Latest news with #LaurentCantet
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Young Mothers' Review: Taut and Tender Drama About a Home for Teenage Moms Shows What the Dardennes Do Best
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes have settled into a comfortable niche over the course of 13 feature films. Well-researched social-realist depictions of marginalized people butting up against intransigent institutions is the way the record goes. To be fair to les frères Dardennes, there is a reliable level of unshowy competence as well as an integrity to their insistence on embedding with unglamorous, recognizable people. All the while, they facilitate other filmmakers in bringing related French and Belgian slice-of-life visions to fruition. They helped to produce one of the best debuts of last year, 'Julie Keeps Quiet' by Leonardo Van Dijl. At this edition of Cannes alone there are two films to bear their names as producers: 'Enzo' by Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo opened Directors Fortnight and, neatly enough, 'Adam's Sake' by Laura Wandel opened Critics' Week. More from IndieWire These Cannes 2025 Prize Winners Will Inspire Oscar Campaigns Cowboys vs. Accountants: The Real World of International Production Financing | Future of Filmmaking Summit at Cannes Earnest force-for-cinema credentials established, how does 'Young Mothers' fit into their body of work? Pivoting around a shelter for teenage mothers in the Belgian city of Liège, this modest offering does not deliver the immense emotional returns of 'Two Days, One Night' (2014) — arguably their last heavy-hitter. Nonetheless, there is a satisfying, compact completeness to their handling of the storylines of four different young mothers and sufficient grace notes are enabled in each case to stave off the cliches that occasionally threaten to engulf events. Jessica and Alba. Perla and Noa. Ariane and Lili. Julie and Mia. Each of the titular young mothers is a frightened child ill-equipped to handle the beloved bundle that now depends on them. The film's most immediate power stems from the casting of age-appropriate, largely unknown actresses, so that we have frequent cause to double-take at the sight of babies with babies. The shelter is depicted as a port in a storm where the girls participate in communal chores like cooking and cleaning and try to help each other out with childcare when they can. The grownup authorities are encouraging yet firm. Although the futures of Jessica, Perla, Ariane, Julie, are uncertain, this is a rare example of a positive institution showing up in a Dardennes flick. Each mother is dealing with non-existent or complex relationships with their families of origin. Bar Julie, who drew the long straw with her devoted Dylan, each mother is also dealing with an absent or checked-out baby daddy. Addiction, either personal or from their own caregivers, is a motif. Any sense of preparedness for the baby's arrival is notable by its absence as the characters spin out in spurts of productive energy, desperate to lay out the next track in the road in front of them. They want to bag a home or employment or a relationship to stop their new responsibility from feeling so totalizing and lonely. The curtain opens on a heavily pregnant Jessica (Babette Verbeek) as she rolls up to meet the mother who gave her up as a baby. It's a no show so caseworker Yasmine drives Jessica back home. Then we're with Noa (Lucie LaRuelle) as she picks up Perla's dad post release from a juvenile detention center. She's delighted to finally present as a family, whereas he is more animated by his first spliff in two months. The stress of it all causes Noa to collapse and Julie (Elsa Houben) helps to bring her back to her body with a massage. It won't be until later that we discover the demons that Julie is fighting. The most fully inhabited inter-generational microcosm comes courtesy of Ariane (Janaina Halloy Foken). Her pressures are packaged in a brilliant, ragged performance by Christelle Cornill as the mother that forced her not to have an abortion. Their scenes reveal that Ariane is sturdier than the precarious adult who has only recently shed a violent ex and is so obsessed with baby Lili that we fear for the vacuum she is contending with alone. Cornill is a volatile presence capable of delivering a backhander before falling to her knees in remorse. Halloy Foken (whose credits include 'Inexorable' by Fabrice Du Welz) holds her own as a focused teenager determined not to let her life be derailed by emotional blackmail close to home. The brothers do rigorous work in cutting between these four stories while letting them intersect as the girls warmly co-exist in the shelter. Essential character details emerge amidst the pace that drives their daily goals, and the fears bubbling underneath occasionally erupt, without anyone having to pay the price for this natural human upset. If there is an archetypal quality to each girl and if this is amplified by the stereotypical nature of their problems, there is enough tenderness in the atmosphere of the shelter to allow each actor to take their foot of the gas and relax into the small and soothing tasks that make up domesticity. A great deal of mastery is present in the balancing of disparate storylines and the blending of contrasting emotional landscapes. Individual insecurity is offset by release-valve relationships in a film that – like its young protagonist – is stronger than it looks. 'Young Mothers' premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. 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Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes Directors' Fortnight 2025 Lineup Welcomes Christian Petzold to the Festival, Plus ‘Sorry, Baby'
The Cannes Directors' Fortnight (May 14 – 24) has unveiled its 2025 lineup. The 57th edition of the Cannes Film Festival sidebar again showcases director-driven works from emerging and established filmmakers, this year opening for the second time in a row with a posthumous movie: 'Enzo,' directed by French 'BPM' filmmaker Robin Campillo, who picks up the reins from late Palme d'Or-winning 'The Class' director Laurent Cantet, who died in April. (Sophie Fillières' final film 'This Life of Mine' opened the event last year.) The Fortnight will close with Eva Victor's Sundance sensation 'Sorry, Baby,' which A24 acquired for release later in 2025 during the January festival. The coming-of-age story 'Enzo' follows an aspiring young mason worker in Marseille whose friendship with an older Ukrainian coworker offers him a renewed sense of life. 'Sorry, Baby,' meanwhile, stars writer/director Victor as a college literature professor reeling from trauma. More from IndieWire Peabody Awards 2025: 'Fantasmas', 'Shōgun', 'Sugarcane,' and More Receive Nominations Dag Johan Haugerud's Berlin-Winning Oslo Trilogy Acquired by Strand - Watch the Trailer for 'Love' Making his Cannes debut will be German filmmaker Christian Petzold with his latest collaboration with Paula Beer, 'Miroirs No. 3.' Cannes pundits speculated Petzold might show up in the competition this year; instead, he will cut his Cannes teeth in the sidebar with this story of a pianist whose life is ruined when a car accident kills her boyfriend. Fortnight artistic director Julien Rejl praised the film during Tuesday's lineup announcement, saying, 'It's a kind of melodrama, very mysterious, but with the same great direction, precision and elegance that makes the charm of Christian Petzold's cinema.' 'The 57th edition of the Fortnight is pluralist, mixed, rich in discoveries. It celebrates a cinematic liveliness that is invaluable and more essential than ever, even as directors and producers are finding it increasingly difficult to finance their project. It stands with directors the world over in the fight against the homogenisation, the commodification and thus the neutralisation of cinema. We are pleased to share with you a lineup that honours the art of mise en scene and the desire and generosity of the auteurs,' Rejl said in a press statement circulated with the lineup. Other highlights include Australian 'The Devil's Candy' director Sean Byrne's latest 'Dangerous Animals'; Iraqi, New York-based filmmaker Hasan Hadi's 'The President's Cake'; Canadian director Anne Émond's 'Peak Everything' with Piper Perabo; Lloyd Lee Choi's 'Lucky Lu' about a Chinese delivery driver in New York; and more. Harmony Korine designed this year's key art, which you can discover over at the Directors' Fortnight's website. Here's the full Directors' Fortnight lineup. 'Enzo,' Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo (Opening Night) 'Amour Apocalypse,' Anne Émond 'Brand New Landscape,' Yuiga Danzuka 'Classe moyenne,' Anthony Cordier 'Dangerous Animals,' Sean Byrne 'The Foxes Round,' Valéry Carnoy 'The Girl in the Snow,' Louise Hémon 'The Girls We Want,' Prïncia Car 'Girl on Edge,' Jinghao Zhou 'Indomptables,' Thomas Ngijol 'Kokuho,' Lee Sang-il 'Lucky Lu,' Lloyd Lee Choi 'Militantropos,' Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova, and Simon Mozgovyi 'Miroirs No. 3,' Christian Petzold 'La mort n'existe pas,' Félix Dufour-Laperrière 'The President's Cake,' Hasan Hadi 'Que ma volonté soit faite,' Julia Kowalski 'Sorry, Baby,' Eva Victor (Closing Night) Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie The 55 Best LGBTQ Movies and TV Shows Streaming on Netflix Right Now
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Enzo review – Laurent Cantet's swan song is a heartfelt tale of youth and desire
The directors fortnight sidebar of Cannes opens with a heartfelt, urgent drama about youth and desire – and destiny, sexuality and class. It is, effectively, the final movie of the late Laurent Cantet, who died last year. Cantet was working on the screenplay with his longtime collaborator and contemporary, Robin Campillo and it is Campillo who now directs – and brings to the movie his usual intelligence and clarity. It is a story of growing pains and not fitting in and the painful mystery of being young. Enzo is a 16-year-old kid from a privileged background, living in a gorgeous villa with a swimming pool; to the intense chagrin of his maths teacher dad and engineer mum he has decided he wants to quit school and work with his hands on a building site as an apprentice. Meanwhile Enzo's elder brother is poised for a prestigious university career. Enzo is embarrassingly mediocre at the job and clearly it is only his family's standing which prevents him from being fired. His father thinks this is a self-harming affectation which might seriously damage his future; he believes Enzo's talent at drawing means he should apply to art school – a far more acceptable middle-class career path. But of course this only makes stubborn Enzo more determined to tough it out at the building site where his incompetence baffles and annoys everyone. And Enzo is drawn to Vlad, a friendly young Ukrainian guy who is conflicted about not going back home to join the struggle against Russia. Enzo is fascinated by the sheer grownup importance of everything Vlad represents: Vlad has a sense of identity and a dramatic dilemma which is gratifyingly real in both its options: stay in France and do manual labour like a real man – or go home and fight? How much more heroic and magnificent is Vlad's existence, how much more real than silly, muddled, spoiled Enzo's dreary life choices? And Enzo's interest in Vlad is romantic in every other sense. Of course, there's something tragicomic and absurd about poor Enzo, absurd and humiliating in the way teenage yearning often is – and Enzo's dad's suspicion of self-harm turns out to be shrewder than he thought. Campillo and Cantet show us that the agonies of being young and existentially rebellious are not simply shallow and callow: they represent a state of idealism which is poignantly brief, like everything else about youth. It is another powerful, absorbing picture from Campillo and a fitting swan song for Laurent Cantet. Enzo screened at the Cannes film festival
