In his debut feature Charlie Polinger riffs on The Lord Of The Flies but makes it entirely his own and pertinent to today’s politics, social media pile-ons and the cowardice of allowing cruelty to another to ensure one’s own safe passage. An adolescent study in social hierarchy and coercion, The Plague is what the 12 and 13 year old boys at a 2003 water polo camp call the rash that one of their number has developed during the summer. Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) is a ‘weird kid’, and his skin condition is deemed to be highly contagious by ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) who has already bullied a boy over it in a previous summer session. When mild-mannered Ben (Everett Blunck) turns up, the fractured dynamics in his home and a speech impediment make him self-protect – he’d rather allow cruel taunts and ostracising than make a stand. Their coach (Joel Edgerton) is no ally anyway. A well-meaning man who sees unkindness as a right of passage based on his own high school experiences, he may shout at the group about compassion but he’s not willing or able to do anything about it.
Spooky Pictures
Foreboding sound design, score and cinematography make The Plague an uneasy watch from the start, the muffled underwater world of a swimming pool strafed with diving boys, the queasy chlorinated lighting of locker rooms and dark corners of a brutalist sports centre. This is a world of hard surfaces and no digital escape via cell phones or social media. The claustrophobic society created in the changing rooms and dorms is what we, and Ben, are stuck with as Jake smirkingly controls the group by picking apart any perceived weakness. Ben can’t pronounce his ‘t’s, cannot enunciate ‘stop’, so is christened ‘Soppy’ and ridiculed for his vegetarianism. It’s enough to not want to make him protest as Eli is humiliated in the lunch room, showers and, in a particularly vulnerable moment, when the arrival of girls causes an embarrassing reaction.
Polinger teases horribly recognisable performances out of his young cast; Blunck’s panic is infectious while Rasmussen is unexpected in every scene as a boy who is being bullied for being different but trying to own it. A moment where he dances like nobody’s watching (even though every one is) is heartbreaking and triumphant. But the standout is Martin who wears a knowing smile most of the time and has charisma to burn. Playing like a young Michael J Fox turned feral, he has a sweet face, a smart mouth and the instincts of a killer. The way his lips curl as he detects fallibility, ready to weaponise it, is the stuff that haunts all our memories of adolescence. And the ease with which his controlled community abuses a teammate is something we can all recognise in all social groups, both intimate and global. Ben’s ultimate question of ethics is one posed to every audience member.
Spooky Pictures
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of SPOOKY PICTURES The Plague premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
Photography by LAKIN OGUNBANWO Words by JANE CROWTHER
‘I will see you in dreams,’ says one of the delightfully cheeky children at the heart of this haunting tale of hindsight, loss, identity and love from Akinola Davis jr. The film, co-written by Davies and his brother, Wale, is like a vivid dream; loaded with so much evocative imagery that one can practically smell the food cooking in the teeming streets of Lagos, feel the heat from the dusty road and taste the salt of the beach where a key moment plays out. It is a loving portrait of both West Nigeria and a parent who comes sharply into focus when remembered on one adventurous day in 1993.
Lakin Ogunbanwo/BBC Films
The father in question, Fola (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù), is largely absent from the lives of two brothers, Akin and Remi (Godwin Chimerie Egbo and Chibiuke Marvellous Egbo) who live in a rural town, constantly awaiting the return of both their parents from work. One day, as the wind whispers through the trees and fruit rots on the ground, Dad arrives home. As he moves through the house alighting on various personal possessions, he brusquely suggests his sons accompany him on his trip into the capital to collect money owed to him from shift work. The three of them squash into a bus for the journey but amid the petrol shortages and political unrest of the recent elections, it breaks down. Now begins the real odyssey, as the trio hitchhike to Lagos and are consumed within its messy, chaotic, bright and busy centre – zipping around on motorbikes, hanging out with Dad’s friends, visiting a closed-down fairground, watching the city hold its breath waiting for the election results in a bar as beer bottles sweat.
Lakin Ogunbanwo/BBC Films
Daddy suffers from nosebleeds, has an unspoken past and is wary of the soldiers patrolling the streets with watchful eyes. His trauma and possible infidelity flutter within the periphery of a day that crystallises both boys’ image of their father. In their jumbled recollection Fola is a stern parent, a swimming teacher, a protector, a provider, hurt by his own childhood and filled with hope for better days, politically and personally. He feels so fully formed by all the aspects of himself coming together during this day, that a stunningly beautiful beach scene begins an emotional ache that lingers to the final, sorrowful moments. Throughout, decay and rot is catalogued via decaying fruit, bones, the circling of vultures – and once linked by a deft foreshadowing twist, Davis’ film packs real emotional punch.
Dìrísù is magnificent in a role that may see him on the same trajectory as Paul Mescal when he arrived in Cannes with Aftersun, ably supported by plucky performances by his young co-star brothers. The film also makes non-fiction history in being the first Nigerian film to be in competition at the festival, despite the power of Nollywood. And what a gorgeous, evocative, smart and tender portrait of Nigeria and a family it is.
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
The British actor who leads Wes Anderson’s latest ensemble tells Hollywood Authentic about landing her role in The Phoenician Scheme and experiencing her inaugural Cannes.
Attending the Cannes Film Festival for the first time is ‘adrenaline-pinching’ according to Mia Threapleton. ‘It does feel quite daunting, primarily because I’ve not done that many red carpet things ever, actually,’ she laughs. ‘But it is also incredibly exciting and amazing that that is where the film is going to be seen by so many people for the first time. That, for me, is the most exciting thing.’
Though she has been acting for a while – impressing in BAFTA winning I Am Ruth and last year’s The Buccaneers – Threapleton takes centre stage in Wes Anderson’s all-star latest where she plays Liesl, the pipe-smoking, sardonic, nun daughter of Benicio Del Toro’s business mogul. It promises to be a performance and project that skyrockets her. ‘It was actually a very intense auditioning process over about six months,’ she recalls of pursuing the role. ‘The first email I was sent was extremely scant. There was no information on the character. The only name as far as the character that I had to go off was ‘young girl’. I self-taped and several meetings down the line, I had a screen test, and met the wonderful Benicio del Toro. [Anderson] gave me a little bit of an explanation: ‘You haven’t seen your father for six years, and you’ve lived in a convent for the majority of the life that you can remember living. You have some very full-on, unanswered questions…’ And I found out 24 hours later that I had the job.’
That job saw the 24 year-old joining a cast including many of Anderson’s repeat collaborators including Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeffery Wright – and a steep learning curve in the director’s inimitable style. ‘He does have a very particular style. But, actually, when it comes to the acting, he really loves things to be as natural as possible. There’s lots of other opportunities within the scene to try a couple of different beats. So what you end up seeing is basically one of the many, many versions that we do. I think 20 takes was maybe our absolute lowest. On one of our first days, we did 69 takes.’ The experience was something she says she’s still getting her head around. ‘It just feels so surreal and equally amazing to have been able to have been a part of something like this with all the people – unbelievably talented people – cast, crew members, camera team, film team, props team, sound design, set design. I don’t think it really sunk in.’
Though Threapleton is the daughter of Kate Winslet, working with such a group of established actors must have provided plenty of useful instruction on how to navigate the precarious waters of acting. She laughs and recalls how she would observe her castmates in action to learn, even on her days off. ‘I would cycle into set and hide under tables, or Wes would point at a plant pot, and say, ‘Go hide over there. That’s a good place to hide today’. I remember having a really lovely conversation with Michael Cera, who plays Professor Bjorn. It was during a scene where we’re sat in a train car talking to each other, and then outside there’s everyone else playing basketball: Benicio, Brian [Cranston], Riz [Ahmed], Tom [Hanks]. I remember Michael turning to me and going, ‘This is so amazing. This is never going to happen again. This is crazy’. We just sat looking at each other, laughing; ‘What are we doing here? This is insane.’ It felt like summer camp every day.’
She recently saw the film ahead of its Cannes premiere and was amazed anew by the calibre of the cast and project. ‘The second that the opening credits rolled, I burst into tears. I couldn’t really believe what it was that I was seeing. There’s so much excitement, adrenaline and anticipation for seeing something like this, that everybody worked so hard on, and that you really care about. And it was so surreal watching this thing in front of me – ‘Oh God, that’s my face. That’s a lot of my face. Oh my God!’ It was overwhelming in the most amazing way possible.’
With a second series of The Buccaneers in the can, Threapleton is aware that Cannes will be a moment that could change her career and opportunities. So what projects is she looking for in the wake of her festival debut? ‘I don’t know if I really have a bucket list. What excites me so much about this job is the amount of incredible, creative people that are out there who want to tell really cool stories.’ Hollywood Authentic wonders how her perception of the industry has changed since her first experience of filming as a little girl on Alan Rickman’s A Little Chaos. ‘I don’t think it’s changed, and I don’t think it will change. I just feel like a little sponge with everything. Then I was just wanting to absorb all of it and I still do now. I like the fact that I still have so many things to learn.’
As a child who grew up with a working understanding of acting, has she ever been given advice that has helped her on her journey so far? ‘“Actually, I didn’t grow up with an understanding of acting necessarily. I really didn’t grow up on a film set at all. I can count on both hands the amount of times I went into work as a kid. But I think I was always just told, you know, ‘Do the work. Work hard on it, and concentrate’. I’ve tried to do that as best I can.’
The Phoenician Schemepremiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival Mia wears Oscar de la Renta
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
Jennifer Lawrence’s abrasive new film – which she co-produced and stars in – may not reflect her own experience of motherhood, but the choice to take it on was certainly informed by it. Lawrence made the movie about postpartum psychosis with filmmaker Lynne Ramsay between having her two children (she was five months pregnant during filming) and told Cannes press that ‘having children changes everything. It changes your whole life, but it’s brutal and incredible’. The project, she said, ‘deeply moved’ her.
Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence
In the film Lawrence plays Grace, a young woman who moves into an isolated Montana farmhouse with her boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson), where she falls pregnant. When the baby arrives Grace is locked in a rinse-and-repeat pattern of feeding and changing while Jackson goes off the work, her writing ambition stalled and her grip on reality growing tenuous. Filled with rage, frustration and the need to be seen as a sexual being and not just a mother, Grace becomes erratic and violent, confounding her partner and his recently widowed mother (Sissy Spacek). Conjuring a sexual fantasy with a mysterious biker (LaKeith Stanfield) and desperate to feel something – pain, orgasm, passion – other than the numbness of a mothering routine, she wants to set her world alight. As the end credits song (performed by Ramsay) attests, ‘Love will tear us apart’…
Lynne Ramsay
Though Grace finds motherhood opens her up to self-destruction and chaos, Lawrence says that her children have helped her access more of herself as an actor. ‘I didn’t know that I could feel so much, and my job has a lot to do with emotion, and they’ve opened up the world to me. It’s almost like a blister or something, so sensitive. So they’ve changed my life, obviously, for the best, and they’ve changed me creatively. I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.’
The film is certainly something of a tour de force for Lawrence who spits, fights, claws and crawls through the role like a feral creature, Grace’s fantasies overlapping and pushing against her reality. It is a fever-dream representation of the confusion, fear and delirium of post-partum depression and psychosis which the actor admitted was a terrifying condition for any woman to experience. ‘There’s not really anything like postpartum… it’s extremely isolating. The truth is extreme anxiety and extreme depression is isolating no matter where you are. You feel like an alien.’
The film premiered to a nine-minute ovation in Cannes and looks to be another role that could net Lawrence awards buzz. The actor attended wearing custom Dior, an updated version of a 1949 Poulenc gown inspired by fans, and was photographed by Greg Williams in a rooftop suite of the Carlton Hotel overlooking the Croisette.
Die, My Love premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
No bodily fluid is left untouched in Kristen Stewart’s raw, unflinching poem to wetness, adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir. Adapted (with Andy Mingo) and directed by the actor with Imogen Poots as Stewart’s front-of-camera proxy playing Lidia, it charts the non-linear, tortured path of a girl who is sexually abused by her father and finds sanctity in the chlorinated depths of her school swim team. Her prowess in the pool is what sets her free to some degree, taking her away from a somnambulist mother and her father’s fingers to college where sex, drugs and the healing power of writing led to pregnancy, addiction, self destruction and the redemption of art. And always there is immersion in water: in baths, lakes, pools, showers, rain. ‘In water, like in books,’ Lidia intones in one of many overlapping, murmured voiceovers offered like dream-state remembrances, ‘you can leave your life.’
Told in four chapters, it explores the legacy of trauma, the physical/emotional pain of losing a child, BDSM and the difficulty and release of becoming an artist. A writer from childhood, Lidia’s confronting prose finds purpose when she joins a writer’s class with author Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) at the University Of Oregon. But can she trust an older man who values her work? Or is he another predatory male? And does the sweet college boy who becomes her partner (Earl Cave) deserve the disdain she literally spits in his face?
Impressionistic yet graphic, The Chronology of Water shows a woman experiencing all her body is capable of: female ejaculation, excretion, birth, orgasm, destruction. And It seems that Stewart pours all of the teaching she’s gained from the dazzling array of filmmakers she’s worked with as an actor into the production of a woozy, elemental, bruising mood piece that is like its protagonist; messy, unbridled, in need of structure. Stewart has described her film presented to Cannes as a ‘first draft’ and in that regard it could use some corralling; but equally, like Lidia, it shows fierce potential. As Kesey notes, ‘you can write, girl’.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photography courtesy of Scott Free Productions The Chronology of Water premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
‘Hindsight,’ runs Eddington’s tagline on its poster depicting buffalo tumbling off the side of a cliff, ‘is 2020’. For Ari Aster’s latest, that means training his quirky eye on America, linking where we are now to events of 2020 when Covid bred paranoia, conspiracy and MAGA like a socio-polical petri dish. Popping the pandemic in a neo-noir Western set in the appellative New Mexico town during May of that year, Aster picks at virtue signalling, bandwagonning, social media, fake news, radicalisation, trauma and first amendment jingoism via the moral and emotional meltdown of the town sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix).
A mild-mannered chap in a fraught marriage to his doll-making, damaged wife Lou (Emma Stone) and living with his conspiracist mother-in-law (Deidre O’Connell), Joe is law-abiding until medical mandates come around. An asthma-sufferer, the sheriff does not believe anyone should wear a mask if they don’t want to (or that Covid is a real threat) and clashes with mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). The two men have history involving Lou and Joe is fired up enough to run for office against his romantic rival, leaning into NRA/MAGA sentiments and further losing his rag when Lou brings home a charismatic cult leader (Austin Butler) and gazes at him in a way she hasn’t looked at her husband in many moons. Suddenly, this is no longer a movie in the vein of John Sayles’ Lone Star and takes an Asterian turn to something darker, more febrile and explosively ludicrous. As Aster films go, it’s less challenging than the big swings of Beau Is Afraid but not as startlingly fresh as Hereditary.
Peppered with as many fatalities as delicious performances, Eddington is surprisingly droll, luridly violent and has the prescience to use a Katy Perry song in a film that worries about the potential stranglehold of big tech in all aspects of life. (The proposed data bank that promises infrastructure and jobs for the area looms throughout as bellwether commentators warn of political control, ecological impact and wealth disparity.) There’s gallows humour to be found as characters declare Covid is ‘not a here problem’, espouse the virtues of Bitcoin and watch TikTok videos as news. The ranting homeless man who staggers into town at the start muttering incoherently about perceived wickedness is no longer the anomaly as ideologies burn brighter, fuelled by misinformation, frustration and ultimately, actually gasoline.
This is an accomplished cast so it’s no surprise that Phoenix holds focus despite playing an insubstantial man with shifting morals, ably supported by Pascal (stoic), Stone (fragile), Butler (scene-stealingly slithery) and Michael Ward, faultless as an ambitious sheriff department officer who becomes a pawn. Nothing so horrific as the decapitation of Hereditary, but Eddington offers a seething discomfort in recognising the start of the slip towards the dumpster-fire rolling-news reality we now live in. Which is truly terrifying.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photography courtesy of A24 Eddington premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
Student Alice is used to being picked up and brushed off by her parents whenever she stumbles. Though we never see her, we hear and know about her via her parents; over-protective Frank (Matthew Rhys) and his exasperated paramedic wife Maddie (Rosamund Pike). Early in the small hours, Alice calls her sleep-deprived mum in a panic – she has taken her dad’s car and driven to the titular road in a nearby forest where she’s accidentally knocked over a pedestrian. The parents jump into Maddie’s car to reach her, their SatNav informing them of the distance to reach their daughter while an increasingly upset Alice keeps them abreast over the speakerphone of the terrible, fatal mess she’s got herself into.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Essentially a real-time bottle episode in the vein of Locke, Hallow Road then unfurls, one mile and minute at a time, in the car as the couple struggle to help their child remotely, question their parenting and reveal the fractured family dynamic that preceded Alice storming out of the house earlier. And as the country roads become more labyrinthine and dark, a folk horror aspect begins to hover over proceedings as both parents’ psychological secrets come to the fore.
Hallow Road starts with a warning – a battery depleted smoke alarm chirruping – and grows in tension and disquiet as Rhys and Pike master myriad emotions while the green dashboard light casts a queasy hue over their distraught faces. To give more detail would be to spoil, but if you’re familiar with director Babak Anvari’s previous work in Under The Shadow, the fact that the crisis at the start of this thriller morphs to something more primal and primordial at its close should come as no surprise. Like the fraught relationship between parents and daughter (voiced by Megan McDonnell), there is something else going on in the trees – what exactly is open to interpretation by each viewer. And, based on a post-credit sting, those interpretations will not necessarily align.
Playing like a lost episode of Inside No 9, this disorientating, brisk thriller is an easy way to spend 80 minutes this weekend while also opening conversations of guilt, grief, helicopter parenting and the inherent creepiness of deep, dark woods.
In case you missed the previous instalment, The Final Reckoning begins by ensuring viewers are on the right page with this adventure, kicking off a couple of months after the events of Tom Cruise’s 2023 summer blockbuster. Now Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) hair is longer, his tech whiz Luther (Ving Rhames) is ill and the rogue AI threat, The Entity, has plunged the world into chaos. The Entity plans to initiate a world wipeout via armageddon by taking control of the nuclear codes of all nations, the only way to stop it is to retrieve its source code from the bottom of the Arctic ocean where it’s trapped in a crashed Russian sub (seen in Dead Reckoning) and then play out a complicated game of digi cat-and-mouse. The only person who can complete this mission is Hunt – appealed to by the US president (Angela Bassett) – and the thorn in his side is Big Bad Gabriel (Esai Morales) who holds a vital piece of the plan. The mission is literally world-saving and it triggers Hunt’s memories of all the people he’s lost and all the crazy stuff he’s done across seven previous films. Cruise and his co-conspirator/producer/director Christopher McQuarrie set this chapter up as a swan song (but is it really?), and ensure it goes out with a bang.
Courtesy of Paramount PicturesCourtesy of Paramount Pictures
As is now expected of Cruise, The Final Reckoning ups the ante on stunts that its star completes personally, his face clearly visible as his body is battered by water and G-force. While there’s plenty of globetrotting, trademark running, mask removal, double crossing and bomb defusing, the big ticket here are two set-pieces in which Cruise and cinematic innovation are pushed to their limits. After a series of fights and escapes, Hunt embarks on solo deep diving to the Russian submarine, his chance of drowning immeasurable due to depth, location, temperature. Add to that a sub that is glitchy and moving on the Baring seabed, and the sequence becomes literally breathtaking as Hunt is trapped in the oceanic version of a freezing washing machine as his oxygen depletes. The production built the world’s deepest and largest water tank at Longcross studios and devised new diving masks to show Cruise’s face to complete the scenes for real, and it translates. It’s a claustrophobic, teeth-clenching watch.
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
It’s no spoiler to mention the finale – promotion quite rightfully leans hard into the vintage bi-plane sequence which see Cruise clinging to the spindly wings of not one, but two different swooping, diving and barrelling planes with South Africa’s stunning Drakensberg Mountains flying beneath him. His face flapping in the G-force, his body weightless as the planes invert, this is another breath snatching moment (certainly for Cruise trying to suck a breath in hurricane-level wind resistance) and provides some much needed levity. There’s a reason Hunt is costumed like Indiana Jones at this point – it’s the sort of delirious der-doing that evokes classic cinema. It’s worth the ticket price alone.
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Though the extended IMF team play a part in proceedings (a bow-out adds emotional resonance), they are certainly second fiddle, facilitators to the Hunt show. That may disappoint fans who enjoyed the previous spike of Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff). Via additional characters the movie champions the unpredictability of human nature, the concept of being on the right side of history despite the rules, the celebration of the rebel, the maverick. That’s seen in Bassett’s POTUS, Hannah Waddington’s aircraft carrier Admiral and Tramell Tillman’s sub captain who likes to call everyone ‘mister’ (bringing Jeff Goldblum levels of deliciously unexpected line delivery). But the star is certainly Cruise, his previous M:I incarnations celebrated in flashback montages and his character praised continuously by his team. ‘Only you can do this,’ he is constantly told, and when you see Cruise dangling off the corner of a vintage Boeing Stearman as it flips around a canyon, you might have to agree.
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
As he prepares to release his eighth (and final?) instalment of the Mission: Impossible series, Tom Cruise brings the action to Cannes.
Just as he brought Top Gun: Maverick to Cannes in 2022, the world’s biggest movie star returned to the Croisette this year to deliver his eighth Mission: Impossible film, The Final Reckoning, to the Palais. Stopping to sign autographs and greet fans on the red carpet (where an acapella group sang the film’s theme tune), Cruise’s latest actioner garnered a 6 minute standing ovation when it premiered.
Earlier in the day he made an unbilled appearance at a Q&A with Mission director Christopher McQuarrie who credited the actor/producer with keeping him in the film business. Cruise’s enthusiasm for cinema, McQuarrie told the crowd, was a turning point. ‘When I met him, I was going to quit the business.’ The duo have made 11 films together since and have developed a shorthand together figuratively, and on the latest film, literally – as Cruise completed death defying stunts while underwater in a groundbreaking submarine set as well as dangling from the wings of a vintage bi-plane over South Africa’s Drakensberg Mountains.
Final Reckoning rejoins the narrative a few months after the action of Dead Reckoning as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt comes to terms with losses from their team and the fallout of an agent called Gabriel (Esai Morales) trying to control an AI programme called ‘the entity’. The team must reassemble to find the source code for the AI in an attempt to stop it from triggering all-out global nuclear war. Known for completing his stunts himself, Cruise is battered in a rolling submarine on the ocean floor and fights negative Gs and incredible physical strain on his body on the wings of a vintage Boeing Stearman. During their joint on-stage chat, McQuarrie admitted that at one point during filming he didn’t know if the actor was conscious or not during a take, fearing for his life as the pilot could not land the plane with him on the wing. Luckily, Cruise rallied, climbed to the cockpit and the plane and performer landed safely.
Not such worries at the Carlton hotel on the Croisette when Greg Williams photographed Cruise balancing on a chair in his suite before walking the red carpet…
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
Paolo Sorrentino’s latest muse burns the screen up in Parthenope. Hollywood Authentic meets the Italian actor who made the leap from extra to lead to talk beauty, fame and the advice Gary Oldman gave her.
Sitting on the rooftop of the JW Marriott in Cannes, writer-director Paolo Sorrentino considers on his latest love letter to his home town of Naples. Why, he contemplates, did he choose to tell his story through the Greek myth of Parthenope (who precipitated the creation of the Bay of Naples) and focus on the siren at the heart of it? ‘What I wanted to do was to tell the story of a girl, a woman, from the moment she is born, to the moment in which she becomes an elderly person. What I really had at heart was telling how time changes us. And it does change us, even if we wear wonderful clothes.’ His currently leading lady certainly wears wonderful things in the sensual, smouldering film that almost gives audiences sunburn when watching. Sorrentino tells the tale of ‘70s Naples teen, Parthenope, born in water and drawn to the sea like a mermaid – seducing men without even trying as she puffs on cigarettes in a bikini, shimmers in sequins on the island of Capri and titillates in nothing but the ecclesiastical treasures of a horny cardinal.
Quite the ask of any actor, but especially for a newcomer who would have to go toe-to-toe with heavyweight performers such as Gary Oldman, playing real-life writer John Cheever, who is sozzled and depressed on Capri and sees pure beauty in Parthenope. ‘I looked at many Italian actresses,’ Sorrentino admits. ‘In reality, I found her quite soon, because I had already met and worked with Celeste. She was in The Hand of God as an extra. It took me some time to understand whether she was going to be able to handle the role. She had never played a main character.’
Celeste Dalla Porta, a Milan-born actor whose scene as a background artist had ended up on the cutting room floor, was up for the challenge of conveying the intelligence of Parthenope (she’s a shrewd student anthropologist) as well as her sensuality. ‘I had no doubts, but I was a little bit scared,’ Dalla Porta says, twisting the mermaid ring on her finger that belonged to her character in the film. ‘Once I accepted it, I started questioning myself: will I be able to do it? But I never had a doubt about the project because it’s such a revolutionary thing.’ Her fears about the role also extended to the fame that will surely come with the release of the film, and how her life may change. ‘I don’t know what is in store for me ahead. I’m a little bit scared. But this is what I want to do, and what I always wanted to do, to be an actress.’
I have learned a lot with [Gary Oldman]. He is this huge actor that is so open and so attentive. He paid a lot of attention. He listens to you
The experience of working with Sorrentino was, she says, expansive and supportive. ‘He’s a 360-degrees person. He has a very authentic way of being on set. He knows exactly what he wants, and he guides you to that. But I felt free working with him. Paolo gives freedom to his actors. Of course, they cannot change the story, and they cannot change the text. But he is a man who is really able to listen to what other people have to say, and to see.’ Oldman was also something of an artistic reference point during the process despite only working for a few days together. ‘I have learned a lot with him. He is this huge actor that is so open and so attentive. He paid a lot of attention. He listens to you. So, on a human level, it was also such a great experience.’
The idea of weaponised beauty is explored in the film as Parthenope leaves a trail of broken hearts in her wake. Though Dalla Porta is shot in stunning light and via an appreciative lens she doesn’t consider herself a beauty. ‘I don’t think Paolo picked me or chose me because I’m beautiful. Beauty can also be something ugly and is subjective, and something that changes over time. In Parthenope beauty is a metaphor for youth. And youth – we all remember it as something very beautiful. We think about it as something very beautiful, and something that we idealise. But then Parthenope grows up. She moves into another phase of her life, and that’s when the movie changes. There is a different photography and different people around her, and a different way of looking at her.’
Celeste Dalla Porta says goodbye to Gary Oldman
Having been the toast of Cannes when the film premiered at the festival last year, Dalla Porta is now looking for future projects. ‘I love Alice Rohrwacher. I find her to be a great, great artist, and I like her poetic way to see the world, and to tell stories. Ruben Östlund, I admire very much. Valerio Mieli – he made just a few films, but all of them talk about love. I’m super-romantic, and I love romanticism, and I love films that talk about love.’ As she navigates her way through her career she is also adhering to the advice Oldman gave to her about the business. As he tells Hollywood Authentic, their off-set relationship somewhat mirrored the one between their two characters, a mentor and a student. ‘The dynamic was very much like that with me and Celeste, because I’ve had this career, and I’m older. This is her first job, and she’s naïve. For Cheever, I think there’s an innocence and a purity that he can’t have back, that he can’t reclaim. Celeste will have an innocence and a purity that she will not be able to ever get back after this film comes out.’
Dalla Porta smiles as she recalls their chats on-set. ’He said that I have to protect what I have inside myself. I have to protect the beauty of simple things. That is something that we all have, and that we need to protect. It was very simple advice, but very important. If fame comes because you have made something that makes you feel happy inside, and it’s something you are happy with – why not? That’s what I want. And then people talk about the fame that is this kind of monster that is waiting…’ She shrugs. ‘I try to stay in the present, and to live in this moment.’
Written and directed by Academy Award Winner Paolo Sorrentino Starring, in alphabetical order: Dario Aita, Celeste Dalla Porta, Silvia Degrandi, Isabella Ferrari, Lorenzo Gleijeses, Biagio Izzo, Marlon Joubert, Peppe Lanzetta, Nello Mascia, Gary Oldman, Silvio Orlando, Luisa Ranieri, Daniele Rienzo, Stefania Sandrelli and Alfonso Santagata. A Fremantle film, an Italian-French co-production The Apartment – Pathé in association with Numero 10, in association with PiperFilm and Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello with Logical Content Ventures with the support of Canal+ with the participation of Cine+. Produced by Lorenzo Mieli for The Apartment, a Fremantle Group company, Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent, Paolo Sorrentino for Numero 10, Ardavan Safaee for Pathé. International Distribution: Pathé, Northern US Distribution: A24, Italian distribution: PiperFilm.
