The competition lineup at this year’s Cannes Film Festival has been awfully sedate so far, characterized mostly by misfires like Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales” and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Sheep in the Box.” Even the two best-received Palme d’Or contenders feel a bit familiar: The “Drive My Car” director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has made another talky drama (“All of a Sudden”) that bursts past the three-hour mark, while Paweł Pawlikowski has followed up “Cold War” with another black-and-white film set in the aftermath of World War II, “Fatherland.”
In fact, the two freshest, riskiest movies here aren’t in the main competition at all. One is “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” a brainy horror comedy from Jane Schoenbrun, director of “I Saw the TV Glow,” while the other is Ken Russell’s provocative “The Devils,” which came out 55 years ago and is playing at the festival with once-censored scenes put back into place.
Schoenbrun’s film, playing in the sidebar section Un Certain Regard, casts Hannah Einbinder as Kris, an up-and-coming filmmaker tasked with rebooting “Camp Miasma,” a horror franchise in the vein of ’80s slashers like “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” Kris watched “Camp Miasma” at a too-young age, and the film was imprinted forever on her psyche. Though she knows that elements of the series would be considered problematic now — especially the transphobic back story of its spear-wielding villain, Little Death — she still reveres the series like a sacred text.
Kris’s connection to “Camp Miasma” deepens further once she tracks down Billy (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive actress who played the “final girl” in the original movie. Though Billy’s grasp on reality appears shaky, and she often suggests that Little Death is both real and lurking close by, the two women nevertheless have some surprising sexual chemistry. Will Kris’s growing connection to Billy put her in some very real danger? Imagine “Carol” with a chance of beheadings, and you’re halfway there.
Schoenbrun, who transitioned in their 30s, is interested in how we can discover ourselves through a piece of pop entertainment: In “I Saw the TV Glow,” the young protagonist fixates on a genre show’s teen-girl heroines, who serve as avatars of escape for someone grappling with gender dysphoria. The sexually timid Kris isn’t fully comfortable in her own body, either, but with the help of Billy and her vivid imagination, maybe a climax worthy of “Camp Miasma” is close at hand.
Not long after I saw Schoenbrun’s film at Cannes, I watched the restoration of “The Devils,” and I’m dying to know how Kris might have annotated its most provocative portions during a watch-along. Though “The Devils” was originally released in 1971, Russell had to cut two key sequences involving some fairly explicit sexual blasphemy, and this restored version (which will be released by the new Warner Bros. imprint Clockwork this fall) is the first time the movie will play as the filmmaker, who died in 2011, intended.
Russell’s film is set in 17th-century France, where the ribald priest Grandier (Oliver Reed) appears to have nearly every woman in town bewitched — especially Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), an abbess who nurses her obsession with him from afar. Though he is a man of the cloth, Grandier has always done what he pleased, and many rivals are eager to bring his defiant nature in line. When Sister Jeanne implies to another priest that Grandier’s charm involve dark magic, her accusation sets the stage for exorcisms, orgies and mass hysteria.
Even the original version of Russell’s film was envelope-pushing, as the nuns in the convent grow so inflamed by lust that they doff their garments to practice frantic free love. The Cannes restoration adds several more minutes of lascivious abandon, including a sequence in which the naked nuns pull a sculpted crucifix from the wall to use as a very unorthodox sexual partner.
Five and a half decades after Russell’s film was released, will the Cannes competition offer anything that’s even a tenth as taboo-flouting? We’ve got over a week to go, and I’ll keep you posted.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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