Film Comment – July 01, 2019

his form, as other djinns have possessed

the bodies of women killed by sex traffickers

in order to exact revenge for their deaths?

Diop plays Ada’s belief in the power of love

against the investigations of an earnest

detective looking for a rational explana-

tion of these inexplicable happenings.

Atlantics has an oneiric beauty, punctu-

ated throughout with realistic details of a

postcolonial, patriarchal Senegalese soci-

ety. In interviews, Diop invoked “the Mus-

lim imaginary,” which involves not only

the power of ghosts but of the natural

world: the sun, the moon, the wind, and

the tides. The attention paid to them

accounts for the film’s seductive beauty.

Atlanticswas the only film at Cannes

that I saw twice, and I look forward to

seeing it yet again.

L

ast year, women demanded that

half the festival’s competition slots

be filled by women directors by

2020. It looks unlikely that “50/50 x
      20/20” will be achieved, given that of the 21
      competition films this year, only four were
      directed by women. (That’s only one
      more than in 2018.) But women were out
      in force, organizing a demonstration on
      the red carpet before Let It Be Law, Juan
      Solanas’s documentary about the current
      struggle for abortion rights in Argentina. It
      screened out of competition, as did Waad
      al-Kateab and Edward Watts’s For Sama,
      one of the most powerful films in the festi-
      val. Their first-person documentary depicts
      al-Kateab’s experience of living in Aleppo
      from 2012 to 2016, beginning with her
      excited participation in protests against the
      Bashar regime and continuing through her
      marriage to a young doctor who refused to
      leave his hospital even as the bombings by

Syrian and Russian forces destroyed the city

and killed tens of thousands. By then, al-

Kateab’s commitment to bearing witness

with her camera was as strong as her hus-

band’s to the wounded and dying, and even

after the birth of their child, to whom the

film is dedicated, they stayed for months, at

last fleeing to London where the film was

completed. (For Samahas already aired on

PBS and opens in theaters July 26.)

In Un Certain Regard, the percentage of

women directors was higher—close to 40

percent. Among the standouts was Mounia

Meddour’s more than promising first fea-

ture Papicha, which brings fierce energy to

the depiction of an 18-year-old Algerian

student’s struggle to hold onto the freedom

she once experienced despite the Islamic

fundamentalist takeover during the civil

war of the 1990s. Nedjma (Lyna Khoudri)

wants to be a fashion designer, and she

doesn’t want to go abroad to fulfill her

dream. As the Islamists tighten their grip

on the city and their deadly violence strikes

home, Nedjma refuses to give up, unable to

believe that her defiant staging of a fashion

show inside the walls of her school could

threaten her life or the lives of her friends.

Meddour makes great cinematic choices,

particularly the use of clothing design to

specify the profound effect that the strug-

gle between liberal and fundamentalist

forces within Islam has on women. Women

were killed during the civil war for not

covering up, and it is quite possible that

they could be again. But Meddour amps

up the violence at the climax of the film,

abandoning both character and narrative

logic. That Papicha is imperfect doesn’t

negate Meddour’s talent or the potential

audience for the film. The day after the

screening I overheard two young women

attacking the daily press for giving such an

inspiring film anything less than the high-

est possible rating. For all its branding as a

showcase for stars and a temple of art cin-

ema, Cannes is a market. There is an actual

market that takes place largely in the base-

ment below the big Palais theaters and in

their shadow on the beachfront just

behind them, where films at all stages of

production from mere fantasy to fully fin-

ished work vie for financing and distribu-

tion. But every film shown in every public

section of the festival is also being mar-

keted by publicists and sales agents, and

sadly, the reception of the thousands of

critics and journalists who watch four

or more films per day and write under

extreme deadline pressure has an undue

effect on whether a film, a director, or an

actor will have a future or not. This year,

the tendency to magnify flaws in reviewing

films was epidemic. This is pure specula-

tion, but perhaps the critics who dismissed

Papicha because its director veered into

action movie–style violence at the end were

simply not interested in the film because

they will never fear being imprisoned or

shot for not wearing an abaya or a hijab.

An even more egregious carping over

details was directed against one of the

strongest and most moving competition

films, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady

on Fire. Set in 18th-century France, it is

the story of two women who fall in love,

make love, and are changed forever by this

brief experience. One woman is a painter

(Noémie Merlant), the other is the woman

she has been commissioned to paint (the

great Adèle Haenel). One of the most

extraordinary aspects of the film is how the

passionate romance between these two

characters differs from those in the many

July-August 2019|FILMCOMMENT| 61

Bong Joon-ho 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.

Papicha Portrait of a Lady on Fire