Cannes Film Festival 2019: Day 10
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by Alexa DalbyWhat the critics say…
Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
CAUTION: Here be spoilers
The gruelling second part of Abdellatif Kechiche’s summer-lovin’ saga aims for symphonic sensualism, but it’s a succession of bum notes… All but plotless at 206 minutes in length, with the first film’s character development deliberately stalled for an overnight study of hedonistic release in a coastal nightclub, Intermezzo is a grinding exercise in low-level cinematic voyeurism that plays a little like Gaspar Noé with all his hallucinogenics confiscated and replaced with Bacardi Breezers. – Variety
Abdellatif Kechiche takes his love story sequel to a nightclub for hot sex, but blows its cinephile credentials in four hours of indulgent sweat… Well, Mektoub My Love: Intermezzo must surely be the most purely experimental film to be shown at this year’s Cannes film festival. It shreds the rulebook about narrative and character development.– The Guardian
The Traitor
There are some show-stopping scenes in Bellocchio’s handsome true-crime movie about mafia informants… Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor is a big, handsomely shot, true-crime gangster movie, ranging over 30 years from the early 1970s to the late 90s, scripted by Bellocchio with screenwriters Valia Santella, Ludovica Rampoldi and Francesco Piccolo. The film has the authoritative air of official history: sometimes brash, sometimes stolid, sometimes with flashes of inspiration and sometimes with long stretches of courtroom dialogue – Guardian
Closing Film
Yves (All About Yves
With Her, Spike Jonze made audiences across the world transform into emotional wrecks, struggling to hold back tears at the heartbreaking romance between a man and a piece of software. If Jonze made the partnership between man and machine tangible, then director Benoit Forgeard goes one better, imagining a jealous, artificially intelligent fridge as the obstacle stopping a couple cementing their relationship, with the fridge going on to have a successful music career, even winning the Eurovision Song Contest, just to spite its former owner. It’s the most bonkers premise of any film playing at Cannes this year, and most improbably of all, it still manages to have heart behind the increasingly surreal laughs. – Film Inquiry
Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo, The Traitor and All About Yves premiered in the Cannes Film Festival 2019.
