Cannes. Four Nights with Anna.

Four Nights with Anna is "the first film in 17 years from the great Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who mostly has spent his time recently acting (he was Naomi Watts's racist Russian uncle in Eastern Promises)," writes Ty Burr.

"The film's small, bleakly funny, quite sad, and beautifully controlled - a tale of peeping-tom passion about a hospital handyman who drugs his favorite nurse's nighttime tea so he can sit and watch her as she sleeps. Creepy, yes, but the film teases the pathos and even nobility out of this wretched man."

"I found this rather frustrating at first," writes Glenn Kenny. "Jerzy Skolimowski's first directorial effort in ten years, and he's doing a pastiche of Bruno Dumont and Béla Tarr?'... Truth to tell, the film's still sinking in for me, and my enthusiasm is growing."

"Helmed with absolute assurance from the get-go, but still marbled with moments of black comedy that faintly recall his younger, wilder works, pic has the metaphysical feel and control almost of a story from Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue and is all the more impressive coming from a filmmaker who's just turned 70 and has been absent from the profession for almost two decades," writes Derek Elley in Variety.

Four Nights with Anna has opened the Directors' Fortnight. For more on the 40th anniversary of the fest-within/beside-the-fest, see Scott Foundas's piece and interviews for the LA Weekly.

Updates, 5/17: "Skolimowski goes deadpan not in content but in form," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "But it is oddly pleasurable - a near total unfathomability beyond its surface, Skolimowski's return hints at really being far, far from what it seems."

"There is about enough material here for a thirty-minute short, and it's only Artur Steranko's absorbing one-man act as a lovelorn village simpleton that stops a stretched film from feeling even thinner," suggests Screen Daily.

Update, 5/21: "Fluid filmmaking that can boast a surplus of black humor and a much-appreciated lack of dialogue, Four Nights With Anna features a great physical performance by Artur Steranko as the frightened, clever, seeming halfwit who spends his days tending a small town's hospital crematorium and his evenings spying on the ample nurse who lives across the muddy way," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "This sardonic thriller has an early 60s jangle. New Wave to the bone, it's replete with Hitchcock jokes and predicated on voyeurism."

Update, 5/22: "It plays like a smart and chilling analogue to Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film about Love," writes Patrick Z McGavin in Stop Smiling. "Both are fascinating works of voyeurism, but the Skolimowski is the far knottier and difficult work.... This is a talent very much worth welcoming home."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 15, 2008 7:42 AM