Biggest bombshells from My Mom Jayne
When waterproof mascara isn’t waterproof enough.
Long queues for women’s lavatories followed the emotional Cannes screening of My Mom Jayne, Mariska Hargitay’s revelatory new documentary concerning her late pin-up mother. The debuting film-maker and CSI legend fought back tears as she introduced a portrait that left most of the audience bawling.
Post-screening, Hargitay gathered the audience to tell a story about her husband, Peter Hermann, and her mother’s piano. Hundreds of people wanted hugs afterwards.
Jayne Mansfield, a Golden Globe winner characterised by Groucho Marx (among others) as “Hollywood’s smartest dumb blonde”, was killed, aged 34, in a car crash on June 29th, 1967. Her three-year-old daughter – and future TV goddess – Mariska Hargitay was in the backseat.
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Following the incident, a persistent and gruesome myth emerged claiming that Mansfield had been decapitated. Hargitay’s film not only sets the record straight, it reveals some jaw-dropping truths.
1. Mariska Hargitay is not who you think she is
For the first time, Hargitay reveals her biological father is not bodybuilder and former Mr Universe Mickey Hargitay, but Italian singer Nelson Sardelli, whom she met in her 30s after discovering their striking resemblance. Sardelli and his two daughters – Mariska’s half-sisters – appear in the film. Before the premiere, they all kept the secret for decades.
2. Mariska was nearly left behind in the car wreck
Hargitay, only three at the time, was initially missed by rescuers during the 1967 crash that killed her mother. Lodged under the seat with a head injury, she was only discovered after her brother Zoltan awoke in the ambulance and asked where his sister was.
3. Jayne Mansfield was not a dumb blonde
Mansfield spoke Spanish, French, Italian and Hungarian. She played the violin and piano on The Ed Sullivan Show. When she attempted to play on The Jack Paar Program, the audience laughed as she tightened her bow and the host cut to commercial break with an order to “shut up and kiss me”.
4. History repeats: both mother and daughter lost fathers at age three
In an eerie parallel, Mansfield was also in the backseat of the fatal car crash that killed her father. Like Mariska, she was three years old at the time of the incident.
K-Stew has ‘big Cannes energy’
The newly married Kristen Stewart arrived on the Croisette in sheer pink Chanel. And that was just her walking-around outfit. K-Stew has a storied history at the festival since her debut at Cannes in 2012 with On the Road. She won much love for her performances in films such as Personal Shopper (2016) and Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), both by Olivier Assayas. She became the first American actor to win a César Award for the latter. In 2018, she participated in the first majority female jury and broke tradition by removing her heels on the red carpet, protesting the festival’s unspoken dress code.
This year she returns as the director of The Chronology of Water – reviewed below – and was on top form as she discussed casting Imogen Poots as The Chronology of Water’s damaged heroine: “She doesn’t have like big t**s or anything, but she seems like she does,” Stewart explained. “It’s like ‘big d**k energy,’ what is that? She has BTE.”
Natalie Portman wins all-time best post-divorce frock
In 2023, Natalie Portman arrived at the premiere of May December in a recreation of an iconic 1949 Dior gown. She was not wearing a wedding ring amid a swirl of French reports that her choreographer husband, Benjamin Millepied, had had an affair with a 25-year-old influencer. Their divorce was finalised last year, and what better way to mark the occasion than a return to the Croisette in another tribute to mid-20th-century Dior, this time a nod to a 1951 Dior classic, requiring 700 hours to stitch shimmering crystals into black tulle. Dior’s Atelier Safrane completed 450 hours of embroidery on the gown, the most photographed dress of the festival.
Review: The Chronology of Water
Kristen Stewart’s ferociously raw directorial debut is this uncompromising, defiantly fragmented adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s trauma memoir. Imogen Poots gives the festival’s most emotionally impactful performance as Lidia endures a harrowing journey through incest, addiction and stillbirth.
Stewart’s film – cowritten with Andy Mingo – is divided into five chapters of fragmented, elliptical memories, arriving in impressionistic waves with a somnambulist voiceover that recalls peak Terrence Malick.
Corey C Waters’s textured 16mm cinematography and Olivia Neergaard-Holm’s brilliant associative edits add to the blur of memories, as the damaged, alcoholic heroine attempts to suppress her father’s sexual abuse. Poots plays Yuknavitch from her teens to late adulthood, a device that goes unnoticed under the weight of her performance and the material.
While the film can feel repetitive in its portrayal of pain, it rarely lapses into indulgence. Stewart directs with big, bold swings and absolute sincerity, eschewing any levity or irony. Brutal honesty, graphic sex and viscera amplify the idea that this is more of a laceration than a movie. Poots, mirroring the film-maker’s bravura script and direction, screams, spits, trembles and bleeds. Neither woman is concerned with your comfort or entertainment.
Review: Nouvelle Vague
American iconoclast Richard Linklater returns to Cannes with a joyful new comedy inspired by the haphazard making of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic, À Bout de Souffle. It’s 1960, and the swaggering, young film critic (essayed by magnetic newcomer Guillaume Marbeck) has watched his Cahiers du Cinéma colleagues – including Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut – diversify into film-making.
For film historians, there’s a welcome and riotous education in the Texan film-maker’s tributary introductions to all participants in the New Wave, whether hailing from the Cahiers du Cinéma backroom to Breathless’s end credits.
For those who have neither seen À Bout de Souffle nor could pick Robert Bresson out of a police line-up, there’s much merriment in the anarchy and Godard’s wilfully pretentious pronouncements: “It’s about a boy and girl who use the same words with different meanings,” he tells an exasperated Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) and her genial co-star, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dillon).
The film’s monochrome visuals and 1:33 aspect ratio pay meticulous tribute to the aesthetic choices of the original, but Linklater is far more interested in querulous personal dynamics and Godard’s antics. “I must have had some bad pizza,” he shrugs to his vein-popping producer, Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürsft), having sent everyone home from day eight of an already-delayed micro-budget shoot. Godard simultaneously blazes through the film, demanding only one take of each scene and simultaneously delays production, requiring breaks to allow inspiration to strike. His bemused cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) invents and amiably shrugs. This film should come with a health warning for producers. Everyone else will have a good time.
Review: Die, My Love
Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love is a hellish dive into post-partum psychosis, anchored by a visceral Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a new mother spiralling somewhere in rural America. Irish interest includes cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, who shot the bad-trip visuals, and playwright Enda Walsh, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ramsay and source novel author, Ariana Harwicz.
Opposite Robert Pattinson’s sensitive but ineffectual Jackson, Grace escalated from frustrated lust to full-blown psychosis in a film more concerned with mood than narrative clarity. The sustained sense of dread throughout is impressive. Even the skies are ominous.
Disturbing and fragmented shots, including Grace in proximity to her family with a knife or shotgun, make for distressing moments. This isn’t just a postpartum issue. Grace behaves like an animal from the get-go, prowling on all fours in carnal scenes. Later, she takes a barking territorial dislike to the puppy her partner brings home, claws at bathroom wallpaper like a cat, and sticks her tongue out at an unfortunate deer trophy. She masturbates in plain sight and fantasises about a passing local (LaKeith Stanfield), before her violent, feral intensity ruins social gatherings and family drives in a mirage of colliding images.
Aural effects – flies buzzing, the baby crying, horse shrieking and distorted musical earworms – add to overall discomfort. Die, My Love evokes the suffocating weight of new motherhood. Its theatricality, however, almost overshadows emotional considerations.
Ramsay, on her fifth uncompromising feature, delivers bold cinema. Lawrence – revisiting the madness of Mother! – is wholly committed. The results cast a queasy, oppressive, lust-fever spell, but with nothing like narrative progression or variation. The viewer – like Grace – is intentionally trapped in endless, apocalyptic horrors.
