Category Archives: Thought for the Day

Stories of a Life | Redux | Cathy and Raymond’s 1970s European Adventure

September 7, 2024Essay, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life Redux, Thought for the Day, Unbelievable Truth, VanRamblings1974, britrail pass, cathy, danelle, european vacation, eurrail pass, jd salinger, raymond, susan, the laughing manRaymond Tomlin

Traveling on a train across Europe, with a Eurail Pass, in the 1970s

In the summer of 1974, Cathy and I traveled to Europe for a three-month European summer vacation, BritRail and Eurail passes in hand, this was going to be a summer vacation to keep in our memory for always.

And so it proved to be …

On another day, in another post evoking memories of our cross-continental European sabbatical, I’ll relate more stories of what occurred that summer.

Only 10 days prior to the event I am about to relate, Cathy and I had arrived in Lisbon, Portugal, alighting from a cruise liner we’d boarded in Southampton, England (passage was only 5£s, much cheaper than now).

After a couple of wonderful days in Lisbon, Cathy and I embarked on the first part of our hitchhiking sojourn throughout every portion of Portugal we could get to, finally traveling along the Algarve before arriving in the south of the country, ready to board a train to Spain.

Unfortunately, I developed some intestinal disorder or other, requiring rest and fluids.

Once Cathy could see that I was going to be fine, she left the confines of our little pensão to allow me to recover in peace, returning with stories of her having spent a wonderful day at the beach with an enthusiastic retinue of young Portuguese men, who had paid attention to and flirted with her throughout the day.

Cathy was in paradisiacal heaven; me, not so much.

Still, I was feeling better, almost recovered from my intestinal malady, and the two of us made a decision to be on our way the next morning.

To say that I was in a bad mood when I got onto the train is to understate the matter. On the way to the station, who should we run into but the very group of amorous young men Cathy had spent the previous day with, all of whom were beside themselves that this braless blonde goddess of a woman was leaving their country, as they beseeched her to “Stay, please stay.”

Alas, no luck for them; this was my wife, and we were going to be on our way.

Still suffering from the vestiges of both an irritable case of jealousy and a now worsening intestinal disorder, I was in a foul mood once we got onto the train, and as we pulled away from the station, my very loud and ill-tempered mood related in English, those sitting around us thinking that I must be some homem louco, and not wishing in any manner to engage.

A few minutes into my decorous rant, a young woman walked up to me, and asked in the boldest terms possible …

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

“Huh,” I enquired?

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth? That’s the filthiest mouth I’ve ever heard. You’ve got to teach me how to swear!”

At which point, she sat down across from me, her lithe African American dancer companion moving past me to sit next to her. “Susan. My name is Susan. This is my friend, Danelle,” she said, pointing in the direction of Danelle. “We’re from New York. We go to school there. Columbia. I’m in English Lit. Danelle’s taking dance — not hard to tell, huh? You two traveling through Europe, are you?” Susan all but shouted. “I come from a large Jewish family. You? We’re traveling through Europe together.”

And thus began a beautiful friendship.

Turns out that Susan could swear much better than I could; she needed no instruction from me. Turns out, too, that she had my number, and for all the weeks we traveled together through Europe, Susan had not one kind word for me — she set about to make my life hell, and I loved every minute of it. Susan became the sister I wished I’d had, profane, self-confident, phenomenally bright and opinionated, her acute dissection of me done lovingly and with care, to this day one of the best and most loving relationships I’ve ever had.

Little known fact about me: I love being called out by bright, emotionally healthy, socially-skilled and whole women.

The summer of 1974, when Cathy became pregnant with Jude, on the right above.

Without the women in my life, Cathy or Megan, my daughter — when Cathy and I separated — Lori, Justine, Alison, Patricia, Julienne or Melissa, each of whom loved me, love me still, and made me a better person, the best parts of me directly attributable to these lovely women, to whom I am so grateful for caring enough about me to make me a better person.

Now onto the raison d’être of this instalment of Stories of a Life.

Once Susan and I had settled down — there was an immediate connection between Susan and I, which Cathy took as the beginnings of an affair the two of us would have (as if I would sleep with my sister — Danelle, on the other hand, well … perhaps a story for another day, but nothing really happened, other than the two of us becoming close, different from Susan).

J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories, an anthology of short stories published in April 1953

Danelle saw a ragged copy of J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories peeking out of Cathy’s backpack.

“Okay,” she said. “In rounds, let’s each one of us give the title of one of the Salinger short stories,” which we proceeded to do. Cathy was just now reading Salinger, while I’d read the book while we were still in England, about three weeks earlier.

Cathy started first, For Esmé — with Love and Squalor. Danelle, Teddy. Susan, showing off, came up with A Perfect Day for Bananafish, telling us all, “That story was first published in the January 31, 1948 edition of The New Yorker.” Show off! I was up next, and came up with Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut. Phew — just barely came up with that one! Thank goodness.

Onto the second round: Cathy, Down at the Dinghy; Danelle, Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes; Susan, showing off again, De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period, “turned down by The New Yorker in late 1951, and published by the British Information World Review, early in 1952.” Me? Struggling yet again, but subject to a momentary epiphany, I blurted out, Just Before the War with the Eskimos. There we were, eight stories down and one to go.

But do you think any one of us could come up with the title to the 9th tale in Salinger’s 1953 anthology of short stories? Nope.

We thought about it, and thought about it — and nothing, nada, zero, zilch. We racked our brains, and we simply couldn’t come up with the title of the 9th short story.

We sat there, hushed. For the first time in about half an hour, there was silence between us, only the voices of children on the train, and the clickety-clack of the tracks as the train relentlessly headed towards Madrid.

We couldn’t look at one another. We were, as a group, downcast, looking up occasionally at the passing scenery, only furtively glancing at one another, only periodically and with reservation, as Cathy held onto my arm, putting hers in mine, Danelle looking up, she too wishing for human contact.

Finally, Susan looked up at me, looked directly at me, her eyes steely and hard yet … how do I say it? … full of love and confidence in me, that I somehow would be the one to rescue us from the irresolvable dilemma in which we found ourselves.

Beseechingly, Susan’s stare did not abate …

“The Laughing Man,” I said, “The Laughing Man! The 9th story in Salinger’s anthology is …” and before I could say the words, I was smothered in kisses, Cathy to my left, Susan having placed herself in my lap, kissing my cheeks, my lips, my forehead, and when she found herself unable to catch her breath, Danelle carrying on where Susan had left off, more tender than Susan, loving and appreciative, Cathy now holding me tight, love all around us.

A moment that will live in me always, a gift of the landscape of my life.

Stories of a Life | 1978 – 1982 | Chief Cook and Bottlewasher

June 1, 2019fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, Thought for the Day, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

1978. Jude, at age 3½, and Megan at 2 years of age. At the kitchen table for breakfast.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was extolling the virtues of my Instant Pot to a friend, in a lull in the conversation, she turned to me and said, “You like to cook, don’t you?”
The short answer: I derive pleasure from both cooking and baking.
Here’s the story behind my love for the culinary powers of the kitchen.

1616 Semlin Drive, at E. 1st Ave. in Vancouver. One of the homes I lived in growing up.

From my earliest days, I fended for myself. My mother worked three jobs, and my father worked the afternoon shift at the Post Office. When I arrived home, although my father often left a stew bubbling away in the slow cooker, from age seven on, for the most part if I wanted to eat, I’d have to make breakfast, lunch and dinner for myself and for my sister.
So, being somewhat industrious, I learned to cook — well, make sandwiches and, for dessert, Jello, at least for the first few years. I loved turkey growing up (all that triptiphan), so with the help of my mother, I learned to make her delicious turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes and vegetables. For the most part, though, my cooking skills were rudimentary — but I didn’t starve, and more often than not there was food in my belly.
When in 1970 Cathy and I moved in together, marrying soon after, I was responsible for most of the cooking. Cathy’s mom sent her out $1000 a month (she didn’t know we were living together), visiting every three months, taking us to the local Woodward’s grocery floor, where she dropped in excess of $300 at each visit. With Cathy’s mother money, we ate a fairly staple diet of generously thick T-bone steaks and baked potatoes.

Simon Fraser University’s Louis Riel House, student family 1 + 2 bedroom residence.

Soon after moving into the Louis Riel Student Residence at Simon Fraser University in 1971, Cathy joined a women’s group, who met every Wednesday evening. Among the decisions that were taken by the women’s group was this: men shall participate in all household chores, and share in all food preparation. As we often ate together with other of the students in the residence, my specialty became salads — all different kinds of healthy, nutritious salads, chock full of vegetables, nuts, sunflower seeds, and more.
At this point, Cathy still hated to cook — there was immense pressure placed on Cathy by her peers to develop culinary skills, but she refused. All that changed in the summer of 1973, which is a story for another day.

2182 East 2nd Avenue, in the Grandview Woodland neighbourhood of Vancouver.

When Cathy and I separated in 1978 — Jude and I lived in the home above, before Jude, Megan and I moved to Simon Fraser University and Louis Riel House, when I began work on my Masters degree — the thought occurred to me one morning when making breakfast that I was now the lone parent, and the sole person responsible for ensuring the children ate nutritious foods at each meal in order that they might grow up into healthy adults. I took on the task of learning the art of cooking (and baking), in earnest.
There was, however, a quid pro quo involved.
After returning from a day of larnin’ and T.A.’ing at SFU, after picking up the children at daycare at 4:30pm, and walking the relatively short distance to our two-bedroom apartment at Louis Riel House, while the children played with their friends on the lawn in front of our apartment, I prepared dinner, calling them in about 45 minutes after dinner preparation had begun. The kids were famished, and so was I.
Here’s where the quid pro quo came in: at the end of each meal, each of the children had to turn and say to me some version of, “Daddy that was a good dinner. It was mmmm, delicious. Thank you for making dinner for all of us, and all the work you put in to feeding us healthy and nutritious breakfasts, lunches and dinners, and all those wonderful desserts we love!”
I needed the incentive provided to me by both children, so their gratitude — which, in time, they came to acknowledge as their own — and the kids felt good about encouraging me, as I encouraged them in all of their endeavours. We were a happy family & all was well with the world for us.
Now, I was an adventuresome cook, and not everything I made turned out to the liking of each one of us.
Being a dedicated democrat, Jude, Megan and I made a deal with one another in respect of dinner. Both children had to eat at least two bites of each food item I prepared: after all the work I put into preparing a dish, the least they could do was try out the dish to see whether they might like it. Most of the time they did, but sometimes not.
One night, I made cream of escargot soup. Honestly, it wasn’t bad. But at the end of the soup entrée, I turned to the children and asked them what they thought, to which they replied almost in unison, “It was all right, tasty enough I suppose, but I’m not sure if I’d ever want to have it again.” I agreed with them. We never ate cream of escargot soup ever again.
Each of us were allowed to have three foods on a list of our creation, foods we did not have to eat, no matter what. Megan had three foods, Jude had three foods, and I had three foods — those foods changed over a period of time. In order to add a food to our individual “nah, I don’t want to eat that food” list, some food on each of our lists had to come off. Took some thought on the part of the children as to whether they wanted to remove a food. Megan, for a great long while didn’t like avocados — but one day, while placing a new food she didn’t like onto her “don’t eat” list, she took out avocados, eventually coming to love avocados, as she does to this day.
Watching me prepare meals all the time he was growing up caused Jude to want to become a chef — he worked in the food industry throughout his late teens and twenties, before getting into teaching, which paid better, and was overall less stressful, with “more honourable people”, he’d say to me.
In her teens, Megan became a vegan — there’s a story there, too, which I’ll leave for another day — and, for the most part, took on the preparation of her own meals, as did Jude over a period of time. After the summer of 1973, Cathy became a great cook — there’s not much I miss about that tumultuous marriage, but I sure miss Cathy’s avant-garde cooking, her culinary craftsmanship, spicing & phenomenally delicious cooking. Ah well.

Taxpayer vs Citizen | Responding to Right Wing Propaganda

May 28, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Canada, Decision Canada 2019, News, Politics, Thought for the DayRaymond Tomlin

The suffering hero of our times is, we are told, the tormented taxpayer.

Conservative politicians mount campaigns to protect the taxpayer, editorial writers evaluate politicians and their policies on whether they will increase or decrease the “burden” to taxpayers, and some self-described taxpayers have formed faux, corporate-funded organizations to plead their cause & lament their plight. Thus, you have the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Nobel prize winning author Toni Morrison, in her New York apartment. Photo | Tim Knox

At a speaking engagement, a few years back, at a New Yorker festival, Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University, Toni Morrison, offered insightful commentary on topics about race, gender, writing, and other issues. One particular observation made by Ms. Morrison was quite memorable …

The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me’. When I was a young girl we were called citizens — American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did — consume. Now they don’t use those words any more — it’s the American taxpayer, and those are different attitudes.

The phrase “taxpayer’s money” is almost always propaganda — that must be rejected and resisted by all of us who support progressive politics.A better phrase is “public money”.

So, why do so few in the news media, if any at all in these times of corporate-owned media, refuse to use the term public money, replacing it instead with the far from benign word taxpayer?

Public money is the property of the entire public, not of taxpayers.

Taxes are a way to pool our resources and develop common infrastructure that can have a positive impact on us all. They build our roads and bridges, pay for our police and firefighters, our system of justice, offer support for raising children and contribute to reducing child poverty, provide income security and housing for people who are in need, contribute to foreign aid, and help to ensure our environment is clean and safe. All of these things are much cheaper and effective when we pay for them collectively.

The taxes paid by previous generations benefits us today, and the taxes we pay hopefully act to benefit the generations of tomorrow.

David Brooks. Toronto-born American centre-right, self-described “moderate centrist” political pundit and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times

In 2016, New York Times columnist and PBS political commentator David Brooks wrote about the difference between taxpayers and citizens …

You can be a taxpayer or you can be a citizen. If you’re a taxpayer your role in the country is defined by your economic and legal status. Your primary identity is individual. You’re perfectly within your rights to do everything you legally can to look after your self-interest.The problem with the taxpayer mentality is that you end up serving your individual interest short term but soiling the nest you need to be happy in over the long term.

A healthy nation isn’t just an atomized mass of individual economic and legal units. A nation is a web of giving and getting. You give to your job, and your employer gives to you. You give to your neighbourhood, and your neighbourhood gives to you. You give to your government, and your government gives to you.

If you orient everything around individual self-interest, you end up ripping the web of giving and receiving. Neighbours can’t trust neighbours. Individuals can’t trust their institutions, and they certainly can’t trust their government. Everything that is not explicitly prohibited is permissible. Everybody winds up suspicious and defensive and competitive. You wind up alone at 3 a.m. miserably tweeting out at your enemies.

And this is exactly the atomized mentality that is corroding North America.

Years ago, David Foster Wallace put it more gently …

“It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We’ve changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries — we’re actually conscious of our rights as citizens and our nation’s responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie.”

This is where the Canadian Taxpayers Federation comes in, a shady, secretly-funded (who are, in fact, funded by right wing elements within Canada’s corporate culture), unrepresentative organization that sells itself as a populist “citizens advocacy group” looking to cut waste and ensure accountability in government, when such couldn’t be further from the truth.

Larry Haiven, a professor in the faculty of management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, says most of CTF’s stances on issues — and particularly their relentless calls to lower taxes — are …

“the most simplistic garbage. It assumes that nothing that is purchased with our taxes is of any use for us. Despite CTF’s anti-tax, spending-is-out-of-control rhetoric, taxes are lower now than they’ve been in decades, leaving governments struggling to provide essential services.

Provinces and the federal government have been cutting taxes frenetically, frantically, for the past 25 years. Governments across Canada are taking in about $250 billion less than they did 15 years ago. You have to weigh that against everything the Taxpayers Federation says.”

Yet night in, night out the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is given a platform on the corporate-owned and operated evening news, with folks on Shaw-owned Global TV, anchors like Chris Gailus and Sophie Liu, and Bell Media CTV Vancouver hosts Scott Roberts and Mi-Jung Lee fulfilling their supplicant role as handmaidens to their corporate bosses & not on our side.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation media presence is truly remarkable when you consider it has a membership of five people.

You read that correctly: five.

Writes Dougald Lamont for CBC News Manitoba …

This might come as a surprise, but the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is not now, nor has it ever been, a grassroots, member-based organization where anyone can pay $10 to sign up (or sign up free) and have a say in how the organization is run.

Instead, it has supporters — about 90,000 of them, who, like followers on Facebook, can like, comment, answer surveys and make donations, but they have no actual say in how the organization is run.

While the CTF’s mandate is to hold elected officials to account, who holds the CTF’s five members to account? Each other. Who decides who else can become a member? They do. It should be no surprise that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has, as a result, faced accusations of being an Astroturf organization — a fake grassroots organization.

Writing in The Tyee, journalist David J. Climenhaga says the following …

Right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch are among the funders of the international Atlas Network, a Canadian Taxpayers Federation partner. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey.

“The Canadian Taxpayers Federation,” writes Climenhaga, “a self-described non-partisan tax watchdog and taxpayer advocacy group once headed by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, has always been tight-lipped about the sources of its own funding and support. This may be mildly ironic, given its vocal demands for transparency in government policy.”

Since the 1980’s and the rise of the Koch brothers in the U.S. and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in Canada, there has been a deliberate effort to reframe citizens as “taxpayers” and public spending as “taxpayers’ money,” as if taxpayers are shareholders. CBC’s Dougald Lamont writes …

Journalists and politicians in every political party routinely use these terms without considering that this framing is anti-democratic. That is because politicians are elected by citizens, not just taxpayers. The word “taxpayer” is not in the constitution; the word “citizen” is.

All citizens are equal. Taxpayers are not.

It is self-evident that you can contribute to the economy and society without paying taxes. Many citizens don’t pay income taxes, notably children, the working poor and a few millionaires and billionaires. Charities, churches and places of faith are all tax-exempt.

Defining taxpayers as the only people who matter has real and serious consequences for policy. It is not a politically neutral position: it is a radical right-wing ideology that drives inequality by making the rich richer while neglecting the poor.

That is why the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s real membership of five people matters, as does its ideology. We don’t have to care what they think, but we should be clear on just where they are coming from.

So the next time you hear British Columbia’s new wicked witch of the west, CTF spokesperson Kris Sims, blathering on your TV about how your “taxpayer dollars” are being wasted, remember: Kris Sims and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation could give a damn about you as a citizen of the province of British Columbia, and could care even less about what our provincial government is doing to alleviate child poverty, build urgent care centres to serve the 780,000 British Columbians without a family doctor, build truly affordable housing for seniors and working people across the vast expanse of our province, create affordable $10-a-day child care for working families, while funding our public safety and justice, education, transportation and infrastructure, agriculture and fisheries, climate action and environment, social development and poverty reduction, indigenous relations and reconciliation, and jobs, training, trade and technology ministries of government to better serve your interests, and the interests of your family, your neighbours, your co-workers, and your friends.

And while you’re at it, ignore Kris Sims when you see her next on your TV!

Arts Friday | The 72nd Annual Cannes Film Festival | Winners!

May 24, 2019A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, News, Thought for the Day, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Saturday night, the 72nd annual Cannes Film Festival draws to a close.
Why should that matter to you?
Well, if you love film, and foreign cinema in particular, the award winning films that will be announced Saturday night in Cannes highlight the most important films made outside the North American continent this year, and most probably predict this year’s Oscar award contenders for what used to be called Best Foreign Language Film but for the 2020 Oscar ceremony will be renamed the Best International Feature Film. Not to mention, for aficionados of the Vancouver International Film Festival, a raft of Cannes films will arrive on our shores this upcoming September and October.
Here’s IndieWire chief film critic Eric Kohn’s wrap up column on the 72nd annual Cannes Film Festival, Class War & the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
WINNER, Palme d’Or | Director: Bong Joon-ho
Parasite | South Korea

The fearlessly and fiendishly well-crafted new film from director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiecer) offers a masterful dissection of social inequality, in a film that while a diabolically fun watch is also resolutely political, the film’s tonal shifts clearly in service of its class politics, infecting Parasite’s breezy dark-comedy with notes of rage and melancholy. Bong delivers a stunning return to form with this newest venture, which takes bold leaps between tenors and tone, the film entertaining and intelligent, and an unsparing social indictment of class inequality — a roaringly raucous, blood-spattered social satire that is also luxuriously watchable, suspenseful, uproarious, and a brilliant return to form for South Korean auteur Bong.
For background on how the Cannes Jury chose Parasite, click here.
WINNER, Grand Prix | Director: Mati Diop
Atlantics | Senegal

Mati Diop entered the Official Competition at Cannes with plenty of attention, as the first black woman with a film in the section across the festival’s 72 years. But, according to IndieWire film critic, Eric Kohn …

“The real reason to pay attention to Atlantics is its singular vision of the migration crisis. Diop’s gorgeous, mesmerizing feature directorial début focuses on the experiences of a young woman named Ada (Mama Sané) stuck in repressive circumstances on the coast of Dakar after her boyfriend vanishes en route to Spain. But the film is less fixated on his departure than with the community around her.

Diop’s enigmatic, lyrical narrative left audiences dazzled by its cinematic textures and haunting atmosphere. The peculiar allegorical nature of its story, and a supernatural twist that creeps into the plot, could make it a tough consensus choice for this year’s jury. But it’s quite the impressive début, and could very well wind up with some sort of prize by the end of the festival.”

There was a tie for the next category …
WINNER, Jury Prize | Tie
Les Misérables | France | Director: Ladj Ly

The directorial début of Ladj Ly offers a relentless tale of mounting tension between tough police officers and an oppressed Muslim population in modern-day Paris. Ly’s jittery, naturalistic style spends much of its running time focused on several officers as they clash with the neighborhood youth, and one conflicted new recruit (Damien Bonnard) with a moral conscience. The suspense builds to an anxiety-inducing showdown involving the bubbling frustrations of a local Muslim boy (Issa Perica) whose pithy crimes receive a nasty comeuppance in the film’s wrenching finale, causing audiences to draw thematic parallels to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
Bacurau | Brazil | Directors: Kleber Mendonça Filho Juliano Dornelles

A bracingly confrontational commentary on the direction his home country of Brazil is taking in the Trump-like era of Bolsonaro, Bacurau’s propulsive storytelling doesn’t come at the expense of the vividly sketched personality of Brazil, in this often strange fever-dream Jacobean-style bloodbath of a film, all at once densely layered and rich, ruthless and clear-minded, a film that divided the critics, but not this year’s Cannes Jury, it would seem. Mendonça Filho has scored before at the Vancouver International Film Festival, with his absolutely brilliant Neighbouring Sounds, which took VIFF 2016 by storm, emerging as an audience favourite.
Best Screenplay | Writer / director: Céline Sciamma
Queer Palm (Feature) | Céline Sciamma
Portrait of a Lady on Fire | France

Acclaimed French director Céline Sciamma makes her long-overdue Competition début with this vivid period drama, which focuses on an 18th century lesbian romance about a painter (Noémie Merlant) hired to create a portrait of a woman from a wealthy family (Adèle Haenel) without her knowledge. In the process, the two women fall in love, against the backdrop of a magical seaside landscape. Sciamma’s sharp, picturesque imagery meshes with the palpable erotic sparks between her two stars, who transform this emotionally resonant two-hander into a riveting portrait of hidden sexuality, a film Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells writes is “as close to perfect as a gently erotic, deeply passionate period drama could be,” while The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw writes in his five-star review …

Céline Sciamma has brought a superbly elegant, enigmatic drama to Cannes that compels a shiver of aesthetic pleasure and fear, demonstrating a deeply satisfying new mastery of classical style to go with the contemporary social realism she showed in Girlhood (2014) and Tomboy (2011).

The setting is 18th-century Brittany, where an Italian noblewoman (Valeria Golino) has engaged what is officially a ladies’ companion for her beautiful daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who has just come out of a convent and is recovering from the loss of her sister. The companion, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), is actually an artist, and the countess wishes her to paint a portrait of Héloïse in secret, to be shown to a wealthy prospective husband in Milan, because headstrong Héloïse would never consent to sitting for any such picture.

Sciamma brings the erotic together with the cerebral. The final scenes set in the art gallery and the opera house are gripping: a past obsession simultaneously sour and yet vividly alive. What did it remind me of? De Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons? Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing? I don’t know.

But what a story of desire.

From the reviews out of Cannes, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a sure-fire contender for the Palme d’Or, with a seeming Best Actress nod for the luminous Adèle Haenel [2017’s BPM (Beats Per Minute)] a near certainty.
Best Actor | Antonio Banderas
Pain and Glory | Spain

A beautiful, full-hearted celebration of the craft of filmmaking, Pain and Glory is one of the most meditative of Pedro Almodóvar’s career, an especially personal work, anchored by the director’s on-off muse Antonio Banderas in perhaps his greatest performance, as he sweeps through the Spanish maestro’s recurrent themes: high melodrama and kitsch comedy, piety and carnal lust, sex and death, human pain and transcendent glory.
Best Actress | Emily Beecham
Little Joe | France

An artfully unnerving, austerely hypnotic horror movie about a very sinister plant, visually Little Joe is a total feast for the eyes, contrasting art-deco pinks and mint greens against sterile, symmetrically framed expanses of white, vaguely evoking the aesthetic of some lost sci-fi film of the ’70s. Another film that divided the critics, with CineVue critic John Bleasdale writing, “compared to the sophisticated and nuanced horrors of Black Mirror, Little Joe feels like a fairly straightforward riff on a very familiar idea. Nonethless, because it won an award at Cannes, because it’s a horror film (and outside of the hothouse of the Cannes Film Festival, the film will receive stronger reviews), Little Joe will likely arrive on our shores at some point this summer or autumn.
Best Director | Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
The Young Ahmed | Belgium

Camera d’Or
Our Mothers | Guatemala | Director: César Díaz

From the military dictatorship established in the late 1970’s in Guatemala was born a civil war that only ended some twenty years later, leaving in its wake more than 200, 000 victims, and burying the memories of 40, 000 missing people. With Our Mothers, selected in the Critics’ Week section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, César Díaz offers a film of remembrance and resilience, Our Mothers erupting like a shout in the darkness that surrounds this often overlooked massacre that cost mostly Indian lives, the film a heartbreaking portrait of a mother and her son.

Otherwise, the following films garnered praise at Cannes 2019 …

An American film, but director Quentin Tarantino and his all-star cast of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Lena Dunham, Kurt Russell, Dakota Fanning, James Marsden, Tim Roth, Timothy Olyphant and a host of other actors, stepped onto The Croisette at Cannes for the international début of his latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which more than lived up to its hype in advance of the film’s much-anticipated mid-summer (July 26th) release in theatres across the continent.

Strong buzz out of Cannes 2019 for Brad Pitt as a potential Best Actor Oscar winner in Quentin Tarantino’s enthusiastically received Once Upon a Time in Hollywood..

At screening’s end, Once Upon a Time received a rare 7-minute standing ovation, with both Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio scoring great reviews and buzz for the two as potential Best Actor Oscar nominees.

Another film emerging from Cannes with immense positive buzz for probable Best Actor Oscar nominee Taron Egerton, in the title role, is Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman, the story of Elton John’s life, from his years as a prodigy at the Royal Academy of Music through his influential and enduring musical partnership with Bernie Taupin, a film that the critics raved about, writing that Rocketman “explodes with the kind of colour and energy that only Elton John himself could invoke.”

“Freddie Mercury may have had the better voice,” writes the New York Post’s Johnny Oleksinski. “but it’s Elton John who gets the better movie. Rocketman, director Dexter Fletcher’s trippy new biopic about the flamboyant rocker is braver, deeper and more enlightening than last year’s slobbering piece of Queen propaganda Bohemian Rhapsody (which he also partly directed), a flashy fantasia of a movie that will have you both cheering and in tears in the film’s phenomenally moving pivotal scene.”

We’ll know soon enough — Rocketman opens in theatres next Friday.

Since 1955, the Cannes Film Festival has awarded the coveted Palme d’Or to the greatest filmmakers of our age, from Frances Ford Coppola to Michael Haneke, Terrence Malick, Abdellatif Kechiche, Costas Gavras and Jane Campion. While Oscar season involves thousands of voters and aggressive, months-long campaigns, the Palme d’Or race among the 20, or so, films selected for Official Competition is often difficult to predict.
This year’s Cannes jury stands out for being particularly filmmaker-centric, with Cannes veteran Alejandro G. Iñarritu serving as president, joined by fellow directors Kelly Reichardt, Alice Rohrwatcher, Maimouna N’Diaye, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Pawel Pawlikowski — as well as Elle Fanning, the youngest Cannes juror in history. All have screened work at the festival, this year’s jury composed of particularly complex & disparate sensibilities.
Today’s update: the winners, and more, at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, some of which will receive a Best International Film Feature Oscar nomination, most of which will screen at the 38th Vancouver International Film Festival, running from September 26th through October 11th, 2019.

Just announced: The Lighthouse has won the Fipresci Critics Awards at Cannes, about which the Deadline website writes …

“A story of two lighthouse keepers who drive each other to madness, won the Cannes Film Festival critics’ award for best first or second features in Directors’ Fortnight and Critics Week. The award was announced Saturday by the International Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci).

Robert Eggers The Lighthouse was shot in black and white and starred Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.

Fipresci also honoured Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven as the best film in competition and Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole as best film in the sidebar Un Certain Regard.

Terrence Malick’s Cannes competition entry, Hidden Life, won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.

The Lighthouse sees ‘two lead actors give stormy, career-best performances,” according to the statement from the Fipresci jury. It described the Eggers film as “a brutal work of art, all shot in beautiful black-and-white cinematography and fueled by a soundscape that echoes like a foghorn.”

The full list of winners at the 72nd annual Cannes Film Festival.