6 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.