62 |FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019
movies we’ve seen about male artists and
their female subjects or muses. In those
films, almost all about heterosexual
liaisons, passion is always a function of
unequal power; in Sciamma’s film, power
(the power of the director, or the power of
one or another character) is not an erotic
lubricant, and that could be the reason that
the depiction of sex in Portrait of a Lady on
Fire is devoid of exploitation. But instead
of focusing on the remarkable aspects of
the film, there was a barrage of criticism
among the cognoscenti based on the fact
that the brushstroke technique in the
painting was not correct for the 18th cen-
tury. I don’t know why Sciamma made this
mistake, but frankly, I just don’t care. Por-
trait of a Lady on Fire won the screenplay
award and opens in the U.S. in December.I
f the festival didn’t come close to
the 50/50 goal, it offered an usually
high number of films, by both women
and men directors, which (like Portrait
of a Lady on Fire) centered on women. In
the badly titled Beanpole(it’s the slang
association with the English translation
that is the problem, not the Russian title,
Dylda), the second feature by the 27-year-
old Russian director Kantemir Balagov
(who won the directing award in Un Cer-
tain Regard), two young women survive the
siege of Leningrad and the immediate after-
math of World War II because they hang
onto their unlikely friendship even when it
has tragic consequences. Balagov has an
amazing rapport with his two nearly
novice actors, Viktoria Miroshnichenko
and Vasilisa Perelygina, and the beauty of
his mise en scène does not diminish our
comprehension of the traumas that, surely,
will permanently scar his characters.(Balagov’s inspiration was Nobel Prize win-
ner Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly
Face of War.) Also in Un Certain Regard,
and its Grand Prize winner, was Brazilian
director Karim Aïnouz’s sprawling melo-
drama The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gus-
mão, which traces the emotional journey of
a woman who searches for the sister from
whom she has been mysteriously separated.
Cannes is rife with contradictions
around gender, as is covering the festival,
where in order to give women directors
and actors their due, I’ve reinforced the
binary and also neglected films I value.
Thus Tommaso, the sixth collaboration
between director Abel Ferrara and actor
Willem Dafoe, was fascinating—no, rivet-
ing—because of the multiple male sexual
anxiety and wish fulfillment subtexts
dancing around the screen as Dafoe played
a character too close to Ferrara for com-
fort, and the actors playing his wife and
child were Ferrara’s actual wife and child.
I was reminded of David Fincher’s remark
years back about how he would love to be
Brad Pitt, perhaps also because Pitt was
easily the most magnetic star to walk the
red carpet, and his scenes in Quentin
Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time... in
Hollywood brought an otherwise draggy
and depressing evocation of 1969 joltingly
to life. There was also a certain amount of
wish fulfillment in Pedro Almodóvar’s
casting of Antonio Banderas to star in
his “autofiction” Pain and Glory. It’s the
director’s most moving film in years, and
Banderas rightfully won the male acting
award. But it was Elia Suleiman, the direc-
tor and star of the gravely comic It Must
Be Heaven, who delivered the saddest line
of the festival: “Palestine will be free, but
not in my lifetime.” Beanpole