60 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019story, won the Grand Prix (the runner-up
to the Palme). Diop, the first black woman
director to be chosen for the competition,
is best known as the star of Claire Denis’s
35 Shots of Rum (2008), but she has made
several shorts, one of them a kind of
prelude to this feature. Set in a coastal sub-
urb of Dakar, Atlantics is a coming-of-age
story in which several versions of truth
compete for the heart, mind, and soul of
Ada (Mama Sané), a teenage girl who is
engaged to a member of the town’s ruling
class but is in love with Souleiman, a poor
construction worker. Ripped off by Ada’s
fiancé and other exploitative Muslim busi-
nessmen, Souleiman has no choice but to
attempt the dangerous voyage to Spain
where he hopes to find work. Although
some of Ada’s girlfriends tell her Souleiman
has been lost at sea, others claim to have
seen him on Ada’s aborted wedding
night, when a mysterious fire erupts in
what would have been the marital bed
and destroys the house. Is Souleiman
the arsonist or is it a djinn who has takenA
couple of days after parasitepremiered at cannes 2019, and two
days before it won the Palme d’Or, I sat down for a brief interview with
the film’s director, Bong Joon-ho. Parasiteis the film I most wanted to
see on the big screens of the festival’s main theaters, the Lumière and the
Debussy, with a combined international audience of nearly 3,400. There
are no truly comparable theaters in New York in terms of size, luminous
projection, and clarity of sound. While movie palaces are not a necessity for art films,
Bong is one of the only contemporary filmmakers whose movies appeal to both art
and mass film audiences. A scathing social satire that fuses raucous comedy with deep
despair, Parasiteis set in contemporary Seoul, where the enormous gap between the
very rich and the very poor has become as untenable as it is in many countries includ-
ing our own. The indifference of the former to the desperation of the latter has horrific
consequences. Bong, who seemed pleased with the film’s reception, said that for the first
time he felt that he was not simply working in established genres but that he had found
his own form. I agree, and so must have the jury. The decision to award the Palme to
Parasitewas unanimous. (Parasitewill be released in the U.S. on October 11.)
The festival opened with Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die (currently in theaters),
which is as funny and bleak as Parasitebut more laid-back, until it’s not. It was both too
subtle and too tough for an opening-night audience that expects straightforward cues
about whether to laugh or cry—i.e., something more mainstream—and that certainly
doesn’t want to be held responsible for the destruction of the planet. Jarmusch refuses to
let anyone off the hook. Misplaced as it was, Jarmusch’s zombie movie set up one of the
festival’s main themes—the presence of the undead, whether zombies or ghosts, in a
world where late capitalism is the engine of Freud’s death drive. Atlantics, the debut fea-
ture of the French-Senegalese filmmaker and actor Mati Diop and a more lyrical ghostFESTIVALS Cannes
The Highest Stakes
Matters of love and war fueled a beguiling and trenchant selection this year at Cannes
BY AMY TAUBIN
For Sama