Cannes 2024: Emilia Pérez, Three kilometers to the end of the world, captivated by the tides | Festivals and awards

So, on one level, “Emilia Pérez” deserves to be appreciated as a filmmaker’s effort to completely shift gears. Audiard fully commits to a big-screen, mostly Spanish-language production that flops: there’s a musical number about vaginoplasty and rhinoplasty; shortly after, there is a song in which Rita tries to convince a doctor from Tel Aviv (Mark Ivanir) to travel to Mexico to meet his client. The film further follows the friendship that develops between Rita and former drug lord, Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón), after they reconnect four years later in London. (Gascón makes the most of the scene in which she reveals her identity to a Rita who doesn’t recognize her; she could well be in the conversation for the festival’s best actress award.) Emilia tries to repent for her past murders and to reunite with his wife (Selena Gomez) and children. Having spent years living in snowy Switzerland, they also don’t know who Emilia is, and it’s in these twisty family scenes – with Emilia acting as aunt to her own children – that the film feels most like in Almodovar.

But then again, if this were actually an Almodóvar film, it would seem a lot less unexpected. In Audiard’s hands, this feels like a big turning point: a film willing to risk looking ridiculous to pursue its lyrical ambitions. If “Emilia Pérez” is madness, it is, as the director says, impersonal. This becomes more evident in the second half, once the novelty of the film’s style has worn off and Audiard must dutifully attend to the mechanics of the plot.

For a modern opera that has managed to become big and weird, we only need to go back to Cannes three years ago with “Annette,” Leos Carax’s collaboration with Sparks. And for a splurge, well, we had one two days ago with “Megalopolis,” and the comparison is instructive. For all that it may seem clumsy or inert, “Megalopolis” feels like a film straight from the mind of Francis Ford Coppola and projected onto the screen; it is full of his private, historical, political, literary and cinematographic concerns. “Emilia Pérez” has more polish and pizzazz, but it feels like something Audiard worked on as a challenge, not an obsession.

Likewise, “Three kilometers to the end of the world” is a perfectly solid drama with a haunting machine-tool quality. Directed by Emanuel Parvu, who has a longer track record as an actor (Miracle of 2022) than as a director, the film focuses on a slowly building crisis and which fits perfectly into the films of the Romanian New Wave of the last two decades. Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea), a 17-year-old boy, is violently attacked one night. But efforts to arrest the culprits face a series of investigative and bureaucratic hurdles. Then it becomes clear that Adi was beaten because he is gay. This revelation, new to his parents (Bogdan Dumitrache and Laura Vasiliu), suddenly upsets the priorities of the town’s homophobic residents. Who cares about holding violent thugs accountable when there is – horror – a homosexual to deal with?