2025 Cannes Report Part 3: The Personal
Getting intimate: Die My Love, The Phoenician Scheme, Splitsville, Highest 2 Lowest, Sentimental Value
I detected four major through-lines in my nine days and sixteen movies at the Cannes Film Festival: plagues, politics, the personal, and the past.
The films I saw have much more nuance than can be described in just a word, but for the sake of helping you understand what these movies represented, this is the systemized classification I've come up with.
So far, we’ve covered plagues and politics. Be sure to check those out!!
So let’s continue this four-part series with the personal.
In this edition: Die My Love, The Phoenician Scheme, Splitsville, Highest 2 Lowest, Sentimental Value
The Personal
A few films I saw really honed in on interpersonal dynamics and family—some successfully plumbing this tricky topic and everything it comes with, and others less so.
Die My Love, a movie heralded by many, purchased at the festival by MUBI for $23 million, and starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, really didn’t work for me. This adaptation by Lynne Ramsay is all sound and fury with no substance. It’s about a woman in upstate…somewhere…dealing with postpartum depression.
If you’re not on the wavelength and buying into the threadbare setup, you might struggle to connect emotionally as I did. This is a film telling you how to feel through music, image, and a gonzo style of acting from J-Law, but it doesn’t congeal into much. If you’re not bought in, you’re basically just bearing witness to her acting wilder, doing more outlandish, cracked-up things.
Before the pitchforks come out—“You’re a man, you don’t get this”—trust me, I do. Similar topics have been covered much more effectively in a film like A Woman Under the Influence, starring Gena Rowlands, which has a story and real characters. Later this year comes Rose Byrne in a similar film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which I was also much more affected by.
By making this so out of place and time, it takes you out of the reality of the story. This just kept devolving into madness, and the deeper it went, the less on board I was. If you don’t want to take my word for it, you can find tons of other critics singing Die My Love’s praises, but I was unimpressed—especially with the multiple endings, as the film struggled to wrap itself up.
Much more satisfying was Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, which has all the filigrees, bells and whistles, and Rube Goldberg-isms of a Wes Anderson dollhouse but, again, has real personal feeling. This is, at its core, a father-daughter story. Wes told us at the press conference he and Roman Coppola made it for their daughters, to celebrate their relationships with them.
The movie stars Benicio Del Toro as an international magnate who, after surviving numerous assassination attempts, wants to bequeath his estate to his only living daughter, with whom he has to repair his relationship. This is Wes in adolescence mode—a bit of a fable, kind of like his Roald Dahl Netflix shorts, especially The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
While this lacks the profundity of Asteroid City, it’s still so much fun—so smoothly and tremendously crafted, with every frame showing new details that are delightful to dive into. Wes should not be dinged for making what he does, which is so challenging, look so easy. I can see Phoenician Scheme even gaining in estimation on rewatch. And to all those people saying they’re sick of Wes—forget ’em; the man continues to churn out entertainment and beauty in equal measure.
In a festival of really serious stuff, one of the few comedies I saw was Splitsville. This is a Neon release from Michael Angelo Covino, who wrote and directed The Climb, which stars Dakota Johnson, Adria Arjona, Kyle Marvin, and Covino himself. It’s a modern rom-com about open relationships, the requisite trials and tribulations, and the emotional chaos and warfare that come with wanting to bust out of monogamy. It’s quite a funny film, and it’s really impressive how Covino and Marvin’s script, Red Panda style, keeps so many plates spinning in midair.
But I kind of got the joke early and wasn’t finding that Splitsville was maintaining the excitement of its opening stretch—which is too bad, because I am always rooting for rom-coms, and I love the idea of this genre playing at Cannes. My audience adored this film (cast, crew, and Adria Arjona’s beau Jason Momoa being in the audience did help), and I could really see this being a sleeper hit for Neon when it comes out. It was just pretty good to me—but credit for trying to revive this genre in a fun way.
Clearly, family means everything to Spike Lee right now. At 68, he’s looking upon his legacy and his work and reflecting on that through Denzel Washington’s character in Highest 2 Lowest, this updating of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.
The story follows David King, aptly named, who looks down from his ivory tower at the world but gets knocked off his pedestal when his son is kidnapped—or is he? Another moral quandary for our characters to navigate as Denzel’s David King deals with the opinions and thoughts of those around him, specifically his driver, played by Jeffrey Wright, whose son is involved in the situation. A$AP Rocky makes a memorable turn as the villain of the piece, but this takes almost half a movie to kick into gear
.The first half was far too sentimental and soap opera-y, not helped by a treacly score that made this feel like a Lifetime movie. But around the midpoint mark, there’s a Puerto Rico parade set piece, and when this exits the building and hits the streets of New York — a delayed gratification that I think is purposeful — this really starts to hum and turns into crackerjack entertainment, with awesome acting from Denzel and the rest of the cast and Spike back in his bag.
That said, watching this, I couldn’t help but think of what this would’ve looked like if Spike directed it in 2000 or the mid-’90s. His films from that era, Summer of Sam, Bamboozled, and 25th Hour, had such an edge and mean streak. This unfortunately lacks those qualities.
Lastly, representing “The Personal” best and most luminously is Sentimental Value from Joachim Trier, whose follow-up to The Worst Person in the World also stars Renate Reinsve, here joined by Stellan Skarsgård as her director father and Elle Fanning as an American actress who comes between them.
Lest I spoil too much about the film, I’ll just say that it’s genuinely mature. It kind of reminded me of Drive My Car or the best of Woody Allen, like Hannah and Her Sisters, in that sense. It’s a comedy and a dramedy for adults, set in the modern world and understanding the foibles of humanity. It has elements of melodrama without being melodramatic.
The performances are great. The writing and filmmaking are naturalistic. It’s a slam dunk, and I can’t wait to return to it and pick up on more of the nuances and themes. This film is about so much—but it’s delivered in such a smooth, compelling package that you couldn’t be faulted for missing just how complex and intelligent it is.
Tomorrow, wrapping up with The Past