QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM CANNES

The Mad Max franchise can be interpreted as one long art installation; a project that gets stronger and bolder with every entry. With Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), director George Miller has elected to change direction, and focus on another character in the “Maxiverse”: Furiosa, the feisty warrior played on this occasion by Anya Taylor-Joy. Set directly before Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is notable for being the first out-and-out prequel in the series, but that’s not to say that Miller has softened the edges for the purposes of canonical history. Indeed, the film begins with one of the goriest killings in the entire film set; that of a woman crucified on a tree.

Set in a dystopian future, warriors populate the desert, hungrily searching for food and water. Furiosa (played in the earlier sections by Alyla Browne) is kidnapped, and despite her mother’s valiant efforts to rescue her, is forced into a cage by bearded warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Sensing something in the girl – it is established that his children were murdered – he decides to become her surrogate parent. The image of a “magnificent” woman wincing on a branch horrifies Furiosa, who spends her adult days roaming the desert roads engaging in vehicular mayhem and general carnage. When she happens upon Dementus in the desert wasteland – now greyer, but no less eccentric than he was fifteen years earlier – she vows to enact vengeance upon him.

Typical of Miller, the action scenes are dazzling in their presentation. The screen explodes with colour: red flares, orange sand, pastel whites. In between these kaleidoscopic stripes stands Joy, who brings a balletic elegance to the part of the angular, agile Furiosa. She leaps from truck to motorbike, her eyes a mixture of commitment and strange contentment. She is, as Dementus points out, as obsessive as he is, launching into her fights with a certain glee. She exercises control through a variety of gestures, the focus being on the motion, not the locution. Similar to Tom Hardy in Mad Max: Fury Road, Joy says very little, but does a great deal, and the actress can be seen performing many of the stunts herself.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga excels as an action epic, although the first forty five minutes – an exercise of exposition and world-building – drags along, setting a slow pace that sits at odds with the rest of the feature. Make no mistake, once Furiosa enters the vehicle – constructed to go faster than any other automobile in this semi-futuristic universe – the film breezes along, barely pausing to take breath and take in the scenery. Keen to impress the adrenaline on the audience, Miller places the camera beside the myriad moving vehicles; in other words, plunging viewers headfirst into the urgency. Joy commits herself nicely to the action,as does Hemsworth, who flits from maniacal megalomaniac to worried father-figure in seconds (“I have a high tolerance to pain,” he boasts to Furiosa.)

Like Mad Max: Fury Road before it, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is soaked in political nuance, sympathising with women in a burly, male-dominated world. Women are either subservient to the wants and wills of their male overlords, or act as parental voices to the men who will save their fortresses from plunder. In what could be construed as a salute to ladies throughout history, Furiosa disguises herself as a man to make it up the ranks of the social sector.

The finished cut isn’t a feminist apotheosis per sé, but it holds a certain flavour that’s more mature than some of the other spectacles Miller has directed, complete with a magnificent central performance courtesy of Joy. Often dark and heavy, it tests the boundaries of action audiences. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga isn’t as neatly streamlined as Mad Max: Fury Road, lacking both the wit and economy of the latter work, but it’s a worthwhile film that stands proudly as both a prequel, and a standalone film.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga just premiered at the 77th edition of Cannes. It is showing in the main selection, however it is running out of competition. In cinemas on Friday, May 24th.