However Birthday Party marks the first time Léa Mysius directs a film in contention for the festival’s Palme d’Or, the French filmmaker knows Cannes. His second feature – the strange, beguiling star of Adèle Exarchopoulos called The Five Devils – was the highlight of 2022 Fortnight Director nomination, and helped write Claire Denis’ Grand Prix Stars at Daytimeand Jacques Audiard’s delightful music that is reviled and revered Emilia Perez, which is 2024 she won the Jury Prize and Best Actress.
Low and blue light, Birthday Party it’s a slow-burning affair that allows Mysius’ penchant for high-contrast melodrama to shine. Contained in its setting of a remote swamp, the film mainly takes place in two neighboring houses: the studio-house of an unknown Italian artist named Cristina (Monica Bellucci) and the farm of the Bergogne family, consisting of Thomas (Bastien Bouillon), Nora (Hafsia Herzi) and their young daughter El Ghabarchi (Tabarchiw).
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In choosing a narrative that includes the type of facts of a direct video, the instigator of the plot is the TikTok posted by Ida: a short clip of her wearing sunglasses and dancing with her parents in the first bars of A$.AP Rocky’s .‘Praise the Lord’. Nora is furious when she finds out, and forces Ida to delete the video. This seems like an overreaction until we learn why Nora is so protective of her family’s privacy – her past as Leïla, who was part of a very shady smuggling ring. Nora’s loved ones prepare a surprise party for her 37th birthday as the size of the clip draws a group of unlikely characters into his life – the terrifying Franck (Benoît Magimel) and his accomplices Flo (Pal Hamy) and Stutt (Alane Delhaye) crash the celebration and Birthday Party kicks into gear as a familiar but twisted home invasion game.
That Mysius film is one of the few in this year’s lineup where outside forces push a patriarchal family into crisis – including James Grey’s. Paper TigerHirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in a Box and Cristian Mungiu The Fjord – seems to reflect public concern about the future of the conventional nuclear unit. It also taps into the industry-wide trend of blockbuster movies that only use small actors; a sign of the times for the beleaguered once-behemoth of cinema.
Like making a movie, raising a child and maintaining a comfortable standard of living are increasingly unrealistic possibilities in an immoral economy filled with punitive wages, nihilistic tech dominance and rampant crony capitalism. While Thomas herds the cows and Ida does her homework, Nora tries to scale up the business, working as part of a regional program launched to support vulnerable rural areas. As her colleagues shoot confetti canons to congratulate Nora on a decade of work – and being appointed head of their city’s planning center – there is an inescapable sense that this is not enough, and more fear and despair are ahead.
With the music of confusing strings and full frames of black on the farm, Birthday Party it pulls on spooky strings to further its intrigue: making jelly strawberries on top of Nora’s cake, and at one point CAD-rendering two houses and their inhabitants with gray static drops. From visuals like this to Cristina’s expansive abstract paintings (on which the director enlisted the help of artist Corinne Mercadier) there’s plenty of creativity in Mysius’ third feature, a well-paced adaptation of Laurent Mauvignier’s. Histoires de la Nuit. It can never surpass that form of its own, though Birthday Party it’s fun enough – timely, gory, gripping and a little over the top.
