Express at Cannes: Tom Cruise's Final Reckoning and a maddeningly marvellous Sound Of Falling

Indian Express

15-05-2025

Cannes 2025 Competition opener 'Sound Of Falling' begins in what seems to be a straight-forward, almost prosaic way. It turns out to be anything but, in the way the director builds a maze of simmering emotions that women experience and suppress, across a hundred years and four generations, somewhere in Northern Germany.
Generational trauma is a phrase flung about quite casually these days. In Mascha Schilinsky's remarkable handling of her material, dense and light, stately and playful, opaque and clear at the same time, this film becomes a palimpsest of feminine desire-and-deprivation, ordered by patriarchal command and control.
It gives us four time zones. Pre World War one, sometime during the second World War, sometime in the 80s, and a here-and-now slice, but there are no dates given, the timeline keeps shifting, and the characters keep drifting in and out. You are left to join the dots, with the film's rewards slowly revealing themselves in an immersive, fever-dream like state. Quite clearly too, you know that you may not be able to piece together the whole puzzle at one go, but you make peace with it, promising yourself a repeat viewing.
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A young woman named Erika (Lea Drinda) is slowly making her way on crutches across the length of a farmhouse, as a male voice calls out insistently, growing louder with every step she takes. The girl straightens her leg; the crutches, belonging to her grievously injured Uncle Fritz, are replaced against a wall. She finally goes down to the yard, and her impatient father slaps her hard across the face. Instead of wincing and crying, she turns to the camera, and smiles, breaking the fourth wall.
It is at the point where you stop expecting the expected, and start wondering: is it empathy for her grievously wounded uncle? Or is it a deeper, more complex emotion which teenagers sometimes attach to handsome men in their family? Or a mixture of shame and terror, distilled down the years?
From the way little Alma (Hanna Heckt) and her mother and sisters dress, it seems like we've flashbacked to a turn of the 20th century era, where women are constantly sickened by either a fresh life growing in their belly, or at the thought of what the less privileged among them have to undergo, 'to make them safe for the men'. We hear Alma's voice telling us about horrific sterilisations in a matter of fact manner, to the extent little girls can understand the depth of the brutality, which carries over, in less overtly but still very clearly into a flash forward, where we encounter Erika's niece Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) navigating her blossoming sexuality, under the heavy hand of a predatory uncle and his younger, gentler son.
Memories make us human. Schilinsky evokes the feel of old albums, where some faces are sharp, the others faded. In a striking scene, the appearance of a polaroid camera causes much amazement: in the family photograph, the teenager is caught as a shadowy figure, almost as if she is writing herself out of the image, and collective memory.
It's tough to unpack these strands without breaking the delicate, gossamer threads that this film weaves around us. But it also brings us back the joy of immersiveness, when you allow the film to cast its spell completely on you. 'Sound Of Falling' is maddeningly marvellous, and we may have already seen the best film of the festival, which has just begun.
**
Tom Cruise brings The Final Reckoning
Tom Cruise came cruisin' by, and the Croisette stopped in its tracks. Three years back, he was here with Top Gun: Maverick; this time around, it's the final installment of the Mission Impossible series, releasing in India this Saturday.
The action star wears his 62 years lightly: 'boyish' may have been invented for him. In the movie, his hard-working secret agent Ethan Hunt saved the world once again. Later, he showed up in a maroon co-ord set to wow his fans lined up for a glimpse. So is this really the final reckoning? The world still needs saving.