The midway point of the Cannes Film Festival is almost here, and among the critics, a consensus seems to be forming that Maren Ade’s “Toni Erdmann” and Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey,” two of the three films directed by women in the main competition, are favorites for the Palme d’Or.“Toni Erdmann,” the first German entry in the running for the Palme d’Or since Wim Wenders’s “Palermo Shooting,” in 2008, received rapturous reviews after reportedly inspiring applause midway through its press screening. Most critics are having trouble nailing down a plot synopsis for the 162-minute film, but Mike D’Angelo, writing for the A.V. Club, gave it a shot: “Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek), [is] a middle-aged German divorcé with a penchant for playing practical jokes. Winfried has one adult daughter, Ines (Sandra Hüller), who works in Bucharest for a consulting firm, and he decides to pay her an impromptu visit after his beloved dog passes away. When his constant gags (even around her colleagues and important clients) prove alienating, Winfried agrees to head home, and the film shifts its focus to Ines, … who’s soon being constantly greeted in public by a ‘life coach’ named Toni Erdmann, who’s just her father wearing fake bad teeth and a terrible wig.”Those familiar with Ade’s work had high hopes for this follow-up to her 2009 “Everyone Else,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and remains one of the best films of that decade. Even so, its reception has been both surprising and refreshing: It scored the highest rating ever on Screen International’s Jury Grid, which compiles critics’ responses to each film at the festival, and Sony Pictures Classics has already picked up the US rights. If it wins the Palme d’Or, it will be the most ambitious film to do so since a Tim Burton-led jury crowned Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” in 2010. Which isn’t to say that “Toni Erdmann” will take top honors, of course. So much depends on the makeup of the jury, and we have no clue to their responses, although we might be able, albeit pointlessly, to make some kind of prediction based on their own bodies of work.As for Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey,” a road movie starring Shia LaBeouf and newcomer Sasha Lane, Jessica Kiang wrote in the Playlist that the filmmaker “distills the very essence of youth, and along with a never-better Robbie Ryan as her cinematographer, serves up golden image after golden image as though dispensing amber shots of hard liquor.” Arnold, who previously directed “Fish Tank” and the latest adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” has shown an acute sensitivity in working with younger actors, but the instant reviews for “American Honey” are her most ecstatic and explosive. The film “is a jaggedly beautiful aesthetic object,” Justin Chang wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “[A]nd at two hours and 42 minutes, its accumulation of immersive details is meant to frustrate your sense of time passing. The subculture being examined here is a fascinating one, but long stretches of tedium, we come to understand, are also a significant part of the characters’ journey.”Chang added that “both [‘Toni Edrmann’ and ‘American Honey’] have their detractors, but you’d be hard-pressed to find two Palme d’Or contenders that feel more thrillingly, urgently and cinematically alive.”Critics have generally liked many of the other Palme d’Or contenders that have screened, including Jim Jarmuch’s “Paterson,” Alain Guiraudie’s “Staying Vertical,” and Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden.” Outside the main competition, films grabbing attention are Pablo Larraín’s “Neruda,” screening in Director’s Fortnight, a parallel festival, and Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Student,” in the Un Certain Regard sidebar of the main festival.At this point, negative opinion seems focused on another aspirant to the Palme d’Or, Nicole Garcia’s “From the Land of the Moon,” starring Marion Cotillard. The film, based on Italian author Milena Agus’s 2006 novella of the same name, is “the least-ambitious film this year’s competition has to offer,” according to Rory O’Conner, of the Film Stage. Jessica Kiang, writing in Variety, added that its “initially progressive inclination to explore the self-actualization process of a woman repressed by a loveless marriage and the social mores of 1950s France” never comes to fruition. “Instead we get this borderline pastiche of the French romantic melodrama.”There is still time, though, for a flat-out bomb to displace “From the Land of the Moon” at the bottom of everyone’s list. Will the audience turn on Cannes Golden Boy Xavier Dolan’s “It’s Only the End of the World”? What about Sean Penn’s “The Last Face”? Nicolas Winding Refn has yet to screen his latest, “The Neon Demon,” but the last time he was here, his “Only God Forgives” was received with a chorus of boos. The timid response thus far of the notoriously impolite foreign critics, who will reportedly scream and shout during screenings and make a scene of exiting the theater early, might just mean they are sharpening their knives, readying a vicious attack. We have a week to find out.
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