So it is perhaps no surprise that Scorsese would be the one to cinematically adapt David Grann’s searing true-crime book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” for the big screen, uncompromisingly illustrating a forgotten chapter of one of America’s original sins: white people’s coldhearted killing of Native American tribes.

In that regard, his “Killers of the Flower Moon” is vast and vital in its scale, purpose and emotional scope, a Western-thriller and ensemble piece that is every bit a Scorsese crime picture as one can dare to imagine.

The impeccably researched book by Grann (also the author of “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon”) neither tells a customary frontier-era tale about this land’s indigenous people (which has been the more traditional avenue in cinema) nor features a stock white savior. Grann instead recounts a shockingly lesser known and shattering true-story from early 20th-century Oklahoma.

That region was marked by what’s known as the “Reign of Terror” during the first half of the 1920s, a phase of indigenous existence Scorsese bursts open through some major and thoughtful structural changes from the book. We learn that the Osage Nation were among the richest people in the world then. There were endless oil reserves to go around in their Oklahoma territory, where they were moved to after getting robbed out of their settlements across Louisiana and Kansas through unkept governmental promises.

Knowing that the Oklahoma soils were rich with petroleum, the Osage signed a deal they had smartly worded: they would not only be the sole proprietor of those soils, but also whatever mineral might be underneath it. Then came the oil, erupting on the surface of the dry earth with ear-splitting promise, captured through repeat Scorsese cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s textured lens and wide, layered vistas with immense power in the film’s early moments.

Predictably, white men were quick to want a slice before the natural resources inevitably dried out. One of those ruthless men was Ernest Burkhart, a war veteran of average intellect, played stunningly by Leonardo DiCaprio in one of his most complicated roles yet, that strikes a fiercely tough balance between drawing contempt and pity. Another was Ernest’s rather Trump-ian cattle rancher uncle William Hale, portrayed by a casually intimidating Robert De Niro with a conniving register that brings to mind his own Jimmy Conway from “Goodfellas.”

A law passed by Congress in 1921 enabled these men by enforcing a financial guardian onto every wealthy Osage. Among them was Mollie, played with stealthy poise and immense dignity by Lily Gladstone (soon to be seen in the thematically connected “Fancy Dance,” on the “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW)” epidemic).

What followed was immeasurable theft and dozens of suspicious deaths (as in, murders) that went uninvestigated: young people losing their health due to mysterious diseases, killings made to look like suicides, all in the name of “guardians” stealing the Osage people’s headrights. The cases were so many that the US government, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, finally sent an investigative unit to the area as the earliest iteration of the FBI.

Scorsese and his co-screenwriter Eric Roth, a name well-versed in complicated script structures across the likes of “Dune,” “Munich” and “The Insider,” open with this background, but keep it somewhat short on information, perhaps relying too heavily on a misjudged assumption that the audience is already aware of this setup, either through having read Grann’s book or general historical knowledge.

Regardless of the catch-up the viewers might have to do, the intro is still breathtaking, observing the adults of an Osage tribe lamenting their relocation and what the future will hold for them with their kids likely to forget their own culture in the hands of white men. There is then celebration upon hitting an oil line, which also introduces us to the brawniest segments of Robbie Robertson’s bravura score: drummy, pulsating and defiantly hair-rising, like the sounds of the earth brimming with liquid gold right before it ruptures.

Scorsese augments this intro with a playful short film shot on grainy black and white in the style of the era’s silents, showing the Osage in lavish clothes and on posh golf courses enjoying their wealth, while the white people run their errands and drive them around. It is in this climate that Ernest arrives in Oklahoma, with the film swiftly switching back to color as we notice his goofily mid-parted hair. His confusion is palpable when a wealthy Osage proudly tells Ernest, “This is my land.”

While they set the book in motion, the murders of Charlie Whitehorn and Mollie’s sister Anna Kyle Brown don’t occur until nearly an hour into the film, a smart decision by Scorsese and Roth that gives much needed breathing room to the eventual coupling of Ernest and Mollie, with the backdrop of legendary Jack Fisk’s lived-in production design, in step with Jacqueline West’s richly detailed costuming. In exchanges between Ernest and Hale, who’s known as “The King of the Osage Hills” and mostly liked as a righteous man, you can blatantly see the slimy latter’s overeager encouragement of Ernest to pursue Mollie’s hand in marriage.

“Can you stand their kind,” asks Hale to his nephew in one scene, among the earlier indications of both his sinister character’s racism and Ernest’s gullibility. Amusingly enough, some of these exchanges also resemble the unnervingly comical undertones of a dark moment in “The Wolf of Wall Street” with the famous chest-thumping. While Ernest and Hale don’t slam their fists on their own torsos, the greed they display, the ways in which they dehumanize those who trust them, is similar.

After much flirtation between Ernest and Mollie—which are among the strongest scenes of “Killers of the Flower Moon” because of the mesmerizing presence of Gladstone—the two finally tie the knot through a beautiful wedding and, to Hale’s disapproval, have children. But even during their early, innocent trysts, it doesn’t escape Robertson’s ominous musical cues that there is something suspenseful underneath it all, something to approach and handle with caution.

And that is why DiCaprio’s performance is titanic here in a role that asks a lot of him. Thanks to his commitment to the layers of Ernest, you buy the character both as a money-crazed, murderous and power-hungry pawn of Hale’s and someone who actually did fall in love with his wife once. That dichotomy is everywhere in DiCaprio’s acting and guilty body language; it’s even in his hairdo that swiftly loses its silly middle part in due course and becomes a menacingly slick and subtle side-sweep. Of course, Mollie is no one’s fool—more a patient and clever seer than an empty talker, she knows immediately that Ernest’s after money. But she follows the love, believing in Ernest’s genuine need to get settled in a caring home.

Once the murders arrive, the film becomes a blistering Scorsese gangster movie enmeshed with a Western, with back-alley murders, shady under-the-table dealings and Thelma Schoonmaker’s zippy editing across various moving parts that gives the multi-pronged story its shape and speed. The script also strives to dissect the different facets of American racism, making sure that the Tulsa race massacre (which happened so close to the Osage murders) and the evil deeds of the KKK are woven into the story in ways meaningful and alarming.

Admittedly, the bureau of investigation’s Tom White (a terrific Jesse Plemons) enters the film a little too late, once Mollie herself—despite her mysteriously deteriorating health—visits Washington and demands change upon the killings of not only Anna, but her two other sisters, her mother, cousin, brother-in-law and a private investigator that she hired.

It’s soul-wrenching to watch Mollie slowly decline through ferocious segments Scorsese orchestrates like a devastating thriller, somehow managing to maintain the suspense even though the evildoers are never hidden. It’s also a little upsetting that Mollie becomes more of a back-burner player during a large chunk of the film. As previously noted, this is very much by the design of the story. Regardless, one can’t help but wonder whether Scorsese and Roth could have gone deeper with her character and family life in the film’s first act—it feels like the nearly 206-minute runtime would have had room for it.

Still, Gladstone delivers a silently towering performance in the final stretch as Mollie tries to parse out her feelings. And Scorsese reaches an unexpectedly delicate, even masterful conclusion for “Killers of the Flower Moon” after a striking police procedural chapter that features Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow in explosive judicial parts. It’s a spiritual, personal and deeply human parting note that feels as specific and enormous as the rest of the film, bleeding for the departed in reverberating silence.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” will be released exclusively in theaters on Oct. 20 before streaming globally on Apple TV+.

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But business isn’t booming, it’s still pretty darn shaky. The people swarming the Croisette are not the power players of years past, when Harvey Weinstein hosted an annual press event at the Carlton Hotel to present his upcoming films, always teasing an Oscar-worthy title or three with talent in attendance.

There’s no Harvey anymore, of course, and there are precious few independent studios that can throw their weight around. Those that exist – Neon, A24 – choose not to. And the Hollywood major studios long ago abandoned Cannes – except for the quick in-and-out for a premiere. 

The stars that are here are present as much to fulfill their fashion industry contracts — by appearing on red carpets — as anything else. (See Merle Ginsberg’s column for more on that.)  

The movie business has also changed dramatically over the last half-decade. The global box office is still down 30 percent compared to pre-COVID numbers in 2019. And the shrinkage may be permanent: With some notable exceptions, major markets like China have cratered for most Hollywood movies. And Russia, smaller though significant, is out of bounds due to the Ukraine war. 

The business infrastructure for non-franchise or foreign films is precarious, producers told me. 

“I worry for the younger generations of producers. There are fewer opportunities for up-and-coming producers,” said Sophie Mas, who alongside Natalie Portman co-founded MountainA, their production company that had the Todd Haynes film “May-December’ in competition. On a rare sunny day at the festival, we sat near the beach and talked about where quality filmmaking is going. 

“It’s hard to get into the matrix of the streamers,” she continued. “If Natalie (Portman) is not part of the film… or if you don’t have a highly visible director… it’s pretty hard.” 

John Sloss, the founder of Cinetic Media that arranged the sale of “May December” to Netflix (which, ironically, does not attend the festival because it’s a streamer that doesn’t play by French rules), said the festival was just getting its “sea legs” after the pandemic.  

“The festival is just coming back from a traumatic interval, which was the pandemic,” he told WaxWord. “It is still very much a market for putting finance together. The real question is whether the traditional model of territorial buying, theatrical release… [which was] basically sidelined during the pandemic — will they come back and will that model of pre-selling multi-territories, rather than being greenlighted by a streamer, will it be a model that continues?” 

The other problem, of course, is even when those films do get financed (since there’s no shortage of billionaires out there who want to be in the movies business), will they get distribution? 

But for those who were on the ground in Cannes, the words on everyone’s lips were: Artificial Intelligence. 

What about it, I asked? “Everything,” said London-based entertainment lawyer Stephen Saltzman. “From the fear-based to curiosity over how to use it. The concern that Cannes might not exist in 19 years. The concerns over who is inventing their own movie in five minutes… Will there be no need for lawyers, creatives and lots of people who contribute to industry?” 

Nobody has the answer to that yet, but Saltzman and his firm deal with these questions every day from clients scrambling to get their arms around the implications of the technology. 

“People see AI coming down — it will be used to make movies, not just revise a script,” he said. “Maybe in five years you’ll ask a chatbot to create a movie with this character and you might put Tom Cruise in it — maybe not Tom Cruise, but a character who resembles him.”  

Sloss, who also heard the anxiety about AI, is thinking about a more dire bigger picture. “The terror about AI has little to do with the film industry, it has to do with the future of civilization,” he said. “We’re not immune from talking about situations that affect the globe – whether global warming or AI.” 

He added: “AI is on everyone’s mind because the WGA is making it a big issue [in the strike]. But it’s disproportionate to focus on the film business when the implications are so much broader for civilization.” 

Good point.  

The future is uncertain, it turns out, for lots of reasons. 

Check out TheWrap’s Cannes magazine here and all of our Cannes 2023 coverage here.

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After the film legend presented director Justine Triet with this year’s Palme d’Or award at Cannes on Saturday, she noticed Triet was beginning to walk away without taking the traditional scroll that comes with the award. Fonda tapped her on the back to get her attention to take the scroll, but the “Anatomy of a Fall” director was already far from the podium. So, Fonda just flung it at her.

The scroll smacked Triet square on the back of her head but she still didn’t turn to Fonda in response. The audience and those on stage erupted into laughter. Fonda looked into the crowd below and stretched her arms out like, “WTH?” then marched upstage toward Triet, who was getting a congratulatory hug.

Check out the hilarious video below. 

Fonda, an honorary Palme d’Or winner herself, presented Triet the prestigious award for her dramatic thriller film “Anatomy of a Fall” (“Anatomie d’une Chute”). In her speech, Fonda reflected on the first time she attended the French film festival many years ago.

“There were no women directors competing at that time, and it never even occurred to us that there was something wrong with that,” Fonda said. “We have a long way to go. But still, we have to celebrate change when it happens.”

In addition to scrolls, Fonda has also been throwing shade at this year’s French festival. On Friday, the “Book Club: The Next Chapter” star spoke in a wide-ranging conversation at the “Rendezvous with Jane Fonda” event at the Salle Buñuel theater. During the interview, she dished about some of the biggest names she’s worked with over the course of her prolific career. 

Regarding her former co-star Robert Redford, Fonda said the “Barefoot in the Park” star didn’t seem to enjoy their shared kissing scenes and “just has an issue with women,” per Deadline. Speaking of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, Fonda deemed him “a great filmmaker. But as a man? I’m sorry. No, no.”

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Though as return to form for Pixar itself – a rekindling of that fire that set hearts ablaze by wedding prodigious technique to (ahem) elementally simple metaphor – the film falls somewhat short of previous highs. By way of pure storytelling magic, the film also unfortunately lives up to its title.

Building on multiple elements from last year’s “Turning Red,” this latest Pixar joint mines family expectations for narrative tension, doing so with a refreshing absence of conventional antagonists. This time, “Elemental” foregrounds the first-generation immigrant experience right from the start, beginning with a short prologue that follows the freshly-arrived Lumen family off the boat and into their new lives in the suburbs of Element City.    

Once we catch-up with the now adult Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis), the only-child has become a fixture of her Firetown community and a hair-trigger presence at her family’s all-purpose deli. The corner store is a fun place to hang — the kind of neighborhood hub where alter kakers kvetch over pools of java, where the native-tongue of Firish is spoken more than English, and where the Old Country bears certain hallmarks of East Asia, altogether reflecting the many immigrant communities the Fire elements are meant to represent. But Ember would rather be anywhere else.

She certainly doesn’t hide her impatience, as her red flames turn purple around the edges when annoyance turns to ire and then explode into a violent fireball when ire burns to rage. One furious release accidentally dislodges a basement pipeline, spewing water all over the supply room and sending Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie) into her life. As in all proper rom-coms, theirs is an antagonistic relationship at first, as water element Wade just so happens to work as a building inspector and just so happened to gush out into a regulatory disaster zone.  

Soon Wade heads back to city hall to process his injunctions and Ember follows in quick pursuit, hoping to do whatever possible to save her family business. And so begins a densely packed if rather episodic narrative that takes the duo from foils to friends to frustrated soul mates, but for their incompatible makeups and family duties.

To say that “Elemental” feels closer in certain aspects to a series of children’s books than to a propulsive narrative is in no way a jab; the episodic film just shares so many of its highest pleasures with mid-century classics from Richard Scarry and Peggy Parish, joyfully anthropomorphizes any odd element and builds visual gags out of puns and plays on words in ways similar to the Busytown series or to “Amelia Bedelia.” The filmmakers really do mine these elements for their full potential, delighting us as Water spectators do the wave in a very literal way at a sports match, or as Ember realizes her glass-making potential upon a trip to the beach. While playful and pun-forward, “Elemental” always takes this world seriously, finding great visual wit in the ways fire, water, land and air interact with one another in a shared metropolis that resembles a coral reef.

The fact that Ember – like most residents of Element City’s Firetown suburb – only view the big city from afar widens the film’s allegorical scope. While we do hear the old “Elements don’t mix” from the flame’s old-timer parents, Ember seems to avoid the downtown for more physical reasons: Many spaces are just not made for her. Though the film dances around interesting questions of accessibility, it mostly does so around the edges. If anything, director Pete Sohn is far more interested in what marvels characters’ bodies can accomplish.

Keeping with the real elements’ unfixed natural states, the fire and water characters have porous physical boundaries; they can shrink and swell and dwindle and spread according to the context. And when met with the advanced rendering tools and animation techniques that makes these often impossible elements now workable onscreen, the wider film becomes rife with visual possibilities, but hampered by a paint-by-number narrative replete with chase-scenes at every 15-minute mark and a third-act recycled from just about 15 other films.

With story beats and character turns that strain well beyond familiarity, “Elemental” matches formal adventure with storytelling timidity. Here is a new spin on the old formula, livened up by advances in technology and delivered with real artistry. The film is full of complex and volatile parts, all held together in the most elemental of containers.  

The post ‘Elemental’ Review: A Rich and Vibrant Showcase of Studio Animation appeared first on TheWrap.

Of course, the South Korean star and his “Cobweb” director go way back, as Kim first launched Song’s career with 1998’s “The Quiet Family” and then nourished it with blockbusters like “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” and “Age of Shadows.” Those intertwining paths certainly tangle in this latest collab, which finds Song playing a filmmaker also named Kim. 

Don’t expect much autobiography in this ’70s-set exercise in style that tracks a beleaguered crew and the film they are making. While both pictures share the same title, only one could be described as a racy-drama-horror-creature-feature-disaster-movie hybrid (guess which). Moving between film-in-film in black and white, and Kim’s production travails in color, “Cobweb” plays with the codes of mid-century Korean cinema while setting them against the controlled chaos of the filmmaking process.

And, boy, is it ever chaotic. We open on (the fictional) director Kim as he’s already wrapped his latest potboiler, only something nags at the man whose career peaked with his first film and has gone steadily downhill ever since. Perhaps with a few days of reshoots, with just a tweak here and a new scene there, he might rescue his next film from the laughingstock and once again make his mark. But doing so will require calling the full cast back, holding onto the sets due for dismantling and – above all – getting his script revisions passed by the censorious Ministry of Culture.

As the color narrative thread tracks an unending process of problem-solving – a marathon of securing the sets, winning over financiers, dealing with actors too drunk to perform, and eventually locking the full cast and crew on set to force a mammoth 48h hours of reshoots – the black and white strain brings that vision to life to delightful effect. That this film-within-a-film already has a pitched and nervy string score is just one indication that this version of “Cobweb” is the finished film run in parallel, and not just the footage Kim and crew are capturing on set. Only, to the film’s slight detriment, the Movie Movie strand offers a far more interesting proposition.

The film’s flaws are very much inherent to the greater design because exploring the chaos and tradeoffs of a film shoot cannot yield that many surprises, whereas the black-and-white film-within-a-film marks new land. Every time we return to the marathon reshoot we basically know what to expect, where the story will go, and how Kim and his crew will react. And every time we plunge into a note-perfect recreation of mid-century outré fare we are once again subject to surprise as the fictional “Cobweb” revises and reforms on the fly.

Inspired to a certain degree by the 1960 film “The Housemaid,” the movie version overlays family melodrama with horror elements while echoing the general chaos of the set in often unexpected ways. Director Kim Jee-woon is alight within a stagy visual playground that offers a chance to let loose, fully merging with his on-screen avatar as directors fully at play.   

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The film was acquired by Neon during the festival, which makes it the fourth consecutive Palme for that company after “Parasite,” “Titane” and “The Triangle of Sadness.”

“Part thorny family story, part whodunit, part courtroom drama and part meditation on the nature of truth and fiction, Justine Triet’s ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ takes two hours of conversations and makes them both provocative and propulsive,” wrote TheWrap in its review.

The Grand Prix, which is essentially Cannes’ second-place award, was given to the chilling Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” by Jonathan Glazer, which many Cannes-watchers had tapped as the likely Palme winner. Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki’s gentle and deadpan character study “Fallen Leaves” won the Jury Prize, the third-place award.

The best director award went to Tran Anh Hung for his rhapsodic film about love and cooking, “The Pot-au-Feu.”

The best actor award went to Japanese actor Koji Yakusho, who plays a mild-mannered man who cleans toilets in Wim Wenders’ low-key “Perfect Days.” The best actress award was won by Turkish actress Merve Dizdar for Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses.”

Sakamoto Yuji won the screenplay award for “Monster,” Hirokazu Kore-eda’s multi-perspective drama about young boys.

Also at the ceremony, Quentin Tarantino presented a special tribute to veteran low-budget director-producer Roger Corman, who got a lengthy standing ovation from the audience at a festival that typically does not program the kind of films he makes.

Twenty-one films competed for the Palme this year, with a record seven of them coming from female directors. Films in competition includes Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera,” Todd Haynes’ “May December” and Ken Loach’s “The Old Oak.”

The jury was headed by “Triangle of Sadness” director Ruben Ostlund, himself a two-time Palme winner, and also included actors Paul Dano, Brie Larson and Denis Menochet and directors Julia Ducournau, Rungano Nyoni, Atiq Rahimi, Damian Szifron and Maryam Touzani.

The Camera d’Or, an award that goes to the best first feature from all sections of the festival, was awarded to “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” from Vietnamese-Singaporean director Phan Thien An. The film screened in the Directors Fortnight sidebar at Cannes.

The short film Palme d’Or went to “27,” by Flora Ana Buda.

The winners:

Palme d’Or: “Anatomy of a Fall,” Justine Triet
Grand Prix: “The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer
Jury Prize: “Fallen Leaves,” Aki Kaurismaki
Best Director: Tran Anh Hung, “The Pot-au-Feu”
Best Actor: Koji Yakusho, “Perfect Days”
Best Actress: Merve Dizdar, “About Dry Grasses”
Best Screenplay: Sakamoto Yuji, “Monster”

Camera d’Or (best first feature): “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” Phan Thien An

Short film awards:
Short film Palme d’Or: “27,” Flora Ana Buda
Special mention: “Far”

Additional awards, previously announced:

Un Certain Regard:
Un Certain Regard Prize: “How to Have Sex,” Molly Manning Walker
Jury’s Prize: Hounds,” Kamal Lazraq
Best Director: Asmae El Moudir, “The Mother of All Lies”
New Voice Prize: “Omen,” Baloji
Ensemble Prize: “The Buriti Flower”
Freedom Prize: “Goodbye Julia,” Mohamed Kordofani

La Cinef
First Prize: “Norwegian Offspring,” Marlene Emilie Lyngstad
Second Prize: “Hole,” Hwang Hyein
Third Prize: “Moon,” Zineb Wakrim

The Golden Eye Documentary Prize: “Four Daughters,” Kaouther Ben Hania, and “The Mother of All Lies,” Asmae El Moudir

Check out TheWrap’s Cannes magazine here and all of our Cannes 2023 coverage here.

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Now it’s the clothes that compel attention – attracting social posts, press, obsessive comment. And once upon a less greedy time, designers cast stars whose images aligned with theirs. Now it’s everything, everyone, all at once.

Case in point: most A-list actresses did double duty at this year’s festival: promoting films while fulfilling contracts as the faces of luxury brands. It’s pay-for-sashay for stars who covet what one Oscar-winning actress euphemistically referred to as “Kardashian money! You can’t make that in movies anymore!” But you can inch closer with a fat Louis Vuitton, Dior or Chanel contract.

Natalie Portman’s vintage Dior couture replica got more press than her new Todd Haynes movie. That other Dior diva, Jennifer Lawrence (Bread and Roses) followed suit, in Dior eye-popping lipstick red (with precedent smashing flip flops!). The face of Louis Vuitton – Cate Blanchett – switched up LV black and white numbers for different premieres. Marion Cotillard just tossed on a Chanel mini tweed coatdress. And why wouldn’t she? She’s the current face of Chanel No. 5. 

Chanel is only one example of how naked (no pun intended) the piggybacking of fashion is in Cannes. Chanel boldly promotes its A-list roster of Cotillard, Margot Robbie, Kristen Stewart, Lily-Rose Depp and Margaret Qualley.  No wonder a social media campaign to get Margot Robbie out of what fans called “frumpy” (Chanel) went nowhere.

Julianne Moore, the rare talent without a European luxury brand contract, chose a bottle green Louis Vuitton gown and an LV daytime look for May/December. Synergy? Could she be diving for a deal? Scarlett Johannson, the face of Prada’s Galleria bag, didn’t coincidentally pick Prada for every Asteroid City photo opp. Few major stars remain without designer deals: Anne Hathaway’s on Versace bus ads, Florence Pugh’s hyping for Valentino; Zendaya models for almost everyone. Fashion/movie star alliances no longer tarnish a “serious actress” brand. And as big paydays have faded in the movie business, it’s an important source of income for the actor – and their business entourage. 

IMPRESSIONS

* Elle Fanning, in her fest-best gold tulle McQueen ballgown –maintained perfect princess prim despite getting paid to play dress up by Paco Rabanne, as face of their new Fame fragrance. 

* Only one model scored Chanel or Valentino: Naomi Campbell. (15 million Instagram followers can’t hurt.) 

* Poor Gigi Hadid wound up with an oddly shaped Zac Posen; it was downhill from there. 

* Sultry Russian supermodel/Bradley Cooper ex Irina Shayk managed to shock in over-the-top (or under the dress) lingerie looks by London-based Mowalola Ogunlisi: a mesh bikini bra, panties and a sheer chiffon piece with heels; a red leather bandeau stretched like an X over her boobs and a low slung leather skirt. Come on. With a 22 million followers, Shayk did not need to go there. (Though maybe that’s how she got them in the first place.)

WHERE’S THE MONEY? 

As major Cannes fest underwriters, L’Oreal and Chopard have for years imported international beauties of all stripe (Jane Fonda, Eva Longoria, Lana Del Rey) to help move the merch. 

Hotel Martinez served as glam ground zero, with luxe brand suites, professional hair and make-up salons, fine jewelry showrooms, stylists and stars running in between. Imagine what L’Oreal – parent company to Lancome, Maybelline, Saint Laurent Beaute’- shelled out to fly in this year’s “ambassadors” Dame Helen Mirren and Viola Davis. Apparently they’re “worth it” – L’Oreal’s ad line hook for years. 

HIT: Celine

Celine’s mercurial Hedi Slimane hosted his candlelight dinner for his target group: youthful hipsters. Prada co-hosted Vanity Fair’s fete, dressing Asteroid City’s Scarlett Johannsen and Maya Hawke in on-brand almost-awkward quirky pastel satins. British Vogue’s dinner with EIC Edward Enninful – and, who else, Chopard – was packed with even more models in even more desire-fusing dresses than many other not-quite mere mortal moments.

MISS: Saint Laurent

But Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vacarello – known for short sharp dresses/edgy skinny suits – costuming Pedro Almodovar’s Strange Way of Life did not  compute. Outfitting its young hot male cast for the premier – sure. But costume designing a gay period piece cowboy western? Not so much. It’s all part of the brand’s brand newSaint Laurent Productions, which is behind the short film – and upcoming indies by David Cronenberg, Abel Ferrara, Wong Kar Wai, Gaspar Noe’, Jim Jarmusch. Vacarello’s flexing his newfound fashion muscle: planning to costume design all of them. Stretching out his brand – or diluting it? Either way, expect to see more luxury brands jumping all the way into actual filmmaking. These two co-habitated in sin for years – seems time to make it official.

Despite the glam glad-handing, the wheeling dealing, real fashion trends triumphed: by golly, ballgowns are back! Voluminous wraps, mostly red (Uma Thurman, Jennifer Lawrence); the mainstream rise of opera gloves, feathers, tulle, black and white, black tie mini’s, less visible peekaboo bra’s – and more hip, thigh, cleavage, side boob and waistline cut out reveals than a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Worn by some of the same models, along with actual movie stars. Sure, fashion and movie stars hype each other – but sex? It always sells.

Merle Ginsberg is a fashion writer and television personality who was one of the judges on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” in the first two seasons of the show. She is also an award winning journalist and writer, and a NY Times bestselling author. She started her long media career in NY at the Village Voice, MTV and Rolling Stone. Then, moving to L.A., she wrote for People, Us, L.A. Times and W Magazine and Women’s Wear Daily, where she presided over the West Coast bureau for 12 years, also contributing to L.A. Magazine, Jane and Details.

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Premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, the film offers English-language social satire cut with chilly European severity in a manner similar to last year’s Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness” – and not just due to a pukey provocation jury president Ruben Östlund may take as a game, set, match.

In simplest terms, “Club Zero” is a film about eating disorders, and one so unflinching about the subject that it warrants a content warning ahead of the opening credits. Of course, Hausner makes abundantly clear that her film is about so much more from the moment those credits roll, and we find ourselves in an affluent private academy full of wood panels, Formica surfaces and about a hundred other interior design choices pulled from a rec room in 1970s hell.

Onto the scene struts Ms. Novak (Mia Wasikowska, with a pageboy ‘do and an implacable accent pitched between Dutch pervert and Austrian gnome) and into the classroom she goes. A wellness coach of apparently some renown (she does have her own brand of Fasting Tea with her face plastered on each box), Ms. Novak has been hired as Bell Bottom High’s new health instructor. Only once her new pupils speak up, they reveal acutely modern anxieties.

One is concerned about ecological collapse, another about economic imbalance, the next about personal optimization. But whatever the stress, the balm is the same – each must reset their body’s relation to food under a program called Conscious Eating. Like any good scheme, the program comes in steps. First, they must eat slower – a lot slower, chewing in slow-mo and using cutlery with the theatrical flourish of a classical dancer. Then they must eat less – a lot less, and only one (unprocessed, ideally organic) food item at a time, and then, for those who are really committed, they are to eat nothing at all.

As she follows the various string bean students, Hausner uses irony as a cudgel, creating dissonances between the kitschy, taffy-colored set designs and the severity of the plot. A jaunty musical beat will underscore dialogue about empowerment as the teens shrink ever more into their clothes. Then we have dramatic irony as the parents – who are all rich and oblivious, granted, but not that rich and oblivious – try to get the school to intervene. The solution? More time with the dedicated wellness coach!

That the one parent/student initially unconvinced comes from the working class affords the film a bit of class war edge, but in the end, Hausner’s wider interests lay elsewhere. Ms. Novak drags the kids to hell, but she does so with good intentions, and the film plays into her true believer’s rhetoric, never winking as hews an affected path. If Hausner doesn’t buy into Novak’s claptrap, the film’s visual language sometimes does, framing the student undergoing what amounts to gradual self-destruction as they would see themselves.

That theme of salvation through self-destruction should hardly land as a shock at a festival where Martin Scorsese was the star attraction, but Hausner does find her own notes to play. Rather than repent for the sins of the soul, these ever-more-gaunt students want to transcend external stresses – their entry into Club Zero paid for by letting go of Gen Z concerns.

With an uncompromising style, a grab bag of ideas thrown up on the screen as moving targets and a provocative flair – with that aforementioned upchuck doing more with less, one-upping Östlund with less velocity and more audacity – “Club Zero” is made to divide. That was certainly the case in Cannes, where the film inspired both awe and animosity. This reviewer felt neither of the two but did appreciate Hausner’s commitment to the bit.  

Like “Triangle of Sadness” before it, and like so many titles hitting any number of screens, “Club Zero” says little new, recycling the same wider anxieties we pretty much all share. But it does so with artistic courage and a unique voice. Isn’t that what cinema’s for?   

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A rich and humorous folk tale overflowing with cultural details, aesthetic pleasures and the effervescent musicality of the Italian language, Rohrwacher’s melancholically grainy pastoral fable isn’t exactly about professional archeology, to be perfectly clear. But what some of her characters—the ancient-grave-raiding collective “tombaroli,” led by Josh O’Connor’s (“The Crown”) enigmatic Arthur—lack in bona fide archeological expertise, they make up for with rebellion and a reckless sense of aspiration.

Violating the bottomless sacred burial grounds of their little Italian village and stealing historical wonders the Etruscan people have taken to their grave, the clandestine tombaroli are after a form of easy living: pocketing invaluable artifacts from the holy tombs that seem to be everywhere beneath their feet and slyly cashing in to sustain their modest living.

Some readings suggest that these real-life looters also aim to stick it to the man in modern Italy (they at least used to back in the ’80s, when the film is set), avoiding conventional work through their unearned gains that they felt entitled to. But being used and abused by the haughty art market ecosystem in return, are they really above the capitalist construct? Rohrwacher gently and humorously ponders this class-consciousness in “La Chimera,” a title that roughly translates into “pie in the sky.”

We meet O’Connor’s Englishman Arthur not during one such illegal excavation, but on a train ride, deep into his dream and opaque visions of his long-lost, unattainable love, Beniamina. The conductor looks at him funny when Arthur hands him an unusual looking ticket, noticed at once by his playfully bickering fellow passengers. Writer-director Rohrwacher never exactly spells it out, but the clues are there for us to spot that he’s no ordinary traveler, not when the echoes of a past crime follow him on the tracks.

Rohrwacher has always been a keen observer and artful portrayer of eyes; a soulful miner of the many meanings they mirror and reflect. That much we know from her timeless parable “Happy as Lazzaro” (a Cannes prize winner) with Adriano Tardiolo’s gleamingly innocent pupils, and last year’s mischevious Oscar-nominated short, “Le Pupille (The Pupils),” a double-entendre title that wears Rohrwacher’s gaze-y preoccupations on its sleeve. While the heroes of these films exhume incorruptible purity from their wide-set eyes, Arthur’s suggest something else. Perhaps a kind of weariness, a sense of darkness concealed by his defiantly light-colored, gentlemanly linen suits that he’s attired in despite his dirt-underneath-nails grit.

It is perhaps thanks to that mistiness of spirit that Arthur is adorned with the most unusual of gifts: the ability to pinpoint the exact location of the tombs down below. In that regard, he seems less like your average living person and more like a fleeting commuter between pairs of disparate worlds. Not only between Italy and his own motherland, but also various abstract ones Rohrwacher perennially explores in her work: the alive and the deceased, the permanent and the ethereal, the radiant and the shadowy, the chipper and the gloomy, the list goes on…

Arthur is quick to notice the frequently daydreaming and amusingly distracted student Italia (a luminous Carol Duarte) upon returning to the charmingly dilapidated country home of Flora (the peerless Isabella Rossellini), a matriarch who delightfully frets over Arthur. Through Neo-Realist depictions of country life and traditionally buzzy domestic rhythms (both are Rohrwacher staples), the filmmaker sees to it that these two melancholic and displaced souls softly enmesh. But could there be a genuine future for him with this unadulterated live-in Cinderella when Arthur has one foot in the grave, the other in the afterlife?

Strolling into Alice Rohrwacher’s world of dichotomies is a reliably one-of-a-kind experience, as much visually and ideologically informed by the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900” in their pastoral vistas and social-conscious cultural touch points, as they are by a sprinkling of fairy dust. Expect to see those dualities everywhere in the lush “La Chimera,” including in its unnamed town, eternalized by its ghosts and layers of history on the one side, and condemned to death by a contaminating power plant that casts a shadow over it on the other.

Also expect recurrently glistening baroque tracks from this major yet humble marvel, a parade of understated but stunningly realized ‘80s costuming by Loredana Buscemi and a juicy performance as a ruthless art curator from Alice’s sister Alba Rohrwacher, a vision in a sunshine-yellow frock this reviewer will forever covet.

Soothingly kissed by Rohrwacher’s frequent collaborator Hélène Louvart’s tender cinematography that blends 35mm and Super 16 film with purpose (and even wittily plays with different action speeds you just might giggle along), “La Chimera” is a pictorial delight to luxuriate in, as it is a philosophical wonder on the unknowability of time. The earth belongs to the past and the future, this miracle of a film quietly suggests. We just live in it.

Check out TheWrap’s Cannes magazine here and all of our Cannes 2023 coverage here.

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“Perfect Days” makes a perfect debut.

Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days” was the hero of the day, earning strong notices and the now-standard standing ovation. TheWrap’s Nicholas Barber called it “an endearing, admiring portrait of a decent man.” The near-consensus was that Wenders had made his best narrative film in a very long time. The film has already been acquired by NEON, which has been on a shopping spree with “this film”Perfect Days, “Robot Dreams” and “Anatomy of a Fall.”

“Last Summer” debuts to a complicated reception.

“Can a film without much spark really be said to fizzle?” So asks TheWrap’s Ben Croll in his brutal pan of Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer.” Breillat’s first film in a decade, a remake of May el-Toukhy’s acclaimed “Queen of Hearts,” debuted to deeply mixed (but not entirely negative) feedback. Irish Times critic Donald Clarke noted that it “plays like a generic sexy stepmom French flick,” while the film earned other comparisions to Todd Haynes’ just-debuted “May December.”

Some folks had a good time with the not-entirely dramatic story about a middle-aged woman who sleeps with her barely-legal stepson, with the performances being praised and at least some of the iffy reactions being chalked up to unease about the subject matter.

Vertical pays big bucks for “Hot Mess”

In aqquisition updates, Vertical nabbed North American distribution rights to the Emma Roberts comedy “Hot Mess.” The film, penned by Gabrielle D’Amico and directed by Katie Locke O’Brian, stars Roberts as a young woman implodes on a dating show and ends up back home with her parents. It will shoot early next year.

Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese announced that 60 hours of rushes from Agnes Varda’s 2000 documentary “The Gleaners and I” will be available for the next generation of international filmmakers courtesy of an educational initiative from France’s National Audiovisual Institute and Ciné-Tamaris.

“Agnès was the real spirit of cinema and she could make a film out of anything at any time,” said Scorsese. ”I thought that with all this footage that was there, there must be more in it. Others might find a way to have their point of view based on her footage.”

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