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    The Cannes Love Affair With American Cinema Takes Unexpected Turns

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    Whether it’s Demi Moore’s performance in “The Substance” or Sean Baker’s tale of a Brooklyn sex worker, this year’s jury will have a lot to ponder.One truism of the Cannes Film Festival is that no matter how alarming the news about the American movie world, Hollywood — however you understand that word — retains a powerful grip on this event. Cannes is a thoroughly French affair, but its love for le cinéma américain is evident everywhere from the faded images of Hollywood stars that are scattered about to the honorary awards that the event bestows. On Saturday, it will present an honorary Palme d’Or to George Lucas, the 11th American to get an award that it’s given out just 22 times.Given the United States’ long domination of the international film market, it’s no surprise that the country looms large here. The Disney adventure “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” it is worth pointing out, was No. 1 at the box office in France and in much of the rest of the world when Cannes opened last week; it still is. That said, the hold that American cinema maintains on this festival goes beyond market share. Americans have also won more top awards at Cannes than filmmakers from Britain, Italy or France. This fact that reminds me of the moment in “Kings of the Road,” the 1976 Wim Wenders road movie, when a character says, “The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.”There are always movies from around the world here, of course, but the selections that often generate the loudest chatter are either from the United States or are Hollywood-adjacent. Three such titles this year are a heat-seeking troika that involve American notables who, after a period of relative domestic quiet, have showily returned to the international stage. Kevin Costner is here with “Horizon: An American Saga,” a baggy western that’s the first chapter in a multipart series, and Francis Ford Coppola has a new epic, “Megalopolis.” Then there’s Demi Moore, who’s being hailed for her bold starring role in “The Substance,” an English-language horror movie from the French director Coralie Fargeat.Demi Moore as an actress of “a certain age” in “The Substance.” Universal PicturesA gross-out fantasy that suggests Fargeat has watched her share of David Cronenberg movies, “The Substance” centers on a beautiful actress, Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), who is what’s often irritatingly called a certain age. When her TV show is canceled, the actress does what you might predict given the movie’s exaggerated look and tone: She despairs at what she sees in the mirror and reaches for an outrageous solution. This turns out to be the mysterious treatment of the title, which allows her to effectively generate (birth) a younger version of herself. This Demi 2.0, as it were, is played by Margaret Qualley, who, like Moore, bares her all in a 140-minute movie that’s as simple-minded as it is bloated.I am (personally!) sympathetic to the points about women, beauty and age that Fargeat seems to be trying to make. Yet the movie never gets beyond the obvious, and the whole thing soon becomes grindingly repetitive despite its two vigorous lead performances, all the many eye-catching shots of Qualley pumping her butt like a piston and the chunky tsunamis of gore. Far more successful on both feminist and filmmaking terms is “Anora,” Sean Baker’s giddily ribald picaresque about a Brooklyn sex worker, Ani (Mikey Madison), who, more or less impulsively, weds the absurdly juvenile son of a Russian oligarch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mentors Named for Next Class in Rolex Arts Initiative

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      El Anatsui, Bernardine Evaristo and Dianne Reeves are among those pairing up for the program.The Ghanaian-born visual artist El Anatsui, the British writer Bernardine Evaristo, the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, the French architect Anne Lacaton and the American jazz singer Dianne Reeves are the new mentors in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a program started by Rolex in 2002 to foster new generations of outstanding talent.The names of the new mentors and their protégés, who will collaborate for two years, were announced Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the Arts Initiative is celebrating the culmination of its current program cycle. This cycle included Lin-Manuel Miranda, the first mentor in a recently added open category to incorporate multidisciplinary artists.The protégés are the architect Arine Aprahamian, the writer Ayesha Harruna Attah, the visual artist Bronwyn Katz, the filmmaker Rafael Manuel and the singer and composer Song Yi Jeon. The protégés each receive a stipend of about $41,000 in addition to funds for travel and expenses.The new group of mentors and protégés hail “from nine different countries in Asia, Africa, North America, Europe and the Middle East,” Rebecca Irvin, the head of philanthropy at Rolex, said in an email. “And their artistic work reflects many of the most pressing issues of our day, including sustainability, diversity and social change.”Evaristo, who wrote in a statement that she had her eye on the program “ever since Toni Morrison was a mentor 20 years ago,” said that the “very close and personal attention” that the protégé receives is very different than attending workshops or writing courses. “It might also involve career guidance and personal development, as well as opening up conversations around creativity and society, and looking to other art forms for inspiration,” she said.Twenty years after it began, the Arts Initiative, which calls on influential advisers to select the mentors and protégés, now has a boldface list of alumni, including David Adjaye, Alfonso Cuarón, Brian Eno, Lara Foot, Stephen Frears, Nicholas Hlobo, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Anish Kapoor, Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Crystal Pite and Tracy K. Smith. More

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      In ‘Xiao Wu,’ a Wandering Pickpocket in the People’s China

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      Jia Zhangke’s debut feature, released in the United States in 1999 and newly restored, follows a nowhere man around his nowhere city in China.Made for a pittance with nonprofessional actors, officially unapproved in China and first shown in the United States in 1999, Jia Zhangke’s debut feature “Xiao Wu” depicted a deadbeat Chinese protagonist and a backwater milieu few Westerners had ever seen.That movie, revived by Film at Lincoln Center in a new 4K restoration, is both downbeat and transcendent.“Xiao Wu” is set in Jia’s hometown in central China, Fenyang. The title character is an aimless, alienated pickpocket — described in a New York Times review as “a nondescript young man in a shabby city who practices his trade without remorse, compassion or evident fear although he is known to the police.” Some critics were reminded of Robert Bresson, whose 1959 “Pickpocket” is a masterpiece of elliptical cinema.Observational, mainly in medium shot and almost plotless, “Xiao Wu” has a documentary quality. The titular character, played by Wang Hongwei, is introduced while waiting for a bus; once aboard, he beats the fare with the smirking claim he is a policeman, then casually picks the pocket of the passenger beside him.An unlikely tough guy — indeed, something of a loser with thick Woody Allen glasses and a cigarette-lighter that plays a few bars of “Für Elise” — Xiao Wu has his act down. The world, however, is changing. As local TV welcomes “the return of Hong Kong,” sleepy, half-urbanized Fenyang has begun to offer the fruits of the free market — karaoke, beauty salons, cheap sound systems.News reaches Xiao Wu that his former partner in crime, now a legitimate businessman trafficking in hostess bars and wholesale cigarettes, is about to marry. Xiao Wu is pointedly uninvited to the wedding and constitutionally unable to move on from his criminal life. The pickpocket is less a product of the new China than an antisocial element who fails to modernize. Asked by the karaoke hostess, Mei-Mei, whom he ambivalently courts, what he does for a living, he tells her that he’s “a craftsman who earns his money with his hands.”Mei-Mei is sufficiently impressed to encourage him to buy a beeper so she can alert him when she’s free. Xiao Wu buys her a ring as well. And each purchase, in its way, promotes his undoing. (Technology is part of the movie’s subtext. Anticipating Jia’s use of science fiction elements in his later, naturalistic films, TV subtly mediates crucial aspects of Xiao Wu’s life.)Remarkable for a movie made entirely with nonactors, “Xiao Wu” thrives on extended scenes of personal interaction — Xiao Wu with his former friend, his parents, the police and, mainly, the diffidently wooed Mei-Mei. Significantly, his single moment of liberation occurs when he finds himself alone in an empty public bath. In the film’s final scenes, society prevails. Xiao Wu himself becomes an object lesson, another commodity in the marketplace, contemplated by the crowd as a pop song asks, “Who is the hero?”As can happen with first films, “Xiao Wu” has a purity unique in its maker’s oeuvre. But it is also an auspicious beginning to one of the most impressive careers in 21st century cinema.Xiao WuJuly 23-Aug. 5 at Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; filmlinc.org. More

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      ‘Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue’ Review: China Through Writers’ Eyes

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      Jia Zhangke’s documentary illuminates a vast and complicated history in a series of intimate conversations.The films of Jia Zhangke, documentary and fictional, zoom in on the granular details of individual lives. At the same time, they are chapters in the single, unimaginably complicated story of China’s transformation in the decades since the 1949 revolution. Jia, who was born in 1970, tends to dwell in the recent past, and to circle back to Shanxi, the part of northern China where he grew up, but he’s also attentive to the continuities of history and geography, the connections between generations and places.His latest documentary, “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue,” is intimate and specific, consisting mainly of interviews with three writers — Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua and Liang Hong — associated with Shanxi. They reminisce about their families and careers, and also about their sometimes wrenching, sometimes exhilarating experiences during the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution in the ’60s and ’70s, and later periods of urbanization and capitalist expansion. Colleagues, neighbors and family members, listed as “witnesses” in the end credits, contribute their own anecdotes and insights. The movie is an affecting group portrait and also a complex and subtle piece of literary criticism.Watching it, I wished I was more familiar with the work of its subjects. Some of it has been translated into English, notably Jia Pingwa’s “Ruined City” and Yu’s “To Live,” which was the basis for Zhang Yimou’s acclaimed 1994 film. But Jia Zhangke’s patient listening and the elegant clarity of the movie’s structure — it advances in roughly chronological order, divided into short sections that explain where it’s going — make it accessible to the curious as well as illuminating to the already knowledgeable.More than that, “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue” demystifies historical episodes that are often presented, at least in the West, as abstractions, and personalizes large-scale events. Politics hovers over the writers’ lives, but their sense of national and regional history is filtered through work, family and landscape. Jia Pingwa recalls the hardship that his father, a teacher, suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Yu talks about his career transition from dentist to novelist. Liang delves into painful recollections of her mother’s illness and her sister’s marriage. Between the lines of their conversations with the unseen director you can intuit the elusive larger story — about the evolution of a poor, rural corner of an emerging global superpower — that is both his subject and theirs.Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns BlueNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More