Cannes: A Disaster for Sean Penn

You have to wonder what Thierry Frémaux, the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, was thinking when he gave the green light to a showing of The Last Face in competition. Was it the aura of Sean Penn at Cannes (The Promise was in competition in 2001, and he presided over the jury in 2008)? His militant side? The presence of superstars Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem in the credits? Regardless, this very bad film has no place in the competition.

Its reception was equal to its failure. The Last Face got the most appropriate boos of this 69th edition of the festival. That’s saying something. Unlike Dolan, Winding Refn or Assayas, this pretentious and insipid dud didn’t get mixed reviews. Everyone was universally against it. In a press conference, the director, who looked down in the dumps, carefully avoided the question, except to grudgingly offer up a cliché: the film doesn’t belong to me anymore.

The Last Face is an atrocious mix of romantic drama and war film, in which the mixture is a complete failure. Instead of using this improbable romance as a pretext for illustrating the work of doctors on the front line of interethnic conflicts, Penn puts the emphasis on the melodramatic aspect. He falls into the pathos of a Harlequin novel with this relationship between two doctors that we don’t believe in for a second. Not to mention the ridiculous supporting characters and the dull dialogue.

This plot choice is an obscenity for all the refugees of the world, not to mention the way in which Penn exploits the image of the horrible wounds of victims in close-up. This is not the opinion of Bardem: “It’s what’s around it that makes this a unique love story.”*

To summarize, it’s about the improbable and impossible love between a doctor who manages Doctors of the World in Geneva and a doctor on the ground in South Sudan. Wren (Theron) will suffer from her stay in the conflict zone and will opt for salvation through flight. Leaving Miguel (Bardem) to his missionary work.

Not everything needs to be thrown out. The actors, who got medical training, are very believable in their performing of medical tasks. “We really felt close to reality,” explained Adele Exarchopoulos (La Vie d’Adele). There is also a very marked documentary aspect in the scenes of the camp. But it’s not enough to save the film from disaster.

Into the Wild, which is at least 10 years old, left me with good memories, which makes this defeat all the more unsettling. What a fiasco.