in its portrayal of class warfare (not to
mention eminently saleable: bought in
nearly 200 countries, it’s been described as
the most exported Korean film ever).I
’d never say that The Lighthouse
(showing in Directors’ Fortnight) was
undeniable, but still, it was diverting
to watch Willem Dafoe (in full Pirate
Day/Daniel Plainview line-delivery
mode) cooped up by the seaside with
Robert Pattinson as his petulant appren-
tice. Shot on black-and-white 35mm in
1:1.33 and meticulously designed and
outfitted with mustaches, Robert Eggers’s
two-hander feels more like a playacting,
neo–period piece than his seamless infer-
nal-Puritan debut The Witch. The Light-
house’s picture of cheek-by-jowl living
may well be accurate down to the palpa-
ble stink of chamber pots, the plague of
seagulls and perilous rocks of its coastal
setting, and the clattering sea-shanty
sing-alongs. But its ramp-up to dark fan-
tasy—something about Dafoe being con-
jugally bound to the lighthouse’s
light-beam, and the temptation of an
anatomically correct mermaid—grows
monotonous. Eggers and his actors do
delight, somewhat contagiously, in the
archaic language (drawn, per the credits,
from coastal New England writer Sarah
Orne Jewett, godhead Herman Melville,
and “lighthouse journals”), although
Dafoe and Pattinson’s zeal at playing two
“wickies” (lighthousefolk) cuts both ways.
It’s a bit like a film caught uneasily
between stage and screen, but
I admired the devotion to a lost 19th-
century world rooted in superstition,
wherein febrile mysticism springs natu-
rally from deadening routine and dwin-
dling rations. (Also: genuine chuckles for
the Dafoe character’s hurt reaction on
learning that his home-cooked dinners
are not sufficiently appreciated.)
In one of the festival’s curious coinci-
dences, The Lighthouse launched an entire
day of costume dramas, followed by
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (set mostly
in a li’l Austrian hamlet, sometime in the
1940s) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire,
Sciamma’s bohemian island paradise for
two. Or, really, for three: in addition to the
film’s painter-subject dyad, there was also
the unassumingly wry servant who attends
on the household, and who yields both a
larger sense of sisterhood and a boldlyrealized abortion subplot that is sometimes
overlooked in writings about the film (in
fact, one of the painter’s most radical acts
is in staging and then painting a midwife’s
abortion procedure). Sciamma’s thought-
fully, at times wickedly, written feature
marked her first appearance in the Compe-
tition, where her film appeared alongside
those of longtime regulars like the Dardenne
Brothers (with Young Ahmed and its full-
forward-momentum story of a Muslim
extremist student falling smack into mater-
ial reality) and Ken Loach (whose Sorry We
Missed You, also partly at a sprint, simply
and effectively captures the nonstop hustle
and zero margin of error for working-class
families). Another new face in competition
was Diao Yinan, whose The Wild Goose
Lake was less spectacular than his prior,
Berlinale-winning Black Coal, Thin Ice,
partly by virtue of a questionably cast lead,
but it nonetheless featured a few galvanizing
sequences (and attracted Quentin Taran-
tino’s attendance). (For more on these and
other films, check out our daily podcasts
from Cannes, all available online.)
A quick word for French comedies, of all
things: Benoit Forgeard’s All About Yves
raised another chuckle or two with its
absurdist story of a smart-refrigerator and
its effect on the life and career of an aspiring
rapper, and Quentin Dupieux’s Deerskin,
starring a repressed Jean Dujardin and
Adèle Haenel as a bartender/editor, turns
into an odd thought experiment about film-
making. Other things you might be
wondering about, or not: there were at least
a couple of obnoxious American indies (The
Climb, Port Authority); the latest Asif
Kapadia film Diego Maradonamakes his
endeavor of archival and personal
recording compilation begin to feel as
hooky and hokey as paint-by-numbers
biopics, and not very illuminating; and Un
Certain Regard winner The Invisible Life of
Eurídice Gusmãofrom Karim Aïnouz may
have been an often plodding, long-winded
melodrama, but it did include a number
of quietly radical scenes. Finally, some
mention must be made of prior Palme
honoree Abdellatif Kechiche’s much-
publicized Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
—but I can’t really join the choruses against
(or for) this repetitive experiment, simply
because when one character said “Stop
staring. Live your life” about two hours in, I
took the hint and left. Wait, was this year
actually... less good? July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 65The centuries-old inequities of Bacurau’s rural settings earn the film a
place as another inheritor to the fearless cinematic and sociopolitical
brio of cinema novo, without feeling like some modish attempt at same.“By far the best American
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