“Your worst enemy is your body,” Benedetta is told when she arrives at the convent as a child and must exchange her fine silks for a scratchy sackcloth shift. But the nun’s words also spoke to a basic skill that many of us in Cannes were having to suddenly relearn: that of being outside, in a body, in the world among all its perils. A toe was broken, a kneecap lost its mooring, an arch fell and an ankle was sprained — this last I know about because the ankle was mine. On the day before the festival began, blithely walking with my nose in my phone, not noticing a split in the notoriously uneven Cannes sidewalk, I fell as flat as Sean Penn’s “Flag Day” would a few days later. The most surprising Cannes exemplar was a documentary: Andrea Arnold’s “Cow,” which with strict formal rigor, focuses on Luma, a handsome Holstein Friesian kept permanently pregnant, and therefore lactating, on a British dairy farm.

Source: New York Times July 18, 2021 17:48 UTC