From Austria, Marie Kreutzer breaks into the Palme d’Or competition for a very first time after having competed in the Un Certain Regard section (and winning) for 2022’s Corsage. Her previous works include The Fatherless (2011’s Berlinale), Gruber Is Leaving (2015’s TIFF), We Used to Be Cool (2016) and The Ground Beneath My Feet (2019’s Berlinale – Golden Bear comp). Starring Léa Seydoux and Catherine Deneuve, Gentle Monster centers on two women quietly eroding beneath the weight of caregiving and compromise. Lucy abandons her ambitions as a concert pianist after relocating to the countryside with her husband Philip, whose burnout has reshaped the family dynamic, while Elsa, a police investigator, struggles to balance the pressures of her work with caring for her aging father. As both women devote themselves to men whose troubling behavior they choose to ignore, the emotional fault lines in their lives begin to widen. Her usual themes of female resistance against prescribed roles, and the body as a battleground is lightly visited here in this Austria, France, Belgium, and Germany co-production. This is competition film #6 of 22.
With very late screenings the night before, we are still receiving our grades and we have a polarizing type film with a flurry of low scores, and high value stamps. With about a dozen grades in we are looking at a current average of 2.7 for Gentle Monster which places the film at the bottom of the chart.
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