Fjord review - Cristian Mungiu at sea with strange child abuse drama starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan

Cannes film festival: The Palme laureate here makes a misstep with an odd, disquieting film that leaves too many issues unresolved Romanian director and Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu – the winner here in 2007 with his stunning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – comes to Cannes with an anticlimactic, underpowered movie which it seems to me could be part of an odd phenomenon at this year’s festival, detectable also in films here by Kantemir Balagov and Ryusuke Hamaguchi: auteurs making coproduction movies outside their home turf and mother tongue with big foreign stars, perhaps as a result of creative conversations at international film festivals with admirers from all over the world – and losing focus. Fjord is an odd film, bearing Mungiu’s signature, certainly, with enigmatic long shots and avoidance of closeups, and one very distinctive crowding of faces in a dinner-scene tableau. But the ostensible pain and trauma of its story is conveyed without the rewarding complexity that we have...

‘I was making a film about the trauma of an entire country’: director Alice Winocour on her movie about the 2015 Paris terror attacks

After her brother was caught up in the Bataclan siege, Winocour wanted to address the events that had scarred France. She explains why she focused on the aftermath, not the violence

Even from the safety of her home, the film-maker Alice Winocour’s experience of the Paris terror attacks in November 2015 was terrifying. Her younger brother, Jérémie, was hiding in a back room at the Bataclan concert hall, and forbade her from texting him in case it gave away his location. She had to wait to hear that he made it out alive. Later, he told her about a random thought he had while waiting to die: that he had left a half-eaten yoghurt open in the fridge. What would whoever found it make of his poor kitchen hygiene?

It is a touch of human absurdity that resurfaces in Paris Memories, her new film, about the 13 November attacks. Unlike the recent Jean Dujardin film November, it completely ignores religion and largely passes over the bloodshed. Instead, it joins films such as You Will Not Have My Hate and One Year, One Night to wade through the aftermath. The French title Revoir Paris gets it: starring Benedetta’s Virginie Efira as Mia, a radio translator caught in the crossfire in a cafe, the film focuses on how she reconstructs her memories of that night and with them her inner harmony, as well as that of the city of lights.

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