This is my first year at Cannes, and while thematic synergy is expected at any given film festival, I’m surprised at how easy it’s been to find similarities between any given assortment of projects. Take the three films in this assigned dispatch, which, when grouped, can make their mini-film series, which speaks to the ways creatives are in an unknown conversation with each other. Premiering in the Cannes Classics, Critics Week, and Director’s Fortnight, these projects revolve around characters who try to rebuild their lives after catastrophe, and explore what moving forward looks like in the wake of damage they’ve received or have had an active part in shaping.
“Slauson Rec” arrived at the Croisette with plenty of baked-in controversy and for good reason: it’s the documentary based on actor Shia LaBeouf’s free theater school, which he started in 2018. LaBeouf has been accused and sued by singer FKA Twigs for sexual battery, assault, and emotional distress, and his destructive behavior has been well documented throughout the years; I entered into this viewing weary that the film’s premiere would just be another way to offer an unneeded platform. Director Leo Lewis O’Neil has crafted a project that is less about providing excuses or mythologizing LaBeouf. Instead, he warns against what happens to communities that cede their collective power in favor of being shaped by the ego and machinations of a sole charismatic leader.
The documentary opens with an interview of LaBeouf addressing O’Neil’s camera directly, sharing that “He’s motivated to talk … because I feel that’s where my utility lies.” Over the next two and a half hours, LaBeouf will do more than talk, but it’s a fascinating (and necessary) way to anchor the film before documenting everything that ensues. The on-screen abuse we witness from LaBeauf to his students is not a secret exposé but done, if not with his blessing, at least with hands-off interference and acute knowledge.
O’Neil shares how he was one of the first participants in LaBeouf’s theater school, and that he was encouraged by LaBeouf to record the happenings of the theater. LaBeouf stressed that his program would eschew the traditional trappings of an acting class, operating more as a laboratory where participants could make up for lack of professional experience so long as they had “a story that needs telling.” O’Neil’s camera documents these early days with a palpable sense of excitement, and it’s easy not to get caught up in the anticipation and belief that everyone assembled on the verge of something great.
It doesn’t take long for the class to devolve into a nightmare. As the troupe begins to work towards a long-form project, “The New Human,” LaBeouf’s bellicose antics take place, as he verbally abuses and screams at his troupe, at some points getting up close to their face and even physically pushing one member for talking back to him. It’s hard to believe it happened, let alone we’re watching it, but our disbelief is suspended because O’Neil’s camera rarely cuts away from these moments and forces us to sit with them long after what would be comfortable or acceptable.
That’s not to say he doesn’t flex his talents as a filmmaker, which mainly comes out in some clever editing, where he underlines the hypocrisy of the egalitarian community LaBeouf is trying to build and how that clashes with the actor’s desire for control. Case in point: in one sequence where LaBeouf shouts at the actors that they “look like garbage,” a song with the chorus “We’re never turning back” plays over his words, as if to indicate Slauson Rec was already going down a path of combustion no one person could have helped steer off course.
While some projects may have sprinkled in elements of this footage for dramatic effect, we’re left to witness LaBeouf’s portrayal of how abuse not only harms people on an individual level but eventually leads to a fracture and breakdown of the community as a whole. For many, particularly those individuals LaBeouf directly hurt, this will be as cathartic as it is painful to witness these acts. If there’s any good from putting this documentary into the world, hopefully, this unfiltered exposure can be the first step to healing for those who’ve had to suffer in silence.
If “Slauson Rec” is uncomfortably moored in the grim and proximate realities it depicts, Momoko Seto’s animated epic “Dandelion’s Odyssey” offers an enchanting vision refreshingly removed from our own. It’s one of those premises that must be seen to be believed, focusing on four friends: Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto, and Taraxa. They’re not just peas in a pod, but rather literal seeds from the same dandelion. Crafted for all the people who watched “Flow” and thought “They should make one of these but for plants,” Seto’s film traces the seeds’ cosmos-sprawling odyssey as a nuclear explosion destroys Earth, launching them into space. After hurling through the star system (and encountering some space squids along the way), they land on an unknown planet, where they hope to establish permanent residency.
Seto’s film is dialogue-free, which gives it a documentary-like effect as her camera follows the seeds’ sojourn through lands known and unknown. With no face to anchor the seeds, it’s a tough call to empathize and connect with these four characters, but Seto gifts them personality by focusing on their physical movements, particularly in the ways the seeds will jump in excitement (such as when they find fertile soil to plant themselves in) or their white tips will shrivel in fear anytime they sense a new creature is nearby. Seto plays with their size in creative ways too; everything to a dandelion seed is frail, which means that any new development in the landscape, no matter how small, from blossoming fungi to an unassuming zephyr, brings either excitement or fright.
Particularly haunting is when three of the seeds encounter a slug (or at least, the unknown planet’s approximation of a slug) for the first time. Seto’s camera lingers on the slug’s face for a beat too long for comfort, allowing its extraterrestrial-like features and elongated, probing eyeballs to appear frightening through magnification. It’s a way to help the film never overstay its welcome, although, at only 77 minutes, I would have taken a whole half hour of the dandelion’s encounter with other creatures (maybe there are capybaras on this planet too?)
I suspect people of all ages will find much to be swooned by in “Dandelion’s Odyssey,” but it’s also a film that celebrates the palpable joy of when those in migration and flight can finally settle and call somewhere home, and the gift of a community to help ground you when you’re in transit. I didn’t think I’d be so moved seeing dandelions ride atop slugs, but I’ll have a harder time finding a more touching and whimsical picture of a found family in the cinema this year.
Bringing things back to a world that hits too close for comfort, director Lloyd Lee Choi’s “Lucky Lu” is the sort of unassuming debut that puts a heartbreaking spin on a story we think we may have seen before. Every time I expected it to devolve into poverty porn or melodrama, it delivers something altogether more disarming. It’s a knotty film in that way, as it can be hard to predict where it’s going. In that respect, it embodies the spirit of its primary protagonist, who knows a thing or two about needing a chameleon to survive.
The film opens with Lu (Chang Chen) working as a delivery bike rider and after years of delivering takeout to the most ungrateful in NYC, he scrounges around enough funds to move into an apartment with his wife Si Yu (Fala Chen) and daughter Yaya (Carabelle Manna Wei). Si Yu and Yaya are flying in from China, and as Lu gets the house in order, it’s touching to see him open up in anticipation of their arrival. Of course, new beginnings are rarely promised, especially to those who’ve earned them and needed them the most, and after a restaurant takes a little too long to prepare food for pick-up, Lu discovers his bike has been stolen. He races against the clock to get his bike, which is tied to his source of livelihood, and the film expands out from that point to encompass the rude awakening he and his family will go through in trying to make their dreams come true in America.
Norm Li’s cinematography adds another chilling dimension to Choi’s film; the film takes place in NYC, but it’s captured with such a heaviness that stands in contrast to the vibrant energy of the city. Everything feels muted and shot in an overcast light as if the city is constantly slumbering. There’s a safety in the anonymity of a large city, but it’s also its type of death sentence, where no one cares whether you make it or die.
Nothing about the film feels overstated in that sense, which allows Lu’s story and inner demons to manifest. Lu tries his best to provide for his family, but he also has dreams beyond surviving. That drive pushes him to do questionable things, and even when Lu is robbing another person’s bike or violently threatening someone who owes him money, Chen always finds a way to anchor Lu’s humanity through the worst of his acts.
Of particular praise is Manna Wei as Yaya, who is forced to see the harsh realities of the world through the prism of her parents’ imperfections; she’s precocious and crafty, and her inquisitiveness reminds Lu that he fights so that she doesn’t have to resort to the same methods of survival he has had to.
“His dreams would fill the room,” Yaya’s aunt tells her, and it’s this line that helps recontextualize the gruffness Lu has displayed prior, that his hardened exterior acts as a way to protect his dreams and hopes that can be snatched as quickly as someone can cut a bike lock. “Lucky Lu,” for all of its grim exteriors, never loses sight of this warm center.
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