Attentive observers of the gender balance have calculated that six out of 18 films in the competition were directed by women. In addition, there were many films that put women centre stage. This included ‘Alpha’ by Julia Ducourneau, who caused a furore three years ago with her second feature film ‘Titane’ and won the Palme d'Or. Expectations were correspondingly high for her new film ‘Alpha’, a mother and daughter story set in Le Havre.
13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Beros) grows up with her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani) until one day her uncle turns up and disrupts their lives. Tahar Rahim plays him as an emaciated junkie with sunken cheeks. The mother, who works as a doctor at the hospital, is confronted with an epidemic in which the skin turns completely pale and those affected appear petrified like marble. It looks decorative, but in the final stage they break at every touch.
Julia Ducorneau obviously wrote the screenplay during the corona period, which makes the film seem a little late. After Alpha gets a tattoo, her mother fears that she might have been infected. At school, she is bullied by her classmates. The whole thing is staged at such a hysterical pace that it is difficult to really get close to the characters. After more than two hours, you have lost all interest and only hope that the story will come to an end.
Carla Simón's ‘Romería’ is a similar experience. 18-year-old Marina (Llúcia Garcia) travels to Galicia in search of her biological father. In Vigo, she meets members of her family with whom she has had no contact for years. Having grown up with adoptive parents in Barcelona, she has found her mother's diaries and sets off in search of the places where her parents lived. It gradually emerges that her father and mother slipped into the drug scene in the wild 80s and eventually died of Aids. Before that, they allegedly sailed to the Caribbean and brought back heroin from Peru.
Marina is primarily concerned with proving her filiation so that she can apply for a scholarship in Catalonia, as she wants to study film. This reveals the personal background of the film, which is based on the biography of director and author Carla Simón. In her first film ‘Estiu 1993’ (Frida's Summer), she had already addressed her childhood experiences in Catalonia. She won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale three years ago with ‘Alcarràs’.
The central feature of her films is that Catalan is spoken as if she wanted to make a linguistic statement. This is not easily possible in ‘Romería’, as Marina's relatives in Galicia only speak Spanish (Castellano). But when she recites the diary of her mother from the early 1980s, she does so in Catalan. No wonder Carla Simón has become something of an internationally successful ‘it girl’ of Catalan cinema and has now been invited to compete in Cannes with her third film.
Marina records her experiences in Galicia with a video camera and you get the impression that you are watching a kind of home movie by the director. That's not enough for a film in competition at the Croisette.