Cannes 2021: Rehana Maryam Noor, Evolution, The Story of Film: A New Generation

Despite the differences this year at the Cannes Film Festival, one thing remains the same: it is one of the most diverse film events anywhere in the world. Take three movies that I was lucky enough to see without leaving the relative comfort of the Midwest or spitting in a vial to prove that I’m COVID free. While two of them could accurately be called depressing in terms of storytelling, they approach their characters in such different ways that they have entirely unique tones. The third is a documentary from one of the most beloved film historians alive. One wonders if either of the first two could find their way into one of his future projects. Other films that premiered at Cannes this year certainly will.

The best of the three by some stretch is Abdullah Mohammad Saad’s powerful “Rehana Maryam Noor,” an exercise in craft and limited POV that’s given a strong emotional core by Azmeri Haque Badhon as the title character. An assistant professor at a medical college and a single mother to a delightful young girl named Emu (Afia Jahin Jaima, giving an incredibly natural performance), Rehana is a taskmaster even though her superior (Kazi Sami Hassan) encourages her to let some small slights slide when it comes to managing her students. One night, Rehana is staying late at the school when she hears a young woman being assaulted in her superior’s office next door. A student named Annie (Afia Tabassum Borno) emerges, knowing that Rehana is aware of what just happened, but she refuses her teacher’s pleas to report the assault. Rehana can’t let it go, becoming increasingly obsessed with what she knows, eaten alive by the knowledge that a horrible crime might go unpunished.

“Rehana Maryam Noor” is a fascinating study in how we define allyship and how easy it is for bad men to continue unchecked. The truth is that Annie’s life will be destroyed if she files charges against her professor—everything she’s worked for in her tough education thrown away. She understandably doesn’t want this to happen, and so Rehana devises an ingenious plan. She will tell her superiors that it was she, not Annie, who was raped. As Rehana digs in deeper and becomes more reckless, Saad’s film almost becomes a thriller. He employs an unstable camera, always moving and shifting, reflecting the uncertainty about what’s happening, both on the part of the viewer and the protagonist.

Saad also brilliantly locks us into the POV of his title character, not only placing her in every scene, but never leaving the offices, classrooms, and corridors of the hospital. The setting adds to the claustrophobia, enhanced even further by a striking blue color palette. We often see Rehana through windows and reflected on surfaces, as if she’s turning into something less than three-dimensional in this nightmare scenario, fading into a system that denies justice. After an intense scene at around the hour mark wherein Rehana takes action against a student, the film kind of retreats right when it should be pushing forward, but a final scene echoes the first one in a way that’s very rewarding. The first Bangladeshi film at Cannes, this is one to watch for when it finds its way off the Croisette.

More likely to get a wide release simply because of the success of the work of the last project from its filmmakers is writer Kata Weber and director Kornel Mundruczo’s “Evolution,” a quick follow-up the couple’s Oscar-nominated “Pieces of a Woman.” Once again, the pair play with unbroken takes and intense tragedy but in a manner here that constantly calls attention to their pretentious filmmaking and miserablist storytelling. “Pieces” got a lot of press for its heartbreaking open sequence, an unbroken shot that ended in unimaginable tragedy. This is a whole movie of that, the sequence multiplied by three in a triptych structure that’s meant to unpack generations of pain but never breaks through its experimental style to strike a single emotional chord.

“Evolution” opens with a wordless sequence as three men enter a gas chamber to clean it. In an unbroken take—all three chapters are largely unbroken with the exception of one very obvious cut in the third one—the men start to splash water on the walls and floors of the chamber, eventually pulling clumps of hair from cracks in walls and out of drains. The scene becomes increasingly surreal as the hair multiplies and then a child’s wails can be heard, sending the silent men into gasping panic. It’s a horrific segment that becomes more interesting as it becomes more and more surreal, playing more like a nightmare one would have after reading about the gas chambers than something that’s meant to be taken literal. “Evolution” is at its best when it finds these surreal tones.

Sadly, that’s nowhere near often enough. A second segment jumps forward decades to a Holocaust survivor named Eva (Lili Monori) talking about her past and heritage with her daughter Lena (Annamaria Lang). Lena struggles with her mother’s increasing dementia, but Mundruczo and Weber allow her to monologue about her birth in the concentration camps and legacy of hiding her Judaism. The monologue goes on for so long that the camera itself almost seems to lose interest, moving to a pigeon on the windowsill and almost staring jealously at kids playing on the sidewalk below.