Cannes. Frontier of Dawn.

Philippe Garrel's Competition entry, Frontier of Dawn, is "a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I've seen, it's still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

Following a compare-n-contrast with James Gray's Two Lovers, she adds, "There are shots in this film's second half that are scarier than anything I've seen in a horror film in recent years... and simultaneously, incredibly moving in their invocation of a love that won't die. Or, at the very least, refuses to abide by traditional boundaries of love and death."

"Frontier of Dawn - the 28th feature by traditionalist director Philippe Garrel - met with tumultuous applause and whistles following its competition screening," reports Fabien Lemercier for Cineuropa. "Lauded on several occasions at the Venice Film Festival, the 60-year-old filmmaker is in official competition at Cannes for the first time, with a work characteristic of an oeuvre that could be described as timeless and anachronistic, or even suggestive and ephemeral, depending on one's point of view."

"Earnest, inherently divisive effort, lusciously photographed in black and white, is one of the weaker recent entries in Philippe Garrel's four decade career of bravely iconoclastic art films," writes Lisa Nesselson in Screen Daily. "Garrel's son Louis continues to embody his generation, projecting an appealing blend of mop-topped insouciance with doubt and anguish on tap. But his presence in this episodic love story with supernatural overtones is insufficient to overcome the film's endearing but awkward retrograde aura."

"Having been recently canonized by some critics and auds for his May 68-set slacker story Regular Lovers, helmer Philippe Garrel may now face excommunication by a goodly chunk of his erstwhile supporters for Frontier of Dawn," warns Leslie Felperin in Variety. "A risible slice of pretentious hokum, this love triangle plot with a supernatural angle peddles that covertly misogynist and sadistic old chestnut, that the hottest, most desirable women are self-harming loonies."

Update, 5/23: "The more some folks ostentatiously laughed at the introduction of a supernatural angle into the plot (achieved via effects that date back to Cocteau if not Melies), the more I loved the film," writes Glenn Kenny.

Update, 5/24: "On the face of it, Frontier of Dawn comes across like a familiar if peculiarly French love story, though one tinged with madness," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But few other filmmakers can - through purely visual terms, through shades of gray, meticulous framing and harmoniously balanced bodies - convey the mysterious transformation by which ordinary men and women become the adored."

Update, 5/27: "Philippe Garrel's cinema - which tends towards the suicidal - questions whether everything in the present can truly mean something in the moment," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Time and time again, the highs and lows of the moment calcify in the past and turn into a brooding regret, remorse, and romanticization. Frontier of Dawn, Garrel's smaller love tale following the epic-intimate May 68 opus Regular Lovers, asks the filmmaker's perennial question: how do you reconcile the unchangeable fate of the past with the quotidian sorrows and joy of the present? The answer is impossible, but the way Frontier of Dawn poses the question is frustrating but utterly effective."

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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 22, 2008 11:50 AM