A hot favorite for the Palme d’Or before anyone at Cannes had seen it, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig arrived late in the Competition carried by a wave of urgency: set against the backdrop of Iran’s 2022 women’s protests, the film put its director, already facing an eight-year prison term for his previous film, in additional legal jeopardy, occasioning his secret flight from his homeland and arrival at Cannes for a several-minute ovation even before the screening started, during which he held up photos of lead actors Soheila Golestani and Misagh Zare, who remain in Iran. Timely, anguished, and ultimately cathartic, the movie meets its moment.

The first image we see in the film is a close-up of a hand laying out bullets on a table, and then setting down a pen, for the recipient to sign for them. Weapons and words, violence and bureaucracy, are the twin poles on which power rests here. It’s a system upheld by functionaries such as Iman (Zare), a civil servant promoted after twenty years to an investigator’s role within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court. The gun is for his family’s protection, and though his wife Najmeh (Golestani) is nervous, she’s also excited for the allotment of a larger apartment, so their two daughters, college-aged Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and slightly younger Sana (Setareh Maleki) no longer have to share a bedroom.

Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion, and so must Iman’s daughters. Having long been kept in the dark about the precise nature of their father’s work, Rezvan and Sana are warned about how to behave in public, who and who not to associate with, and to stay off social media; Najmeh is not specific about what behaviors should or should not be allows, but the investigator’s daughters should know well enough.

Iman himself is also learning how to self- censor: his first assignment at work is to rubber-stamp a death sentence without first reviewing the case first; knowing what a refusal to do so would mean for his family, he loses sleep over the assignment, and carelessly leaves his gun in the pile of dirty clothes for his wife to pick up. At the same time, he puts on a mask of unquestionable righteousness for his wife and daughters.

In general, characters tentatively question authority to their superiors, and enforce it viciously on their subjects: as a classmate of the Rezvan is caught up the protests and violent state crackdown following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, Najmeh asserts to her daughters that all the students and women who were beaten and arrested “must have done something” to deserve it, but also risks legal exposure and her husband’s reputation by pulling strings to locate the missing girl. When someone comes into the apartment wounded by the buckshot sprayed at a crowd by police, Najmeh tweezes the steel out her face so tenderly, but every time she leaves the flat she pulls her hijab a little tighter.

Though the film is epic in length and ambitious in subject, it also has a hurried, shoestring quality. The widescreen frame is mostly used to lay out the family flat at eye level, and it’s this domestic interior to which the action is largely confined.

Restricted by their parents from going out, Rezvan and Sana listen to the chants out the window, and furtively watch videos on their phones (via a VPN). Rasoulof inserts a number of real, confusing, stunning videos of the 2022 and 2023 protests into the film, on-the-fly civilian journalism capturing limp and bleeding bodies, screams, the moments when the uniformed or plainclothes police batter women with clubs or chase a man with a car. This gives the film the raw feeling of a real-time response to unfolding events; Rezvan and Sana speak in hushed, desperate whispers even in the privacy of their own home.

Their confinement stands in for the larger confinement of women in Iranian society, but the doomscrolling aspect of the film, the power of the images and the powerlessness of the viewers, gives it resonances beyond Iran. That said, the applause halfway throughout the film, when Rezvan finally speaks up and articulates a political consciousness, was surely for the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests.

From that moment, Sacred Fig becomes a different film. Up until its halfway point, the film resembles one of Asghar Farad’s painstakingly procedural dramas, which capture the intense legal and moral scrutiny of life in the Islamic Republic, showing how one barely-glimpsed incident, or a single personal miscalculation, reverberates through a web of closely interconnected characters to life-altering effect. In the scene immediately following, Rezvan’s speech, Chekhov’s — sorry, Iman’s — gun goes missing, and so does Rasoulof’s interest in balancing the motivations of his entire ensemble.

As the state loses control of its people, Iman loses control of his family, and evolves over the course of the film into patriarchy personified. To consolidate his crumbling authority, he turns the state’s coercive apparatus onto his own wife and daughters, using interrogation techniques, intimidation, psychological abuse and gaslighting on what seems to him, in his terror, as a viper’s nest of deceitful women.

Late in the film, the location shifts, to another inconspicuous semi-licit filming location, out of the way in rural Iran, a family estate in the shadow of old ruins, and the genre shifts as well. Rasoulof throws a surprising twist into the missing-gun plot, one that alters the film’s allegorical calculus, and Rezvan and Sana’s budding feminine defiance flowers into final-girl resourcefulness as Rasoulof stages a home-invasion thriller with Iman as something like the Islamic Republic’s Jack Torrance a once-familiar father figure turned embodiment of masculine demons and childhood terrors, a pursuing ogre in a fairy-tale labyrinth. The applause at the conclusion may have been in gratitude to Rasoulof for giving his women an ending that the stark realist register of his film would not seem to permit — though given the thrilling intrigue and high stakes of his own escape from persecution, it’s appropriate enough that The Seed of the Sacred Fig ultimately becomes a melodrama of resistance.

When we first meet September and July, their mother Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar) is instructing them on how to pose in their Grady Twins costumes as part of her ongoing photography project. July happily complies; September scowls. Flash forward a few years, and the pair are awkward teenagers, played by Pascale Kann and Mia Tharia – maybe twins, maybe not, they share a secret language and a set of bullies. While July maintains a code of silence and attempts to completely ignore their jibes, September, ever the more confident sister, bites back. She cuts off the ringleader’s ponytail, she takes to carry a flick knife to protect herself and her sister. But is her semi-feral attitude helpful? When September is suspended from school for acting out, July seems to breathe a sigh of relief.

Adapted from Daisy Johnson’s novel Sisters, Ariane Labed’s directorial debut is part gothic fairytale, part horror story, with stilted rhythms and strange imagery that evokes the Greek New Wave through which Labed rose to fame. Yet the film is firmly grounded in British and Irish iconography, as the three women depart for their absent grandmother’s cottage on the Irish coast midway through the film following a mysterious tragedy which remains opaque until late in the game. There’s a sense the family are mired in tragedy; the death of July and September’s father is alluded to but never fully explained, and there’s some suggestion he was no saint. September, a domineering presence, lacks her sister’s serenity, and such seems compelled to control her at every turn. Sheela, meanwhile, is a ditzy mother, well-meaning but distant from her daughters, an outsider to their unique relationship. In one extremely funny but perhaps out-of-place scene, she picks up a bloke at a pub for a one-night stand, which is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness voice-over.

If there’s one complaint, it’s that a very silly third-act reveal somewhat undermines the sombreness of the film. This is probably a detail taken directly from the source material, and it possibly has a more touching impact on the page, but on screen it is just left-field enough to be distracting, verging on comical, rather than devastating.

Even so, evoking the strange combination of brutal British realism and light fantasy of Jacqueline Wilson’s iconic young adult novels (particularly Double Act), it’s a promising debut for Labed, who moves between the uncanny and the tender with ease. Her DoP Balthazar Lab captures the windswept beauty of the Irish coast, which is as arresting as it is foreboding. We’re always at a slight remove from September and July, and there’s something voyeuristic about the rigid angles of the camera, as though we’re being told a secret that we’re not quite comfortable hearing.

Hot weather does strange things to people, and the residents of a Marseilles apartment block are no exception in Noémie Merlant’s sophomore feature, co-written with Céline Sciamma. Life moves at a different pace on the hottest day of the year; old men drape themselves over their windowsills, smoking cigarettes with sweating bottles of beer in hand. Children whine uselessly about the heat. A woman finally takes a stand against her brute of a husband. And Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), a shy writer, lusts after the stranger in the flat opposite, who she can see from her balcony.

Meanwhile, her gregarious, free-spirited roommate Ruby (Souheila Yacoub) has no such reservations. She’s a polyamorous cam-girl who couldn’t be more different from Nicole, but the pair are firm friends despite their contrasting personalities, and they’re soon joined by their friend Élise (Noémie Merlant), a flighty actress trying to hide from her overbearing husband Paul (Christophe Montenez). With the heat and women’s giddiness reaching a fever pitch, they end up across the street at the apartment of Nicole’s crush, who turns out to be the rakish photographer Magnani (Lucas Bravo). But an act of sexual violence against Ruby leads the three into a situation none of them could have predicted, whereby they suddenly have to dispose of a dead body and clean up a murder scene.

It’s certainly a timely film, given France’s recent localised #MeToo movement, and the central trio are incredibly vivacious and compelling as their situation becomes ever more perilous. There’s something cathartic about several truly vile men violently getting their just desserts – for once justice is served, when the reality is, most of the time victims of sexual violence never get that luxury. But a gimmicky supernatural element somewhat undermines the more serious message, and there’s a sense that the film could have perhaps been kept to a tight 90 minutes, as it runs out of steam in the back half.

Shakespeare was really onto something when he wrote “The course of true love never did run smooth” in Act 1, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This truism has fuelled romantic narratives the world over for centuries, and now, in Gilles Lellouche’s 165-minute melodrama, two young lovers discover as much for themselves, as they first meet as headstrong teenagers and later encounter each other as world-weary adults.

Jackie (played by Mallory Wanecque as a teen and Adèle Exarchopoulos as an adult) lives a comfortable suburban life with her father (Alain Chabat) following the death of her mother in a tragic car accident when she was a child. After being expelled from her private Catholic school, she enrols in a public one, where she first clashes with Clotaire (Malik Frikah and later François Civil), a cheeky, violent thug who’s dropped out of school to focus on petty crime and causing a nuisance. Jackie is the first girl to stand up to Clotaire, and it’s love at first sight for him. Jackie takes a little more convincing, but there’s something about the wild boy that she’s powerless to resist. Their budding romance is defined by long rides on his dirtbike, a daring Flamby heist and visits to the local swimming hole and beach; around Jackie, Clotaire softens, and for a moment, the possibility of a future not fuelled by his fists seems entirely possible.

But then Clotaire and his mate Lionel steal some hash from some local gangsters, and after receiving a bit of a kicking, Clotaire impresses them with his violent streak. His fate is sealed, and while he tumbles further down the rabbit hole leading to an eventual 12-year prison sentence for a crime he didn’t commit, Jackie is left alone and broken-hearted.

Picking up in the 90s, Clotaire is out of prison and Jackie is out of fucks to give. Their reunion is inevitable, but first, there’s Clotaire’s revenge against the gangsters who let him take the fall and Jackie’s new boyfriend Jeff (played by Vincent Lacoste) to contend with – new complications for old lovers.

Adapted from Neville Thompson’s 1997 Irish novel ‘Jackie Loves Johnser OK?’ by Lellouche, Ahmed Hamidi and Audrey Diwan, some of the sense of place is lost in transporting the narrative to North East of France, but a soundtrack of certified 80s bangers including Sirius by The Alan Parsons Project and A Forest by The Cure help to give the film some of its propulsive energy. The supersized runtime is extravagant, but Beating Hearts doesn’t drag as much as you might expect given the fairly cliche subject matter – this is down to the excellent casting of the four leads, whose performances sync up perfectly across the two decades.

While Beating Hearts is not exactly reinventing the wheel with its Romeo and Juliet narrative and Clotaire’s inevitably late-game redemption arc does feel a little rushed considering the film’s overall length, there’s still something likeable about this sweeping romance, despite its undeniable naivety.

As he runs freely across the sprawling dunes of Ceará, flitting back and forth between the crisp water and the blazing heat of the Brazilian sun, it is hard to imagine why Heraldo (Iago Xavier) would want to leave this slice of paradise. Alas, things are rarely as idyllic as they seem – even more so in small towns where one is hidden away from the rest of the world but never sheltered from prying neighbouring eyes.

In Heraldo’s case, he’s always under the heavy gaze of his drug boss, an artist who splits her time between painting colourful canvases and taking care of late-payers. Her crowded house is the closest thing Heraldo ever had to a home, made even more intimate by sharing it with his older brother who sings promises of a future living in quiet lawfulness, raising their children close together, brothers made fathers and uncles made godfathers. Those dreams uttered under the vast skies of the Brazilian Northeast are cut short by a violent crime that sends Heraldo into hiding at the titular seedy motel.

The same destiny that lends its name to the shaggy establishment off the highway has seldom been kind to the downtrodden 21-year-old. Such kindness comes naturally to the cheery Dayana (Nataly Rocha) who, taken by this man who is everything her abusive husband Elias (Fábio Assunção) isn’t, agrees to let Heraldo stay in the motel in exchange for acting as the motel’s handyman. And, boy, does he prove handy.

Motel Destino sees Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz return to the language – both in theme and form – of earlier works like Madame Satã and Futuro Beach, prodding at the undercurrent of desire that clouds an already frail sense of morality. It does, however, crucially lack the tangible yearning of such films, much due to newcomer Iago Xavier being miscast in this love triangle that never quite joins its corners. This teasing unravels as a frustrating withholding in a film that sets out to comment on notions of power and possession but can’t keep up with its own throbbing, sensual rhythms.

Still, Motel Destino is shot beautifully by Aïnouz’s frequent collaborator Hélène Louvart, a tropical neo-noir that does away with darkness in favour of a riveting spiral of colour and sweat. Yellows meet purples meet blues, lime green bikinis lying against orange hammocks, and sweat-drenched bodies slithering under a curtain of crimson. The workers at the motel eat, clean and sleep to a soundtrack of constant groaning and panting, the loud, chaotic nature of want and ecstasy as natural to them as the pages on an accounting book. In this depraved Eden, deep moans casually cut through ordinary conversations as two donkeys fornicate outside and chickens peck happily at tufts of dry grass – Aïnouz’s gaze as free of judgment as his characters.

The director is an expert in this precise kind of world-building, one intricately related to yearning – for another, for belonging, for redemption. If Xavier is a misfire, unable to tap into the kind of rogue unpredictability required of a character like Heraldo and never quite grasping the volatile nature of the love triangle at its core, Assunção and Rocha prove the opposite. The actress channels the great Sônia Braga in her easy-flowing seductiveness, untamed hair sticking to the sweat dripping from her chest, a cheeky smile always looming at the corner of her mouth. Assunção makes for a great sleazeball with trunks just as short as his temper, whose inflated sense of self barely manages to keep him afloat. The pair is one of the many pleasures of Aïnouz’s latest, a homecoming that isn’t without its flaws but one that will prove kind to those willing to walk into its grimy, frisky arms.

Dating in India can often be fraught. There’s a caste system to contend with, broader religious segregation, the watchful eyes of your community and, of course, your family’s wishes, whether it’s an arranged marriage they want for you, or simply heterosexuality. In Payal Kapadia’s debut fiction feature – the first Indian film to play in Cannes’ official competition since 1994 – the former is plaguing Anu (Divya Prabha), a young Mumbaikar who works as a nurse at a local hospital. Anu spends her days behind a reception desk, encouraging visitors to have their husbands get vasectomies, texting Shiaz, a boy her parents haven’t picked out for her, and playing dreamily with various items in the office: taking a stethoscope to listen to the medical models and other items in her immediate vicinity, as well as her own heart.

In these languid, playful scenes, Kapadia sets up Anu as a headstrong romantic, a foil for her roommate Prabha (Kani Kusruti) – the head nurse at the hospital and the straight man to Anu’s eccentric dreamer. Unlike Anu, Prabha is married, and a little severe. She’s absorbed greater cultural dogma than her younger, more rebellious friend, and her elevated standing in their workplace means she feels more responsibility – and is under more external pressure – to uphold these values. “If you behave like a slut, people won’t respect you,” she tells Anu bluntly after rumours about her secret boyfriend begin to echo around the hospital.

Kapadia’s story reads as timeless for many reasons: this blurring of well-intentioned, cross-generational advice with a kind of emotional abuse, the plight of two young star-crossed lovers; and the glowing celluloid feel of each frame. Contemporary motifs are sparse, but references to actors like Amitabh Bachchan, brands like Reishunger, and the sight of smartphones situate the film in a recognisable present. The filmmaker’s renderings of desi girlhood are subtle but powerful, coming through in small details: the claw clips and medicine strips strewn about the apartment, tiny tattoos and even tinier, heart-shaped lingerie hardware, stolen moments under cover of darkness.

Like Kapadia’s feature debut – an intimate yet politically-charged documentary titled A Night Of Knowing Nothing – her latest is set during the monsoon season, a choice that bathes each scene of the film’s first act in an all-encompassing blue, and positions All We Imagine As Light as a successor in a longstanding canon of Bollywood romances. But this is no masala movie. That it is Shiaz’s Muslim faith that poses a wedge between him and Anu feels hyper-relevant at a time when the country’s Hindu nationalist prime minister is attempting to secure a third consecutive term by continually stoking Islamophobic sentiment. The film also approaches an anti-capitalist critique in its survey of Mumbai’s urban sprawl, speaking disparagingly of the seemingly endless construction of new tower blocks, and even going as far as having Prabha throw rocks at a luxury development in Lower Parel.

As an NRI (non-resident Indian), it is heartening to see these issues given cinematic airtime, not to mention the much-deserved arthouse treatment of Mumbai’s crowded shopfronts and neon Sanskrit signs. The last time I visited my family there, we went to see Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge – a musical romance epic that has screened daily at the Maratha Mandir theatre ever since its 1995 release and, as I was reliably informed, a makeout movie that provides ideal cover for sneaky young lovers. Peer onto the roadside at night and you’ll be able to see any number of kissing couples grabbing each other just as Anu and Shiaz do. In this way, Kapadia’s film precisely captures the realism of the particular romantic chaos native to Mumbai: a warm, heady place where desire, tradition, shame, and pride are in constant negotiation with one another.

In Limonov: A Ballad, his rambunctious indictment of the Russian poet, provocateur and political dissident Eduard Limonov, Russian auteur Kirill Serebrennikov unleashes a withering, fabulist whirlwind of a character study, one with as much if not more to say about the self-contradicting social conditions of a post-Soviet Russia as the deeply troubled contrarian at its centre.

Born in the Soviet Union as Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko, only to later derive his pen name Limonov from limonka, the Soviet nickname for an F1 hand grenade, Limonov lived many lives as he careened across Moscow, New York and Paris, only to eventually end up back in Russia. He was known alternately as a literary talent, a bohemian adventurer, a political firebrand, and a fascist street thug; in adapting Emmanuel Carrère’s fictional biography alongside Ben Hopkins and Pawel Powlikowski (who’d once intended to direct before deciding he didn’t like Limonov enough to base a film around him), Serebrennikov embraces each of these identities as core to the man’s perplexing, self-perpetuated myth.

Considered one of Russia’s great modern theatre directors, and previously the artistic director for the Gogol Center in Moscow, Serebrennikov seeks not only to depict Limonov’s personal and political evolution but also to follow his trajectory through a strange, tumultuous period in world history. In keeping with the flair for expressive surrealism he showcased in Petrov’s Flu and Tchaikovsky’s Wife, the filmmaker stages Limonov in an impassioned, elaborate fugue, bringing together the historical record and what’s known about Limonov’s life story with what the filmmaker imagines as his fraught emotional and psychosexual interior. In doing so, he locates a common thread in Limonov’s life in his compulsion to rebel: a bright-burning energy that formed the fury of his artistic voice and fed into the abiding chaos of Russian nationalism that slowly corrupted and consumed him.

A blistering interrogation of the many roles Limonov played in popular consciousness, the movie also formally mirrors the character’s seemingly unstoppable momentum, collapsing time and space through the filmmaker’s signature long takes, including one standout sequence in which the poet and his friends are visualised moving through the years as they travel from room to room, the culture steadily shifting around them through recognisable artefacts and signifiers.

As portrayed by Ben Whishaw, in an explosive performance that’s closely attuned to the vitality and vigour of such a character while depicting the destructive force of his jealous rage and petty insecurities, Limonov doesn’t alternate between attractive and repulsive but straddles an uneasy erogenous zone in the middle. Hilarious, terrifying, absurd, pathetic, and impetuous, Limonov is a particularly volatile lover, and Serebrennikov’s film traces through his relationships with first wife Anna (Maria Mashkova), who’s also engaged in the literary scene, then second wife Elena (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), a socialite and model, his precipitous descent into emotional violence and reactionary politics.

In Passages, opposite Franz Rogowski and Adele Exarchopoulos, Whishaw recently stood out as half of a gay marriage that collapses after one partner pursues a relationship with a woman, capturing the sensitivity and growing self-awareness that can accompany romantic turbulence. But the actor has never had a role quite as complex and contradictory as that of Limonov, and he rises to the occasion with a transformative lead turn that’s most compelling in its depiction of how malignant narcissism can sour romantic desperation into something uglier and more grimly depressing. It’s a fascinating, slow-motion car crash of a performance: destined for destruction, spiralling magnificently all the way down.

Earnest ethnographic documentary, steamy backlot melodrama and the existential travelogues of Joseph Conrad coalesce in another cinematic UFO from Portuguese filmmaker, Miguel Gomes, a quixotic and occasionally-exasperating treatise on how the west distorts and romanticises its cultural depictions of the east. Its high-profile premiere in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival made for an interesting bluff for anyone who thought the pathfinding director had embraced the mainstream, as Grand Tour is quite possibly his most experimental and emotionally opaque feature to date.

Very much a continuation of the concerns and production methods employed to make previous features such as 2012’s Tabu and 2015’s epic Arabian Nights trilogy, there’s perhaps a whiff of unwanted familiarity to the way the film attempts to forcibly conjoin the fiction and non-fiction forms, and on the back of a single viewing, it was difficult to discern a purpose to this high-wire mode of storytelling. That’s not to say that the film is without its pleasures, as each shot offers a surprise of eccentric audio-visual juxtapositions that seem to operate on their own off-kilter and intuitive internal logic, and there’s also a light scattering of Gomes’ Martini-dry humour across proceedings.

Manderlay, 1918, and effete British bureaucrat Edward Abbot (Gonçalo Waddington) decides, for reasons that are never stated, that he will jilt his estranged lover, Molly Singleton (Crista Alfaiate), at the alter and ride the rails, roads and waterways wherever they take him, perhaps until he’s able to comprehend these obscure impulses. His “tour” takes him through Bangkok, Shanghai, Manilla, Osaka until the point where he’s curled up in a bamboo forrest, giant pandas in the near vicinity, and melting away with an opium pipe in hand. Along the way, Gomes gently leans on anachronism by sliding in documentary inserts resembling TikTok tourism (albeit with higher production values) which almost exclusively focus on local storytelling custom, such as puppet shows, folksong recitals and theatre performances – indeed, Grand Tour assiduously catalogues the range of ways out there to tell stories as it also tells its own.

A mid-point reset introduces us to Molly with her bonnet hat, toothsome smile and silly rasping laugh and we discover that she, with the same lack of logic as her betrothed, intends to track her errant beau on his jaunt and, one presumes, convince him that they should go back and tie the knot. We now have the same journey from Molly’s perspective, which sees her reject a mysterious and rich admirer in favour of continuing her wacky search for Edward. There’s always the nagging sense here that the ripe central storyline is the aspect of the film that Gomes and his writing committee (Mariana Ricardo, Telmo Churro and Maureen Fazendeiro) are least interested in, and unlike with Tabu, he gives us very little to be able to truly invest in the characters and their seemingly random peregrinations.

The film’s spry literary voiceover switches language in tandem with each new destination, emphasising the notion that all stories are different depending on who’s telling them, and where they are. Yet Grand Tour never settles on a tone or an obvious seam of enquiry that allows for a satisfying entry point into the often-dazzling material, its most successful moments of primal emotion coming from its ironic use of pop and classical standards. There is definitely some of the old Gomes magic here, but things just doesn’t feel as potent or intoxicating as usual.

Oliver Stone’s latest documentary is about two men: the titular Lula, and Oliver Stone. It is 2022 and the American filmmaker reunites with the Brazilian politician for the first time since 2009’s South of the Border, Stone’s attempt to chronicle the Pink Tide that saw South America lean into left-wing governments and more socially and economically progressive leaders.

In the fifteen years since that last meeting, much has changed in Brazil (and South America). With Lula, Stone sets out to better understand how the country he left many years ago, one that venerated the man at its helm, could so violently turn their backs on its leader. How could one of the greatest rising modern democracies fall into the hands of fascism? This is, of course, a great, pertinent question, but Stone is much more interested in being the man with the answers than he is in the answers themselves.

The documentary is structured around an interview between Lula and Stone recorded soon after the politician was released from 18 months of unlawful imprisonment and right before the presidential election that would lead to his third mandate. The two speak via an interpreter, a level of separation that is not an issue in itself but emphasises the expanding gulf that lies between the men. Stone’s gaze — both physical and cinematic — is unfocused and ever-shifting, and the questions that he asks are superficial, a guiding frame concocted solely to be interwoven with the archival material of Lula’s rise and demise.

The footage shows Lula as a small boy growing up in the Northeast of Brazil as one of many children raised by a single mother with little means. Like many other Northeasterners in the 1950s, the Silvas leave their homeland for the promises of São Paulo, Lula quickly becoming the family’s breadwinner through money made as a steelworker. It is the steel company’s union that first entices the young worker into a life of politics and ushers in the birth of the Labour Party he would come to spearhead.

Barack Obama once called Lula “the most popular politician in the world”, and it is easy to see why. Beyond the president’s groundbreaking socially-focused initiatives that lifted 20 million people out of poverty, Lula is just a very, very likeable guy. He speaks candidly and beautifully about his commitment to the people and his calling as a leader, both a privilege and a curse. When Stone prods at Lula’s relationship with the American government, the president answers in a refreshingly candid way. Hilary Clinton hates South America; Bush was a better partner than Obama; the US wants nothing but to keep Brazil in its place as a tame, third-world colony.

One would think hearing all of this spoken with such clarity would elicit at least a sliver of self-reflection from Stone, who purposefully inserts himself in the frame as the equally relevant counterpart in this conversation, but that epiphany never comes. The filmmaker then enlists journalist Glenn Greenwald, yet another American with a famous interest in Brazil, to help elucidate Brazil’s fall into the hands of Bolsonaro and the right-wing movement. The conversation between the two Americans plays as an over-extended YouTube explainer, Stone sitting awkwardly on a wooden bench parallel to Greenwald as his lack of knowledge on the subject grows clearer and clearer.

During his Lula introduction at Cannes, Stone claimed his film would endear the politician to the agnostics and downright opposers. That he was saying that to a room very clearly filled with nothing but passionate supporters says much about the film he was about to present, yet another effusive pat in the back from an American director whose uncurious, self-congratulatory gaze does very little justice to the legendary man he sets out to portray.

Every work of art begins with a question. With Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino asks: What if a woman was hot?

In Neapolitan lore, Parthenope — derived from the Greek “Parthenos” meaning “virgin” — is a mermaid or siren whose passions resulted in the founding of Naples. In this film, Parthenope is another legendary beauty (played by Celeste Dalla Porta), born in a water birth, in the Bay of Naples. She is the city itself, and the film moves through the decades of her life in a series of mythic vignettes which illustrate ideas about the ache of beauty and the fleetingness of youth; of the insatiable yearning of desire, for sex or understanding; and of the contradictions and crumbling grandeur of the city, personified in an early insert shot of a classical marble bust missing the lower half of its face.

Parthenope enjoys her bittersweet days of prematurely nostalgic youth on an island vacation with her childhood playmate, the besotted son of the family maid, and her moody older brother, with whom she revels in a caressing and quasi-incestuous relationship until his suicide carves out in her a void that persists throughout the rest of her wanderings. Studying at the university — L’Università degli Studi di Napoli — she starts down the academic track, under the mentorship of a crusty professor who sees the spark of genius in her sadness and dissatisfaction, with plentiful digressions: during a brief acting career, she meets a bitter and bewigged Sophia Loren manque named Greta Cool (she “adores anal sex,” it is rumored); she witnesses the union of two Camorra families’ son and daughter, consummated in a basement in front of dozens of eager witnesses; she tarries a while with the vain and worldly priest who carries out the Miracle of San Gennaro, draping her nude body in the church’s cache of jewels. The action continues up to at least one documentary shot of the public celebrations for SSC Napoli’s 2023 scudetto, which Sorrentino posits as a beloved but dismal city’s return to a vanished glory.

It’s like pulling teeth to derive either a story or a thesis from all these chapters, which are alternately airy and abstract or ostentatious and obscure. The film could best be likened to one of Fellini’s episodic late-period burlesques, but played at half speed — it’s outrageously pretentious, but too dozy and sun-drunk to even read as campy. Gary Oldman shows up in expat linen suits as John Cheever, who gives Parthenope some drunken-sage advice (“Desire is a mystery, and sex its funeral”) but, in line with the film’s soporific rhythms, I swear you can catch him nodding off during one of the interminable pauses between his line readings.

Parthenope is an honors graduate in anthropology with an insatiable curiosity about the world, but more observed than observer: as played by Dalla Porta, she moves regally and alluringly, as if aware that every set of eyes in the room is constantly on her. She remains passive, sphinxlike and inscrutable — men asking her what she’s thinking is a refrain throughout the film. Dressed in slinky disco dresses with plunging necklines, she’s often seen staring out at the sea or back at the camera, leaning back from it teasingly with a bemused or beatific expression on her face; she wanders through tableaux of beautifully dressed extras while the film’s incredibly languorous tone-poem coloratura horn section washes over you, or while characters speak past each other in weighty but nonsensical aphorisms. What Sorrentino is after isn’t acting, it’s posing; it’s not dialogue, it’s slogans; it’s not a narrative, it’s a vibe — it’s not a scene, it’s an editorial shoot for a luxury brand.

Though this is his seventh film at Cannes, and Il Divo won the Jury Prize here in 2008, the film festival with which Sorrentino is most strongly associated is Toronto, where his Bulgari ad starring Anne Hathaway, Zendaya and a peacock plays before every public screening to ironic applause. Though the much longer film, Parthenope hardly extracts more substance out of its recurrent scenes in which a hypnotized camera trails a beautiful woman in glamorous clothes as she walks dreamily through a villa, trailing an arm behind or giving a sultry, wistful look over her shoulder. “In the search for wonder, there are no endings, only new beginnings” is a line from the Bulgari ad; “love as a means of survival has been a failure… or maybe not” is a line from Parthenope. It could just easily be the other way around.