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Thursday, May 17, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

FESTIVAL COVERAGE

CANNES INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Cannes: ‘Leto’

Cannes: ‘Sorry Angel’ 
delves into the heart

FESTIVAL COVERAGE

I should have taken French 
in school. I opted for Spanish, 
as responsible kids often do in 
California, for it promised to be 
more useful. However, I now find 
myself in the south of France — 
having miraculously schemed 
my way into the 71st Cannes Film 
Festival — knowing very little 
Spanish and even less French. 
I’ve gotten by with “bonjour” 
and “merci” as I continue to mar-
vel at the beauty of the language 
that makes absolutely everything 
sound wonderful, and wish that I 
had been a little less responsible. 
I try to sound out the name of the 
movie that I stand in the queue 
for, “Plaire Aimer et Courir 
Vite,” but it comes out all wrong. 
The American title is “Sorry 
Angel,” two short words that 
don’t seem right at all, and I feel 
as though I’m Bill Murray hold-
ing Japanese whiskey in “Lost in 
Translation.”
“Plaire Aimer et Courir Vite” 
literally translates to “Pleasure, 
Love, and Run Fast,” which 
serves as a much more astute title 
than the translation it is given. 
The moody romantic drama 
from 
writer-director 
Chris-
tophe Honoré (“Metamorpho-
ses”) fallows a gay novelist and 
playwright in 1990s Paris named 

Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps, 
“Stranger by the Lake”) as he 
meets and falls for Arthur (Vin-
cent Lacoste, “The French Kiss-
ers”), an adventurous student 
who, like most, is still figuring 
things out. Arthur likes to read 

and knows little about authors, 
which is pathetically normal 
for kids who have grand ideas 
about the world but know little 
of what it actually is. Jacques is 
more seasoned, falls into a deep 
depression and can’t seem to put 
to rest the failed loves that dis-
appear only to reappear again. 
Jacques, ultimately, may have 
never loved at all.
“Plaire Aimer et Courir Vite” 
is one of those romantic trag-

edies that is sad in all the right 
ways. 
The 
cinematography 
paints France in blues, deepen-
ing the loneliness of the two lov-
ers stuck in their self-destructive 
orbits and running out of time. 
Rather than making a grandiose 
political statement on gay rights, 
AIDS or a number of other 
themes that the film alludes to, 
“Sorry Angel” is more concerned 
with matters of the soul. Love, 
or at least Honoré’s depiction of 
love, is painful. It hurts. It hurts 
when it is not returned, when it 
doesn’t appear like one hopes, 
and when there just doesn’t seem 
to be enough of it. Love hurts 
when it’s perfect, too.
And for all the heartache 
that “Sorry Angel” so master-
fully creates through Jacques’s 
and Arthur’s own heartache, 
there are moments of pure, cin-
ematic joy that erupt on screen. 
A flirty meet-cute in a movie 
theater, a brainy telephone call 
full of witty banter, a drunken 
living room dance party — ele-
ments that every good romance 
needs, yet few actually master. 
Jacques’s and Arthur’s rela-
tionship is three-dimensional: 
Their interest in each other, in 
the worlds that the characters 
inhabit, both together and apart, 
makes sense. And that is what 
makes this French Cannes selec-
tion so moving, heartbreaking 
and wonderful to witness.

DANIELLE YACOBSON
Daily Arts Writer

The requiem for the local scene 
— the underground scene, the house 
show scene, the “we’ll never be 
big, that’s okay we just want to be” 
scene — is the greatest kind of music 
movie. To perfectly encapsulate how 
a specific moment in a specific place 
looked and sounded is one thing. 
To recreate its feeling is another 
ambition altogether. Russian film-
maker Krill Serebrennikov’s latest 
film “Leto” does both with a skill 
and joyfulness unmatched in recent 
memory.
The film follows Mike (Alexandr 
Gorchilin), the central and center-
ing figure for the roiling Leningrad 
underground rock scene of the 
1980s. He’s cool, calculatedly distant 
in aviator sunglasses and exudes a 
level of carelessness that cannot be 
matched by the stiff crowd of youths 
at the rock club he and his band 
frequent. Their every foot tap and 
head nod are policed by rule-loving 
adults.
Mike and his crew, including his 
wife Natasha (Irina Starshenbaum), 
amble through the woods sing-
ing about summer. That’s where 
they find Viktor (Teo Yoo) and pull 
him into their circle and really set 
the plot in motion. They dance and 
drink and play guitar. Jump over fire 
and run naked through the water. 
They are young and free.
But “Leto” doesn’t let its audi-
ence believe for very long that these 
are the youngest or the freest or the 
most counter-cultural youth in the 
world. Their exuberance is matched 
by self- and state-sponsored censor-
ship. Unlike its relatives in the music 
movie genre, “Leto” doesn’t look 
wistfully at a time when anything 
was possible, it vividly recreates a 

moment when people did as much 
as they could, as much as they let 
themselves do. That seems to be the 
greatest hindrance to Mike’s rise to 
the top: His inability to let himself 
rebel or succeed fully. That, and his 
proximity to Viktor’s superior tal-
ent, are crippling.
But even for the rest of his crew — 
who aren’t impeded by success, their 
main collaborator and rival — Len-
ingrad has slow suffocating effect. 
Serebrennikov navigates beautifully 
the divide between the intimacy and 
secrecy of their scene and the loud 
rebellion its existence demands. 
Early on in the film, during a train 
altercation, a new character looks 
into the camera and tells the audi-
ence they are about to hear a song 
by “Soviet enemies” The Talking 
Heads. And thus our heroes are off, 
running and jumping and punching 
their way through a heavily accent-
ed, thoroughly charming cover of 
“Psycho Killer.”
In these musical interludes (as 
well as other bursts that are quickly 
noted to be ahistorical) we see these 
kids become the clashing, crashing, 
joyously angry punks their world 
does not let them be. This tension 
— between the narrative and the 
interludes — is where the film finds 
a great deal of its success and proves 
an unexpectedly apt way to navigate 
the disparity between a free mind 
and a policed body. “Leto” has all 
the whispering intimacy of “Inside 
Llewyn Davis” and the joyful noise 
of “Sing Street.”
“Leto” is a standout of its genre 
not for its musical quality or mastery 
of rambling narrative (although both 
are truly exceptional), but for the 
way in which it provides a space for 
a deeply intimate portrait of musical 
moment and an exuberate depiction 
of youth culture to coexist.

MADELEINE GAUDIN
Daily Arts Writer

CANNES INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Love, or at least 
Honore’s depiction 
of love, is painful. It 
hurts. It hurts when 
there is not returned.
It hurts when it’s 
perfect, too. 

