If the response to the competition has been muted thus far, then the immense quality of the sidebars has more than made up for it. Critics’ Week is one such sidebar, and this dispatch includes three works that are among the best films playing at Cannes. These are films from creatives who one can imagine will eventually have pictures in the competition, and in the case of Blerta Basholi, should probably already have one there. So let’s dive into her film first.
A fraught coming-of-age story set in Pristina, Kosovo, in the late 1990s, Blerta Basholli’s “Dua” cleverly navigates the tragedy of watching your country fall apart just as you’re coming into your own. Dua (Pinea Matoshi), a 13-year-old Albanian girl, is at the center of a maelstrom of teenage angst and cultural mourning experienced under Serbian violence.
Basholi, the filmmaker behind Kosovo’s 94th Academy Award submission “Hive,” smartly, however, doesn’t immediately dive into the oncoming turmoil. She opens quite cheekily with a teenage slow dance between Dua and another boy, set to Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose.” That party is broken up by the police, causing these kids to scatter through the streets like punk rockers rebelling against the man. Why are these cops pursuing these young teens so fervently? Basholi doesn’t immediately answer that question. Instead, she allows the world’s discrimination to surface organically.
Dua, we find, lives with an older brother and sister, her unemployed mother and father, in a household that requires odd jobs and government assistance to make ends meet. She has few friends, which makes her vulnerable against a local band of attacking Serbian hooligans and the sexual assault by an older, neighborhood Serbian man, which will eventually cause her to search for tools to defend herself. Her classmate Maki (Vlera Bilalli), a refugee from another country, inspires Dua to take up Judo, a sport that gives her some self-confidence to seek revenge.
From this point on, a lesser director would limit Dua’s perspective, allowing for the possibility that personally defiant acts—such as standing up to bullies—can stop wider horrors. Basholi doesn’t allow for such childlike fantasies to take hold. She’s given us a practical, observant protagonist, one who, even when she closes her eyes so she doesn’t hear cops beating up her father, still takes in the grisly information that surrounds her. Televised news and radio broadcasts further elucidate the precariousness of a people who feel abandoned by the world. Such violence forces many to flee and causes cracks and fissures to show in Dua’s once tight-knit family, putting Dua in a terrible position to absorb blows that are far beyond her age.
Matoshi, a revelation, magnificently oscillates between shrewd stoicism and carefree frivolity, giving equal weight to a cool stare and a beaming smile. Basholi operates with a similar dexterity, opting for immense scale when needed—particularly through her frenetic use of handheld—and for moments of cautious intimacy in character-based joy and sorrow. At every turn, “Dua” remains clear-eyed and honest. Because this film is not solely about the pain of losing control of your family and your country, though that feeling hits with incredible resolve, too. It’s also a film that firmly shows how that loss can be an emotional and psychological heartache of discovering that no amount of self-care can wholly overcome the effects of displacement and bigotry.
A gentle queer romance about two long-haul truckers that recalls “God’s Own Country” and “Je, tu, il, elle,” Pierre le Gall’s “Flesh and Fuel” is a fulfilling drive down a passionate road. The taut 90-minute journey, told with bracing ease, initially follows a quiet Étienne (Alexis Manenti) living a repetitive life: hauling goods to the same cities, cleaning himself with baby wipes in the same rest-stop bathrooms, and continually checking in with his dutiful dispatcher. He’s not married, but does have a sister and a nephew. He’s also deeply professional, chastising a new, young hire when he notices they lack care and precision.
Initially, there doesn’t appear to be much happening under Étienne’s stoic exterior. That is, until he goes cruising through the woods. There, he happens upon the Polish immigrant and fellow long-haul trucker Bartosz (Julian Swiezewski), beginning a relationship whose rapturous intensity is often separated by speed and distance.
“Flesh and Fuel” isn’t concerned with traumatizing audiences by resorting to leaning on emotionally and physically traumatic violence (though, to be clear, the cruising scene does alert viewers that such public sex carries a one-year jail sentence). Nor is it a coming-out story (Étienne and Bartosz’s families are quite open and supportive of their gayness). Instead, the film is merely and refreshingly a simple picture about two men who want to be together despite lacking the emotional tools to fully commit to one another.
“Flesh and Fuel” does deploy Étienne and Bartosz’s fitful romance to explore other subjects. Étienne’s company, for instance, is deemed “too expensive” by many European companies (they pay their drivers properly and allow for requisite time off). Étienne must shift toward hauling goods to England, which will take him further away from Bartosz. Consequently, Bartosz, an immigrant working for an exploitative company that requires him to drive far longer for significantly less pay, must cover more of Europe. The strain in their routes causes their harmonious relationship to buckle.
Moreover, the film doesn’t treat Étienne and Bartosz as outsiders among long-haul truckers; there appears to be a broader practice of queerness within this profession, allowing “Flesh and Fuel” to feel emotionally organic rather than thematically contrived. The only part that doesn’t work, funnily enough, is Étienne’s straight colleague, who feels more like a plot device than a fully fleshed-out person. Nevertheless, between Manenti and Swiezewski’s vulnerable performances, the film’s spirited score, and Gall’s trust in his actors, which culminates in a moving take that allows for a flurry of expressions to envelop Manenti’s face, “Flesh and Fuel” carries one’s heart for the long haul.
One of the more formally adventurous films in Critics’ Week is writer/director Bruno Santamaría Razo’s heartfelt queer coming-of-age story “Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building.” Told in bracing detail and with amusing vibrancy, Razo’s film begins to move intimately, using documentary and narrative as vehicles. It opens with Razo’s mother sitting on her bed recounting the moment when they believed the director’s father was dying. From here, we snap into the fictionalized narrative, wherein an 11-year-old Bruno (Jade Reyes), growing up in Mexico City in 1996, revels in living with his Bohemian parents, Mundo (Lázaro Gabino) and Diana (Sofia Espinosa).
Their home is open and cozy, filled with his father’s illustrations, several paintings, and many knick-knacks. Parents and children navigate freely through one another’s spaces and partake in lively parties. In one early scene, Mundo is doing his makeup while Bruno tries on crop tops. They will proudly parade through their home like a runway, basking in the frivolity of their family and community. Underneath their celebration awaits a heart-stopping diagnosis: Mundo has HIV. That existential news untethers the close bonds between Mundo and Diana, and even between Mundo and Bruno.
Following in the footsteps of “Aftersun” and “Blue Heron,” “Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building” doesn’t treat its autobiographical elements as hermetically sealed moments in time. Instead, there’s a winking artificiality to Razo’s approach that leans into the limitedness of his younger fictional self’s childlike perspective. As such, the strain in Mundo and Diana’s relationship is more acutely felt in the documentary elements than in the narrative, as though the present tense breaks the sheen of the past, in which even family tragedy doesn’t appear to fully upset Bruno’s childhood.
Instead, far greater attention, at least by the fictionalized Bruno, is paid to his queer awakening. At one point, he sneaks onto the set of “Romeo + Juliet,” which is filming in the nearby Templo del Purísimo Corazón de María and causes a constant barrage of helicopter noise in the film’s soundscape. Colorful wardrobes and delicate interpersonal relationships further elucidate Razo’s careful recollection of his queer awakening, as does Reyes’ ebullient performance as his fictional avatar. “Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building,” therefore, isn’t simply a parsing of imperative recollections from a rocky moment in one’s family history, but an eloquent excavation of a quiet personal pain that a child might register but is only fully understood in adulthood.
The contemporary Razo approaches those hard truths with tenderness, making his coming-of-age film as artistically powerful as it is achingly present.
