Cannes 2025: "Urchin", margins in London

A first feature film about the journey of a young homeless person screened at Cannes, is that really reasonable? On the Croisette, you don't make the Sunday-best spectators shed tears without risking seeing them wipe their cheeks with their luxury handbag, or with their invitation card to the next trendy party on Magnum beach. And unlike the great cinematic precedent Panic in Needle Park (or its unofficial homage Mad Love in New York by the Safdies), Harris Dickinson 's film doesn't even have the argument of a love story in the foreground to keep the gloomy verism at bay. Watching Urchin, however, we never have the impression of consuming a melodrama about homelessness, sculpted in pity, or the heroic portrait of a junkie for scavengers of misery.

A certain English temperament is undoubtedly sharpened in the sense of humor, bitter, dry, very well seen, with the