‘Butterfly Jam’ Cannes Review: A Father, a Son, and the Rituals That Bind and Break Them
A teenage wrestler in New Jersey’s Circassian community is forced to confront his father’s failings after one reckless decision upends both their lives. Directors Fortnight.
Every male community has its rituals of masculinity. They can be loud and obvious, or quiet and strange and deeply uncomfortable. They can operate as a form of bullying, or as an unspoken code — be strong, show nothing, keep the vulnerable parts hidden. Butterfly Jam takes that as its gravitational center, the fixed point around which everything else orbits. At its core, it’s a film about the relationship between a father and a son, both members of the Circassian community — an ethnic group originally from the northern Caucasus, the region of present-day Russia bordering Georgia, to which the director himself belongs — now living in Newark, New Jersey. And everything that happens around them.
Pyteh (Talha Akdogan) is a teenager who devotes most of his time to wrestling, a sport in which he excels to the point that his father, Azik (Barry Keoghan), is convinced he’ll be an Olympic champion. Azik himself is a different kind of man — more hesitant, more tangled up inside, sensitive in ways he doesn’t quite know what to do with. He’s a gifted cook, his traditional Circassian recipes always warmly received, and he claims to make a butterfly jam that everyone who tastes it finds irresistible. He works at the neighborhood restaurant run by his sister Zalya (Riley Keough), who is about to become a mother.
Running alongside the father-son dynamic is Pyteh’s own story: his training, his budding relationship with Alika (Jaliyah Richards), a young Black woman he meets at the gym, and his growing frustration with Azik — a father he loves but wants to see do more with himself, maybe take a job with a well-connected member of the community who runs a string of upscale restaurants. But Azik has other plans, or no plans at all, and seems far more preoccupied with choosing a name for his soon-to-be-born niece, or finding the right gift for his sister, or contemplating a poster of Monica Bellucci — whom he insists is also Circassian — than with any kind of professional ambition.
Around them, an all-male community — which includes the sometimes belligerent, sometimes simply lost Marat (Harry Melling) — gathers to play cards, go drinking, trade blows, and perform the rituals of a friendship that may not run as deep as it appears. On the wrestling mat, similar dynamics play out in more regulated form. Gradually, though, things between these men start to unravel in ways nobody anticipated, pushing toward moments of sudden, brutal violence.
At its heart, Butterfly Jam is a coming-of-age story about a fifteen-year-old boy embedded in a performative masculine culture who begins to sense that what lies underneath it is considerably more toxic than it looks. To call someone weak — a coward, a sissy — is perhaps the most devastating insult available in this world, a challenge to a man’s standing in the community that functions, among these characters, almost like a weapon. And when it’s used as one, confusion and conflict follow in ways that are hard to contain.
The film marks a strange turn in the career of its Russian director — who has been in exile since the invasion of Ukraine, previously known for Closeness and Beanpole — toward something closer in spirit to American indie cinema. That shift is felt most acutely in Barry Keoghan’s performance, which carries the particular kind of Actors Studio weight the actor tends to bring everywhere: always doing a few things too many, always slightly overloaded. Curiously, the younger and far less experienced Akdogan turns out to be the more compelling presence — a boy who doesn’t quite understand his father, doesn’t know how to react to his choices, and is working it all out in real time.
One of the more unexpected things the director brings to the film is an odd, dry sense of humor — a series of strange little moments and incongruous appearances, including a pelican that turns out to be considerably more significant than it initially seems, which keeps the film from settling too comfortably into the gravity it accumulates as it goes. In the end, all of these elements — the humor, the violence, the rituals, the wrestling, the jam — are working toward the same underlying idea: that it might be possible to break, generationally, from this cycle of toxic masculinity and damage, and to build something different. Another kind of bond. Another kind of family. Another kind of life.
