On paper, I’m a big fan of this one. The unexpected death of a psychiatrist’s patient kick-starts a murder mystery. It’s a thriller in which reality and relationships are called into question. A series of small crimes, the burglary of her clinic, tells Jodie Foster she’s on the right track as she digs deeper into the family life of her deceased patient. Are the clues hidden in the sessions they’d shared?
Sadly, I didn’t love it. Foster’s acting was amazing, but the script wasn’t convincing to me. Her character goes off the rails too quickly, too completely. I never quite believed that this grown-up, serious professional would be raving about visions of 1940s Paris. Nor that the characters around her would accept her madness with a casual Gallic shrug.
We were always going to see the new Jafar Panahi film. After Taxi Tehran and No Bears, you can sign me up for any new film from Panahi. And more broadly, all of the Iranian cinema we’ve seen at the film festival has been gold.
This, fresh from winning the top prize at Cannes, is no different. It’s a fairly simple premise: what do you do if given the chance to take revenge on your torturer? And the story doesn’t do anything massively unexpected. But Panahi’s films are about the characters and they’re all just so human.
Life in 1970s rural Brazil does not look fun. We join Iracema, an anagram of America, in her precarious existence on the edge of the transamazonian highway. There are moments of joy - markets, festivals, bars - but there is a lot of very hard, grim survival too. Men are awful - aggressive, predatory, violent. The women aren’t much better. Somehow Iracema scrapes by, sleeping with truck drivers for lifts, bartering for cigarettes and booze.
Meanwhile, the amazon burns in the name of progress.
Brendan Fraser is a down-on-his-luck actor living in Tokyo, when he stumbles upon the Rental Family agency. Soon he’s moved on from being an anonymous mourner at funerals to being fake family, partners and friends.
It’s a surprisingly heartfelt little story.
My first dud of this year’s festival.
The premise is interesting enough - Jessica Chastain is a high-powered American, all business-suits and chauffeured cars, who has taken a younger Mexican lover from the ballet academy she sponsors. Suddenly, he’s no longer a bit on the side in Mexico but has smuggled himself into the US and inserted himself into her life.
Unfortunately, I never really liked any of the characters. At some point I found myself wondering why I was watching a small story of unpleasant people being unpleasant to each other.