“Cut!” is a cinema term which fits well with the 77th Cannes Film Festival, where excessively tortured bodies, hallmarks of gore, are featured in films. Powerful women remain at the forefront of this festival on May 22, 2024.

Films such as The Substance with Demi Moore in competition, directed by the French Coralie Fargeat, or Les femmes au balcon, also directed by a woman, highlight gore as a cinematographic language. Out of competition, Les femmes au balcon, by French actress-director Noémie Merlant, uses gore as a delightful outlet in this story of a female trio rebelling against patriarchy.

Three years after winning the Best Actress award for Julie (in 12 chapters), Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve impressed the Cannes Film Festival once again with one of the wildest laughter scenes ever filmed. Reinsve stars in Armand, presented in the Un Certain Regard section, about a famous single mother summoned to school where her young son is accused of abusing another boy. Directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tondel, grandson of cinema legends Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, the story takes unexpected psychological turns. A major turning point occurs when the main character begins to laugh nervously and uncontrollably. “It was a bit scary because I kind of lost control in my head,” Renate Reinsve told AFP about the scene. The director, making his debut, explained that the scene was based on his own embarrassing tendency to laugh in tense social situations like funerals. “I really liked the idea of this very rigid situation where someone completely loses control of themselves,” said Halfdan Ullmann Tondel. But when the actress read the line in the script, “I said it was impossible,” she recalled. Ultimately, they spent an entire day filming the scene, then gave her five days off to recover. “My body resisted… but when I crossed the threshold, I couldn’t stop,” she said. “It took me a long time to recover.”

Being Maria, presented out of competition at Cannes, revisits one of cinema’s most infamous scenes performed by Marlon Brando with Maria Schneider in the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris by Bernardo Bertolucci.

The audience is celebrating popular French cinema this Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival: a new adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas’ masterpiece. To condense the nearly 2,000 pages of the original work, the film (2h58, nonetheless) takes some liberties with the script, using multiple ellipses. Yet, it retains the epic breath and adventure pleasure, even including some Indiana Jones-style scenes.

Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, targeted by the Tehran regime, will personally present his film Les Graines du figuier sauvage at the 77th Cannes Film Festival after clandestinely fleeing his country, announced the festival’s general delegate Thierry Frémaux on Tuesday. The film, competing for the Palme d’or, is set to be presented on Friday, the day before the award announcements.

With AFP