Writing last week from the seventy-ninth Cannes Film Festival, I noted that some of the best movies to première here are often overlooked for prizes. The events of the past few days have forced me to amend that statement. During that time, “La Gradiva,” an exceptional début feature from the French director Marine Atlan, won the Grand Prix in Critics’ Week, an independently run program for first and second films that runs parallel to the official selection. Great things do, in fact, happen to great films, although Atlan’s movie was arguably still ill-served. I’ve heard more than one colleague suggest that it warranted a berth in the main competition, where it would have had a shot at winning the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor.
Even without that distinction, it’s undoubtedly one of the year’s great discoveries. “La Gradiva” follows a group of unruly French high-school seniors on a five-day class trip to Naples and Pompeii, where the weather is warm and the scenery gorgeous enough to keep college-admissions anxieties at bay. It’s a travel saga, a coming-of-age drama, and a movie of precisely drawn, superbly individuated young characters who are nonetheless locked in myriad crises of identity, flailing about for a deeper understanding of who they are.
The energetic volley of words and ideas, interrupted frequently by raucous jokes, reminded me of similar scenes from the French filmmaker Laurent Cantet’s Palme d’Or-winning drama, “The Class” (2008). That movie centered on a committed teacher who, in trying to inspire, befriend, and discipline his charges, finds himself more than a little in over his head. “La Gradiva” strikes the same exquisite balance of idealism and realism. The camera seems alternately amused and exasperated by the spectacle of youthful recalcitrance, but it is also attuned to the thrill of hearing a student expound, with prodigious insight, on the expressive intricacies of a painting.
Like “The Class,” “La Gradiva” builds toward tragedy, with initially imperceptible but finally implacable force. Unlike “The Class,” which confined itself almost entirely to the grounds of a school, “La Gradiva” unfolds out in the open, in what is for its characters a beautiful and unfamiliar land; scene by scene, the mounting drama feels less overdetermined and more expansive. The world beyond the classroom, full of treacherous waters, smoldering ashes, frozen-in-time artifacts, and living, breathing, lusty women and men, will prove a vital completion and test of Toni’s, James’s, and Suzanne’s educations. They’ll soon realize that the most important lessons can be as dangerous as they are unforgettable.
I can’t remember who first told me that “life is short but Cannes is long,” but you needn’t be here for the festival’s entire twelve-day duration, as I have, for the weight of that statement to sink in. The movies themselves, even or especially the good ones, have a way of exacerbating your homesickness. Seeing a film about parent-child separation can make me yearn to be under the same roof as my kids again—and Cannes is always happy to oblige where that subgenre is concerned. It was a relief, though, to laugh more than I cried during the swells of father-son drama that roil “Club Kid,” a disarmingly sweet, hugely enjoyable comedy that has been one of the few near-unanimous critical hits of the festival. (The film played here to through-the-roof reactions and ignited a bidding war, which ended with A24 reportedly paying a hefty seventeen million dollars for the global distribution rights.)
“Club Kid,” which Jordan Firstman wrote and directed as well as starred in, is a coked-up, neon-lit rejuvenation of a wincingly familiar template: the comedy of cross-generational self-renewal, in which a selfish, irresponsible, and/or curmudgeonly adult forms a transformative bond with a child. Firstman plays Peter, a gay New York City party promoter who discovers that he has a British-born ten-year-old son named Arlo (Reggie Absolom), a consequence of a rare and drug-addled dance-floor foray into heterosexual intercourse. Arlo’s mom has recently died, and Peter reluctantly begins looking after the boy—a responsibility that soon forces a serious rethink of his choices. Even so, there’s no escaping the pull of New York night life, without which this club kid wouldn’t even exist. And although Arlo is still a few years away from being a teen-ager, he’s already music-savvy enough to d.j. some of Peter’s parties—one of many reckless allowances that will ultimately throw father and son’s future together into heartrending legal jeopardy.
You may know Firstman from his online comedy videos, which made him an internet celebrity during the COVID-19 pandemic. You might also have seen him riffing on his gay-influencer persona in the dick-swinging dark comedy “Rotting in the Sun” (2023) or, more recently, playing a celebrity stylist in the HBO series “I Love L.A.” Firstman has a way of both embracing and productively undercutting his own look-at-me narcissism. Just when you think you’ve had enough of him, he’ll strike a sweet note of sensitivity, unleash an emotional beat that catches you off guard, or—even better—turn the spotlight on one of his talented co-stars. (The strong cast includes Cara Delevingne, Miss Benny, and Diego Calva.) That penchant for self-promotion goes hand in hand with an unexpected formal assurance; from the long, swirling shot that kicks off the movie, it’s clear that Firstman knows how to place and move the camera, and also how to capture the particular intoxication of the queer club scene. As the movie rolls toward a bittersweet, wholly earned finale, it’s equally clear that he knows how to plumb the depths beneath that dazzling surface.
There are no ketamine hits, coke binges, or pounding blasts of house music in “Fjord,” the wintry new drama from the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu; there is, however, a similarly agonizing and protracted battle for parental custody rights. The film follows a married couple, Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve), who have recently moved, along with their five children, from his homeland to hers—i.e., from Bucharest, Romania, to a remote mountainside town in Norway. Mihai and Lisbet are evangelical Christians, and from the start their spiritual fervor brushes up against the town’s likewise strident liberal and progressive pieties. The couple’s children, including their teen-age daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban), are enrolled at the local school, where, the family swiftly learns, neither traditional-marriage rhetoric nor “Amazing Grace” is allowed. When school officials notice bruises on Elia’s body, they immediately suspect abuse and initiate official inquiries. Before long, all five Gheorghiu children, the youngest of whom is still breast-feeding, are moved into foster care. The rest of “Fjord” charts Mihai and Lisbet’s journey through the Norwegian legal system—a trial by ice, in which their every attempt to bring their kids home is met with increasingly glacial disdain.
One of the most hotly debated titles in a middling competition lineup, “Fjord” ended up winning the Palme d’Or from the jury, which was chaired by the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook. The choice catapulted Mungiu into the small pantheon of two-time Palme laureates; he earned his first in 2007, for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a masterful thriller about two young Romanian women trying to secure an illegal abortion during the Ceauşescu era. In “Fjord,” as in his previous work, he is fond, perhaps to a fault, of elongated scenes and crowded compositions. His ensemble-friendly technique nurtures a sense of life continually spilling in and out of the frame. Everything seems to be happening at once, and crucial clues—but also, you suspect, a few red herrings—are being slipped to us in the margins of every shot. Apart from a moment when Lisbet instinctively shoves two kids away from a potentially dangerous kitchen accident, we never once see her or Mihai lay a forceful hand on the children—which doesn’t mean, of course, that physical abuse isn’t happening offscreen. Our uncertainty is only fed by the immaculate restraint and simmering intensity of Stan’s and Reinsve’s performances, from which every hint of movie-star glamour has been methodically purged. (Stan’s transformation into the bespectacled, nearly bald Mihai is especially startling. It’s also one of relatively few examples of the actor, who was born in Romania, getting to lean into his roots.)
“Fjord” pushes your buttons, or at least mine, with a skill as impressive as it is dubious; Mungiu knows how to cloak his manipulations in the mesmerizing syntax of art-house realism. As I watched, I could feel my blood boiling just as the director must have intended, though I also began to question those intentions—and to wonder if the overweening child-welfare agency, with its especially hard stance against Christians and immigrants, was an ideological straw man. In the many discussions I’ve had with other festivalgoers in recent days, I’ve heard it argued that Mungiu has slipped into an oddly misanthropic mode, raining down contempt on all his characters—a posture that better suits a filmmaker like Michael Haneke, one of his notable influences. Some dismissed “Fjord” as a reactionary work, a rare dollop of prestige-cinema validation for audiences on the political right. But if Mungiu is seriously courting this crowd he also eyes them with a skepticism verging on satire; in one of the story’s wilder developments, Mihai turns the family’s legal battle into a conservative cause célèbre, urging pro-Christian activists to oppose what he sees as a textbook case of religious discrimination.
Then there’s the not-disposable fact that, going back at least as far as “4 Months,” Mungiu has been a fierce critic of all manner of religious and right-wing dogmas. He made the point even more bluntly in “Beyond the Hills” (2012), in which an intimate relationship between two women prompts suspicions of demonic possession in an Orthodox Christian monastery. There’s a similar if underexplored thread of same-sex desire running its way through “Fjord”—though, as a tale of outsiders facing persecution from their new neighbors, the film more closely resembles Mungiu’s “R.M.N.” (2022), in which the church is shown to be an enabling instrument of small-town intolerance and xenophobia. Seen in this light, Mungiu’s willingness to grant a conservative Christian “other” the moral high ground strikes me as a fascinating act of conviction and curiosity. He seemed to sum up his position in his Palme acceptance speech, during which he referred to a “divided” and “radicalized” society and described the film as “a pledge against any kind of fundamentalism.” “Fjord” may be something of a cinematic Rorschach blot, a reminder that, too often, we see only what we want to see—and I must confess that, days after my first viewing, I am already eager to see it again. ♦
