Cannes 2017: Radiance, film review – Delicate and gentle story from a festival favourite

Cannes looks after its favourites. Once the festival has decided you are one of its directors, that’s for life, it seems. The Japanese director Naomi Kawase, 48, won her first award here in 1997 and another 10 years later; she’s been on juries and been made a Chevalier Ordre des Arts et Lettres of France, although less successful elsewhere.

The reviewers here may mock her, but Radiance shows why she deserves such support. This film about film and photography, about seeing and saying, the first in this year’s competition by a woman, looked in advance to be special pleading, cinema about cinema yet again.

It turns out to be gentle and delicate, touching and open-hearted. Misako (Ayame Misaki) writes spoken commentaries for films to be watched by the visually impaired — and strikes up a relationship with a former photographer in the focus group assessing her work, Mayasa Nakamori (Masatoshi Nagase), once acclaimed, now losing the remnants of his sight.

Misako’s commentary on a film about an old man heading into the sunset is criticised by the group as intrusive, as she tries to describe the emotions passing over faces, as well as the physical world. When she makes it more reticent, though, she fails to offer the blind the immersion in another world that is the joy of cinema. Stung by the criticism, she unkindly accuses Nakamori of lacking in imagination of his own. But learning more about him, moved by his photograph of a setting sun, she asks him to go with her to where it was taken.

Radiance is sentimental, perhaps, obvious even — but it’s film-making quite unlike everything else in competition here, beautiful in its own way. It looks into the eyes. That’s part of what Cannes is for.