painted diorama, sets a thrilling pace. The rest of the film is an ill match for the Alice comparison.

At the risk of taking Dufour-Laperrière’s elevator pitch seriously, Alice’s wordplay renders sense-making both elusive and completely available to the mind of the reader or interpreter. Hélène, on the other hand, is confronted by the coherently verbose apparitions of two friends. Manon is more radical than she is, and critiques, in a hard yet supportive way, her hesitations. Marc slips Hélène a confessional letter on the way to the mansion site, and offers a different direction, in the way of a comfortable, suburban fantasy. Grappling with these illusions, Hélène’s dialogues and inner monologue are patiently unspooled. Dufour-Laperrière’s script offers space to consider the pros and cons of each position, in a way that amounts to little more than a lot of liberal handwringing.

This is the ultimate balance of the film: for every surreal backdrop or gliding camera movement, there’s a clamped-down meditation on if it’s really so bad to be content with retreating from the world for the sake of “simple pleasures.” And as if to show it’s safe enough to show at Annecy and the Quinzaine, the sympathetic treatment of its opening sequence, what would in most descriptions be branded a terrorist attack, is followed by a decontextualized, evenhanded survey of positions — like its stand-in protagonist, this is a film that doesn’t dare to take a position, except for one in favor of that universal value of Life.

One could call Dufour-Laperrière’s film, in its reliance on animation as an outlet for the malleability of space and thought, and its positioning and subsequent unravelling of action, as the opposite of Godard’s ‘60s films. In La Chinoise or Band of Outsiders, revolutionary thought — or something like it — precedes an uncontrollable, borderline cartoonish, and incompletely satisfying violent act. The foregrounding of education in those films, flaws and all, is married to Godard’s form, which pauses, contradicts, and tests the trajectory of the small radical groups that parade before his camera.

For Dufour-Laperrière, action is purely symbolic and generalized, and exists to be brought in comparison to the film’s ultimate perspective, which values assumptions: even though revolutionary action is taken, Hélène’s mind doubles against this version of events, retelling the story as evasion or, perhaps, a realization she can better live with. This foreclosure of possibilities is strangely anodyne, in a way that never strays into deeply felt regret or division, and instead lists toward therapeutic encouragement. Throughout its runtime, Death Does Not Exist stands out as an impressive display of animation labor, but its narrative arc is as unmotivating and prescriptively moral as any children’s parable. — MICHAEL SCOULAR