Cannes 2026 Dispatch, Part 2: “Pour la beauté du geste”

Continued from Part 1

–Qu’est-ce qui vous pousse à continuer, Oscar?
–Je continue comme j’ai commencé. Pour la beauté du geste.
–La beauté … On dit qu’elle est dans l’œil … Dans l’œil de celui qui regarde.
–Alors, si personne ne regarde plus.1

—Holy Motors, dir. Leos Carax, 2012

The Automatism of Gestures

In a 2010 documentary titled The Essence of Forms, dedicated to the cinema of Robert Bresson, Bruno Dumont reflects on Bresson’s work with actors and the profound debt his own cinema owes to it. The fundamental idea Dumont borrows from Bresson is the attempt to strip the actor’s gesture of every trace of intentionality. Professional actors tend to guide every movement, vocal inflection, and gesture according to the demands of a script: everything is thought out, deliberate, motivated. Yet what happens in real life is precisely the opposite: Our everyday gestures are, for the most part, automatic, spontaneous, and devoid of conscious intention. In one interview, Bresson recalled how a person scratching their head, resting a hand on their knee, or absentmindedly moving their fingers is not actually thinking about what they are doing: The gesture emerges on its own, almost independently of the subject. Or rather, we might say that the subject emerges as a consequence of the gesture—as an attempt to retrospectively organize and make sense of it.

To reach this level of automatism, Bresson famously subjected his actors to an exhausting number of repetitions—sometimes fifty or sixty takes of the same scene—with the aim of forcibly rendering the performance mechanical, progressively emptying it of every expressive psychological intention. Here lies one of Dumont’s fundamental aesthetic principles: not to suppress but to evoke the accidental quality of gesture before it has been contaminated by the codes of acting. If one looks at the entire trajectory of Dumont’s cinema, it becomes clear that it has been guided with remarkable consistency by this search for automatism. From his early films featuring nonprofessional actors, Dumont moved toward working with adolescents, marginal figures, and bodies alien to any performative ambition, eventually even engaging with figures at the limits of disability. It is therefore no surprise that with Les Roches Rouges—presented at the Directors’ Fortnight alongside a masterclass that became one of the most anticipated cinephile events of this year’s festival—he seems to push this logic to its extreme conclusion, this time working with actors barely four or five years old.

In this extraordinary and tiny film, shot in the south of France not far from Cannes with an extremely modest production, Dumont stages a minimal story of love and jealousy focused almost entirely on the bodies and movements of these child actors, who are still too young to be rigidified by the stable forms of psychological or narrative intentionality. Gèo, the film’s young protagonist, moves through space as children of his age do: running without direction, constantly flailing his arms, contorting his face into endless grimaces, traversed by a kind of uncontrollable motor energy. It is no coincidence that during the masterclass, Dumont joked that the next step might be to work with even younger performers—or, we might say, directly with animals. And indeed the film already seems to move in that direction, as demonstrated by one of its most beautiful scenes, in which a tennis lesson given to one of the children’s grandfathers is continually sabotaged by dogs chasing balls across the court. These are gestures reduced to pure automatism: movement without interiority.

Les Roches Rouges thus represents not only one of the most radical achievements of Dumont’s body of work, but also an unexpectedly lucid reflection on one of the central transformations traversing contemporary cinema. On the one hand lies the classical photographic paradigm, grounded in the idea that film inevitably records even what escapes the director’s control: involuntary details, residues of the real, opaque fragments of the visible—what Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious. On the other hand lies the contemporary digital regime, in which the manipulability of the image has become so extreme as to transform cinema into a generalized form of animation, where every element of the frame can be corrected, retouched, controlled, and programmed. Within this visual universe, every image progressively tends to become indistinguishable from writing itself.

It is precisely against this saturation of control that Dumont appears to work. If the contemporary digital image tends toward a total intentionalization of the visible, the French director instead seeks to reintroduce into cinema a zone of accidentality and contingency. And the way he does so once again passes through bodies: through those infantile gestures which, precisely because the actors are incapable of truly acting, restore to the image something of its older photographic uncontrollability and neutrality.

The Commodity of Care

And indeed, confronting this transformation of the visible seems to have become one of the fundamental quandaries characterizing contemporary cinema, as well as many of the films presented at Cannes. Interestingly, many of the festival’s most important works adopted forms still deeply indebted to the tradition of modern cinema and, more broadly, to the history of cinema as an art of ambiguity, interpretation, and the desiring subject. And yet it is precisely this very form that today appears traversed by evident signs of crisis.

Perhaps the film that most radically confronted this transformation at Cannes this year was Diary of a Chambermaid—also presented at the Directors’ Fortnight—in which Radu Jude once again demonstrates, more than almost any other filmmaker in recent years, an extraordinary ability to think cinema at the point where it comes to coincide with the very flow of contemporary images themselves: a universe in which the distinctions between representation, archive, simulation, pornography, commodity, and memory progressively collapse.

Only superficially connected to the novel by Octave Mirbeau—already adapted for the screen by Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, and more recently Benoît Jacquot—Jude’s film constructs his characteristic polyphonic and centrifugal dispositif, in which radically different registers, formats, and image types constantly overlap. The protagonist is Gianina, a young Romanian woman working as a “chambermaid” for a bourgeois progressive family in Bordeaux, far away from the daughter she left behind in Bucharest with her grandmother. Her duties include cleaning the house and cooking, but above all caring for the couple’s small child, while the two liberal professionals who employ her are completely absorbed by their work (brilliantly played by Mélanie Thierry and Vincent Macaigne).

The family for whom Gianina works sincerely believes itself to embody the values of progressivism and inclusion. Whenever they invite friends over, they engage in animated political discussions about the invasion of Ukraine, EU policies, and the contemporary migration crisis, inviting Gianina to intervene so that she may contribute what they imagine to be her “Eastern European perspective.” In other words, they want Gianina to be recognized as a subject—but only within terms they establish. The problem is that this apparent inclusiveness collides with the material reality of a relationship that remains radically asymmetrical. And it is precisely here that Jude’s film discovers one of its most compelling tensions: the unresolvable contradiction between the contemporary language of liberal empathy and the persistence of material relations of dependence, subordination, and exploitation that such language cannot truly abolish.

The film thus intertwines different narrative threads and registers. On the one hand there is Gianina’s everyday experience within the bourgeois household in Bordeaux. On the other there is a theatrical staging of Diary of a Chambermaid by Mirbeau, in which the character played by Mélanie Thierry encourages Gianina to participate: a kind of theater within the film that stages the return of the repressed drives and tensions underlying the dynamics of the household. Whereas in Mirbeau’s novel the dimensions of desire, domination, and sadistic violence were open and explicit, in the liberal progressivism of Jude’s present everything remains implicit, concealed, neutralized within the language of inclusion and mutual understanding. Yet it is precisely this concealment that renders the underlying material conflict even more visible—a conflict destined inevitably to erupt. But what Jude preserves above all from Mirbeau’s book is its diary-like and epistolary structure. The film unfolds as a sort of journal, proceeding day by day throughout the autumn in anticipation of Gianina’s Christmas return from Bordeaux to Bucharest to reunite with her daughter—although events will, of course, develop unexpectedly. But this diaristic form is updated through contemporary digital technologies: The film is punctuated by WhatsApp calls, messages, and webcam conversations with her daughter in Romania, which become the contemporary equivalent of the letter. It is precisely these long digital conversations with her daughter—who grows increasingly resentful of her mother’s absence—that introduce into the film a surprisingly intense emotional dimension.

Diary of a Chambermaid thus ultimately becomes at once a reflection on one of the fundamental forms of contemporary class conflict—that linked to migration and global care labor—but also a reflection on the form of the contemporary image itself. By intersecting these two levels, it also becomes a film about the political dimension of the digital image’s aesthetic form: plural, dispersive, centrifugal, continually traversed by shifts in register, changes of format, and collisions between different languages.

In this sense, Jude’s film brought to mind an essay by Arlie Russell Hochschild from several years ago entitled “Love and Gold,” which analyzes the functioning of global care chains within contemporary capitalism.2 Hochschild shows how migrant care labor does not simply consist of the sale of labor power and time, but also of the commodification of affective, emotional, and relational capacities: empathy, attentiveness, listening, emotional availability. These are precisely the capacities—inseparable from the worker herself—that Gianina sells to the Bordeaux family. Yet the tragic paradox at the center of the film is that, precisely because these capacities are inseparable from her own person, the care she provides to the French family’s child is exactly the care she can no longer give to her own daughter left behind in Bucharest.

What emerges so strikingly from Hochschild’s essay—as well as from Jude’s film—is that this apparently “soft” commodification of emotional life is in reality something profoundly unstable and contradictory. Hochschild recounts, for example, the experiences of migrant workers who end up feeling more emotionally attached to the children they care for professionally than to their own children left behind in their countries of origin. And it is precisely this contradiction that Jude’s film pushes toward explosion. Even while maintaining its characteristic fragmentary irony—made up of vulgar jokes, sudden digressions, abrupt tonal shifts, and collisions between heterogeneous registers—by the end Diary of a Chambermaid nevertheless succeeds, almost paradoxically for Jude’s cinema, in reaching a deeply emotional and even dramatic intensity. And it is probably precisely this capacity to allow a genuine emotional experience to emerge from the very center of a fragmented, saturated, and self-reflexive visual universe that makes the film one of the most surprising works presented at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight.

Regimes of Truth

Despite the fact that two of the most interesting filmmakers seen this year at Cannes—Bruno Dumont and Radu Jude (unfortunately we do not have the space to dwell on what would be the third, namely Lisandro Alonso, director of La Libertad Doble)—were both screened in the Directors’ Fortnight, it is nevertheless worth concluding by briefly commenting on one of the main awards of the Competition: the Grand Prix awarded to Minotaur by Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Minotaur addresses the more radical problem of the repression of truth within Putin’s contemporary Russia. And it is no coincidence that the film revolves around one of the primal scenes of modern cinema: the concealment of a crime. How many times have we seen it, beginning of course with the famous shower scene in Psycho (although the immediate reference point here seems rather to be La Femme infidèle by Claude Chabrol)? A murderer who, after committing a crime, obsessively attempts to erase all traces of it, to clean away the blood, to make the evidence disappear. It is perhaps the fundamental cinematic scene of repression itself: the attempt to undo what has been done and to conceal a truth one refuses to acknowledge.

Naturally, this happens in cinema. In real life—and especially in the militarized and increasingly fascist Russia shaped by the Ukrainian conflict portrayed by Zvyagintsev—things function differently. Not because traces of the crime do not exist or are not visible (some characters do in fact discover them), but because a single phone call to the right people, a few political connections, and a network of favors and complicities are enough for everything to be buried and for truth to cease to matter. This is the political core of the film: contemporary Russia as a gigantic regime of repression, diffuse co-responsibility, and collective falsehood lived as truth.

At the center of the narrative is Galina, the unhappy wife of a minor provincial oligarch—the owner of a military contracting company operating on the Ukrainian front—who longs to experience an authentic life within a world where everyone else seems merely to be performing a role. Around her unfolds the moral squalor of a new Russian bourgeoisie economically prospering through war, which emerges in an extraordinary dinner scene where every gesture, conversation, and form of intimacy appears corrupted by a generalized economy of lies. The adulterous relationship Galina develops with a young photographer thus becomes the point at which three distinct crises converge: the familial crisis, the moral crisis, and the crisis produced by a war economy in which a political favor can determine who will be sent to the front and who will be spared.

Zvyagintsev, who had not made a film in nearly ten years (Loveless was presented at Cannes in 2017), arrives at Minotaur after a long interruption marked by exile, the abandonment of several international projects, and above all a severe case of Covid that left him hospitalized for nearly a year. Although the film was shot almost entirely in Riga, Latvia, with mostly French financing, Minotaur is one of the most violent indictments of contemporary Russia produced by European cinema in recent years.

Significantly, the film closes with an image shot on a cellphone by the family’s teenage son, a silent and apparently passive figure who throughout the story absentmindedly observes the moral collapse of the adults through the screens of video games and smartphones. Yet in the final sequence the boy finally raises his gaze toward the sky and films the clouds from an airplane. What are these clouds? The sign that a truth destined to escape the regime’s manipulation will nevertheless make itself visible? Or does the fact that the video is filtered in black and white suggest instead that even the future of the Russian image will remain inevitably mediated by the symbolic machinery of power?

Zvyagintsev deliberately leaves the question open. And it is perhaps this final suspension that makes Minotaur one of the strongest and most intelligent political reflections screened at Cannes this year.