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’m not a saint’: Abel Ferrara on his wild career, rehab and nightclubbing with Donald Trump

The last time our writer interviewed him, the drugged up director dozed off then asked for coke. Now sober, he reflects on #MeToo, Italian fascism and his fight for the final cut

The last time I met Abel Ferrara, he dozed off in the middle of our interview then woke up and asked me to score him some coke. It was 1996, and he was in the UK promoting his gangster drama The Funeral – which the actor Vincent Gallo alleged Ferrara had been too blitzed on crack to direct properly – and his vampire horror The Addiction. He was on a roll, his reputation fortified by King of New York, starring Christopher Walken as a flamboyant crime boss, and the gruelling Bad Lieutenant, with Harvey Keitel as a bent junkie cop. Ferrara was the scuzzball Scorsese: no matter how celebrated he became, he never shed the patina of grime from his early days as the star and director of porn film The Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy and the infamous “video nasty” The Driller Killer.

“You were the guy I fell asleep with?” he gasps now from his bright, high-ceilinged living room in Rome. He is calling via Zoom, his laptop resting on a shelf so he can pace around as he speaks, drinking from a bottle of San Pellegrino that he clutches by the neck. “You’re the guy? I’m sorry, man! Really, really.” Then he switches tack. “You let me down! You were 24, living in London, and you didn’t know where to score?” He shakes his head in disbelief. “All right. So where could we get some now?” A sandpapery cackle fills the air as he rocks on his heels. His hunched posture and jutting jaw make him the spit of the cartoon dog Muttley. He laughs like him, too.

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