Cannes 2022: One Superb Morning, Brother and Sister, Mariupolis 2 | Festivals & Awards

If the ambiguities of “One Superb Morning” in some methods recall Éric Rohmer, “Brother and Sister” revives the pressure of Cassavetes that critics acknowledged in early Desplechin movies like “Esther Kahn.” For one factor, Alice (Marion Cotillard), an actress starring in a play based mostly on James Joyce’s The Useless, befriends a Romanian girl (Cosmina Stratan) who remembers the smitten fan at the beginning of Cassavetes’s “Opening Night time.”

However extra to the purpose, the dynamic between Alice and her brother Louis (Poupaud)—siblings who’ve refused to see one another for 20 years—is finest defined as a folie à deux, a state that outlined the lives of Cassavetes pairs from Minnie and Moskowitz to Mabel and Nick. Alice and Louis compulsively keep away from one another but discover methods to inflict wounds from afar, writing nasty books or responding with libel lawsuits over the writing. One other brother, Fidèle (Benjamin Siksou), the one sibling Alice will acknowledge, turns into a sort of hapless go-between.

To take pleasure in “Brother and Sister,” it’s a necessity to roll with Desplechin’s eccentric branching subplots and to simply accept that the film isn’t meant to be learn in a literal approach. The accident that units the plot in movement—involving a automotive and a truck dropping management on a quiet woodland street—certainly indicators that the film is working on an exaggerated degree. Certainly, the hatred between Alice and Louis is explicitly framed in biblical phrases. Which makes his low-key approach that Desplechin and Julie Peyr, his co-writer, resolve it appear all of the lighter. “Brother and Sister” is completely weird, but it surely’s additionally a return to kind. No different director does loopy fairly like Desplechin.

The documentary “Mariupolis 2” performs extra like a sequence of rushes from Mariupol, Ukraine, than a completed movie, as a result of it technically is not one. The director, the Lithuanian documentarian Mantas Kvedaravičius, was killed in Mariupol, Ukraine, in late March whereas engaged on the undertaking. (“Mariupolis,” his earlier documentary on Mariupol and the preventing in Jap Ukraine, premiered in 2016.) Kvedaravičius’s fiancée, Hanna Bilobrova, and the editor on the primary “Mariupolis,” Dounia Sichov, assembled the footage Kvedaravičius had shot on the time of his demise into this kind, introduced as an addition to the competition only a few days earlier than opening evening.

Given how troublesome communication with Mariupol has been for a lot of the conflict, the documentary is an important dispatch. It exhibits smoke-filled skies and neighborhoods decreased to rubble. Individuals pray in dimly lit shelters that is probably not round for lengthy, cook dinner on flame pits outdoors (with no homes, not to mention kitchens, to work with), and futilely attempt to clear up the world whereas ongoing mass devastation continues.