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Notes On A Virtual Cannes: ‘Dandelion's Odyssey,' ‘Death Does Not Exist,' ‘I Only Rest in the Storm,' and ‘Meteors'

The Croisette seems nice. Many have heard tell of its luxurious essence, what with the many movie stars, auteurs, producers, and journalists that annually trot its boulevard during the Cannes Film Festival. Cinephilia is the name of the game on those hallowed grounds, the air that reeks of ticket-reservation anxiety only being masked by the booze-sponsored scattered around the premises. Of course, I'm only guessing based on my experience at other festivals, and in all likelihood, these already vague details are dead wrong. Cannes remains on the bucket list, though as with any fest that is programmed to the gills, plenty of writers and critics such as myself and others at GVN have been lucky enough to catch a few of the titles that premiered in France earlier this month from home. For a few of them, I even crafted a homemade cheese board to set the proper mood. One's couch may not rival the Agnès Varda or Debussy screening venues. But worthwhile cinema, varying quality aside, has no set time zone nor locale. The following few Cannes premieres are living proof of exactly that. Dandelion's Odyssey (Momoko Seto) What to make of a longtime short film animator's feature debut, one that splits the difference between Flow and the weeds that terrorize your front yard berm? Perhaps there's no more important takeaway than the very plot of Momoko Seto's entrancing (if slight) Dandelion's Odyssey, the 76-minute saga of four dandelions working together to survive the challenges of an unknown cosmos, one that might make you reconsider yanking them from the soil in the future. After a series of nuclear explosions propelled them into space, the 'blowballs' – named Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto and Taraxa – find their search for safe sod to be a bit more treacherous than they bargained for. A clear comment on the modern climate catastrophe that continues to pillage the planet – and immigration, depending on your read – Seto's film sounds like a ridiculous ask only in terms of asking its audience to feel something for a quartet of Irish daisies, yet the director has her fingers firmly planted on the pulse of exactly what makes one exude compassion. It's easy for a viewer to weep over the fate of a black cat and his unlikely companions (one of which is a yellow lab, no less) as many did with Gints Zilbalodis' Oscar-winning film last year, but to inspire a similar response with plants, let alone dandelions, is tough, and not a task anyone would ever consider achievable. Seto succeeds in that effort, even if the film itself grows repetitive and farcical as its protagonists encounter threats in the form of fellow flora and fauna, not to mention the smattering of insects and amphibians that seem more dangerous on the surface than they are in execution. In order for a film to stretch beyond the bounds of being a mood piece, it has to do more, and to make us do more. Are questions about climate change bound to arise from Dandelion's Odyssey? If they do, they aren't new ones, nor the kind that will take us anywhere particularly revolutionary. Granted, that's a lot of unwarranted pressure to place on a wordless work of inspired animation – and my stars, is it that – but films are birthed into a world of demand, and it's difficult to note whether or not Seto's answers the call. It's triumphant in one sense, and more of a head-scratcher than it needs to be in another. (5/10) Death Does Not Exist (Félix Dufour-Laperrière) Not to be confused with Ryusuke Hamaguchi's masterful Evil Does Not Exist, Félix Dufour-Laperrière's French-Canadian triumph actually has something in common with the former title: Both films, both in name and in narrative, argue the opposite of what they proclaim with their labels. Death, like evil, is inevitable according to Dufour-Laperrière, and his fourth feature – equal parts Romain Gavras' Athena and Hayao Miyazaki's worldview – examines how a young person might reckon with that certainty. It's a foregone conclusion that our individual clocks will eventually tick down to their final seconds. The idea that Death Does Not Exist probes is how we choose to spend that time, and what we stand to gain and/or lose from every decision we make with it. The decision at the center of Dufour-Laperrière's film is for a group of radicals to make: In an effort to send a strong climate-related message to their community and the world at large, these juveniles aim to attack a powerful family at their lavish residence, hoping that their actions will change the course of history. After the last minute – notably, not 'at' – Hélène (voiced by Zeneb Blanchet) cannot go through with her part, beliefs be damned. It's a shocking decision that is sure to alter her future, but in what sense? Stunning illustration and the inspired, haunting use of limited colors keep Dufour-Laperrière's themes from ever being too challenging to assess, but his film's existential nature is never lost, especially given the writer-director's laser-honed focus on his complicated heroines (Karelle Tremblay's 'Manon' is a key figure to follow) and their equally complex partnership. In many ways, Death Does Not Exist is what one could imagine an animated film by Ladj Ly would look like, a credit to Dufour-Laperrière's understanding of how varying age groups understand and react to the backwards social and political machinations of their world. Gutting, imaginative, and a small but mighty standout. (7/10) 'I Only Rest in the Storm' (Pedro Pinho) Pedro Pinho's latest epic is a near four-hour task of a film that does its best to reward its viewer's patience by never being uninteresting. Here's the thing: Your patience will depend on a lot. For one, how strong your appetite is for a marathon that might seem as though it has no idea whether it wants to be a documentary or a scathing drama, let alone what it wants to be about. There's also the fact that it could feasibly have been separated into a number of shorts, its avant-garde, vignette-reliant construction resembling something closer to the work of Wang Bing than a true auteur. Now, that might just be Pinho's point with I Only Rest in the Storm: That fiction and nonfiction are interchangeable, not these 'genre' stipulations we tend to be far too quick to apply to every damn film that achieves proper circulation. His lead, Sérgio Coragem (playing Sérgio, natch), aids that idea. An engineer, he was brought from Portugal to Guinea-Bissau by an NGO to draft an 'impact assessment report' on an abandoned project but spends more time with two locals, best friends Diára (Cleo Diára) and Gui (Jonathan Guilherme), and the many more figures he encounters blur the lines between drama and documentary. (And not solely because of how much time Pinho enjoys spending with a gamut of non-professional actors.) An odyssey-level journey, I Only Rest in the Storm's focus is primarily pinned to a triumvirate of thematic prongs: The impact of Sérgio's whiteness on the community he's entered, the film's setting and its colonial history (namely the neo-colonialism its main character represents), and how the way one treats their responsibility can cause both internal and external harm. But Pinho's curiosity regarding these three ideas can't hinder his obsession-level partiality to Sérgio's sex life, a distracting element that ultimately reduce I Only Rest in the Storm to being an assemblage of a few curious films stuffed into a single massive one that doesn't quite know how to be about any of its many far-reaching – and far more compelling – concepts. Theoretically, this could have existed in a league similar to something like Miguel Gomes' brilliant Grand Tour. Instead, it's a film that wouldn't feel misnomered if it took the title of Pinho's 2017 feature: The Nothing Factory. (5/10) Météors (Hubert Chaurel) 'The heart of the film is [Paul Kircher, Idir Azougli and Salif Cissé,]' Météors writer-director Hubert Chaurel – premiering his second feature and first since 2017 – said of his film's cast. 'We wrote a story about characters who have known and cherished each other for a long time… If their mutual feelings were not believable, the film was doomed.' Thankfully, Météors is anything but doomed, but Chaurel isn't far off: If not for the undeniable chemistry between his three leads, the picture in question wouldn't be nearly as successful as it is in portraying the bond between a delinquent-adjacent duo (and their third, slightly more mature pal) careening towards chaos. Yet so much about Meteors feels lightyears beyond the actual experience its filmmaker possesses that you can see a world in which their connection is frayed and the movie is still highly engaging, if not as remarkable. Chaurel's innate knack for mining emotions, especially those of young men, goes for the jugular to the point where you're not only fearful for the boys' safety, but their well-being beyond the closing credits. Couple that with a startling visual sensibility – cinematographer Jacques Girault's nightlife-heavy tableaus never feel forced nor used as plug-and-play settings for a drama about troubled, misbehaving adolescents – and you have one of the festival's hidden gems. Perhaps this is no surprise given the talent Chaurel displayed in his 2017 feature Bloody Milk, the winner of that year's 'Best First Film' prize at Cannes, as well as Kircher (a consistent standout; no different here) and Azougli's rising stardom in French cinema. But what's really refreshing is a story about broken boys that genuinely roots itself in the heartbreak they struggle to manage and communicate. A simple premise – with a few stray, unexpected elements not worth spoiling here – is one thing. Taking it beyond the limits of its motifs, at least as they appear on paper, is what gives you one of this young year's best films. (8/10)