This year, 22 films are competing for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. So, far, two competition films have screened: “Wild Diamond” and “The Girl With the Needle.”
The 19-year-old protagonist in Agathe Riedinger's “Wild Diamond” could easily belong in an Andrea Arnold film. Riedinger's debut feature, which was the first comp title to screen, is filled with working class dreams and testy behavior on the part of its main protagonist.
Liane (Malou Khebizi) dreams of escaping her reality, living with her struggling and unemployed mother (Andréa Bescond) and younger sister. Khebizi’s debut film performance is definitely worth a look. Her character is unafraid of a pushing buttons, and strives for fame, especially on her Instagram profile which features scantily clad images of her posing for the camera. “I'm going to create a buzz.” Liane says.
She lives in a small apartment in banlieue Paris, always sporting low cut dresses, crawling under fences, stealing headphones and reselling them in various neighborhoods. At night, she’s out clubbing with her girlfriends. It’s a mundane existence, and she has no interest in stability, only fame and money.
Her life changes when she gets a call from a casting director for reality TV show “Miracle Island,” they’re interested in her being part of the upcoming ninth season, and for the rest of the film she anxiously, and impatiently, waits for the call back to see if she made it in.
This is familiar blue-collar territory, and as mentioned, Andrea Arnold figures prominently in every frame. It’s a character study about a young naive girl, with poorly channeled emotions, who doesn’t seem to have much of a future beyond aspirations for fame.
In the end, “Wild Diamond” can have these strikingly intimate moments, but at times can come off as very muddled —a portrait of youth gone awry via social media influence isn’t anything new. What matters most to Liane isn’t a stable job, but more followers, at all costs. Her life depends on whether she’ll be getting that callback from the TV producer. Everything else is thrown out the window, including her family and friends.
The film tackles a quest for social climbing, but there are also hints of Liane showing emotions beyond the online kind. She strikes a strange and non-committal romance with Dino (Idir Azougli), a young-ish type who works with his brother to fix motorcycles. He tries to connect with her, his intentions noble, but she’s too stuck in her own reality to know what to do.
I gather that Cannes boss Thierry Fremaux didn’t have much to choose from when it comes to including the mandatory 5-6 French films that show up every year in competition. “Wild Diamond,” although meant as a button pusher, and featuring a strong lead performance, is surprisingly conservative, treading familiar waters when it should be more inciteful. [B-]
———
Magnus Von Horn’s “Sweat,” released in 2020, was a highly stylized eye opener, but one depicting its lead protagonist, a social media influencer, in obvious and predictable ways.
This Cannes, Von Horn surprised many by nabbing a competition slot for “The Girl With the Needle”, which couldn’t be more different to “Sweat.” In fact, you’d have no idea he was directing this one if his name weren’t stamped in the credits.
“The Girl With the Needle” can be qualified as gothic horror and features some rather disturbing imagery, always stoked in realism, as its lead protagonist, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), goes through an arduous journey of societal survival.
Karoline is alone, unemployed and pregnant by a man not her husband. She lives in a grimy working-class part of Copenhagen right at aftermath of the First World War. We meet her as she’s about to get evicted from her small apartment: Her husband, Peter, has never returned home from the great war, and her job as a seamstress at a linen factory barely pays. She soon strikes up a romance with Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), her boss, who gets her pregnant and vows to marry her.
Just when she thinks her life might be on track for something good, Peter (Besir Zeciri) unexpectedly show up, back from the war and very much alive, but with a grotesquely deformed face. She rejects him, saying she’s found a new man. However, soon after that, and due to his mother’s demands, Jørgen annuls their marriage and tells Koraline to take a hike.
Alone, pregnant and poor, Koraline attempts a self-abortion in a public bathhouse, that’s where she meets Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), a candy-store owner who illegally secures adoptive families for unwanted infants. They strike up a friendship and soon after Koraline is invited to live with Dagmar.
“The Girl With the Needle” is based on a true-life story, but revealing more would be unfair given that the narrative springs twists and turns that come as total shocks. There’s an extremity on display here, filled with suffering and despair, that Von Horn does tend to sometimes overreach in trying to get a reaction from the viewer. Still, there’s an expressionistic beauty in every frame that cannot be denied.
DP Michał Dymek shoots Von Horn’s world in beautifully sombre black and white, with nary a glimmer of hope for its main protagonist. This film is a total downer, filled with arthouse miserablism. “The world is a horrible place,” Dagmar tells Karolina, and watching this film sure makes it look that way.
The standout here, apart from Von Horn and Dynek’s elegantly realized imagery, is Sonne as Karoline. Her character, always calm, even as chaos surrounds her, is put through the ringer for most of the film’s 2-hour runtime, and her baggy, solemn eyes reveal her inner demons at every turn. She’s an automatic contender for the fest’s Best Actress prize.
This is high-wire and unsparing work on the part Von Horn, he doesn’t fully have a firm grasp of the tonal shifts in his narrative, but the film rarely has a dull moment. [B]