Mister Tee wrote:For the record, I haven't been posting Cannes reviews this year because neither Variety nor Screen Daily -- 2 of my 3 usual trade sources -- has been letting me into their reviews of late.
Sssh, don't tell anyone.
For Variety, hit the "Print" option on the review page in the 2 seconds before it goes black. This takes a little practice, but you can read the print-friendly page just fine. If you don't do it in time, just "refresh" the page and try again.
I found a way to read Screendaily's reviews as well, but it's far more complicated and I found it out by accident. It has something to do with an RSS feed I subscribed to before SD put the paywall up. I thought Screendaily's Cannes reviews were free, though? If a particular review interests you, I can get it. I'm just not posting because I have no time this year. Which is a good thing.
For the record, I haven't been posting Cannes reviews this year because neither Variety nor Screen Daily -- 2 of my 3 usual trade sources -- has been letting me into their reviews of late.
I don't bother predicting the Palme these days, because most recent winners have been surprises.
I found it amusing that Sean Penn couldn't make it to Cannes because he was in Haiti helping the earthquake victims. Meanwhile, Lindsay Lohan couldn't make her court date because she was in Cannes.
More than anything else, what I want from the Cannes Film Festival—from the films in Competition, in particular—is to experience something that feels singular, unprecedented, visionary. That doesn’t necessarily have to mean “great,” either (though it’d be nice). Antichrist,for example, was perhaps my least favorite film in last year’s lineup (D+), but I nonetheless “reviewed” it via an open letter to Lars von Trier in which I thanked him, with utter sincerity, for at least trying to shake people’s foundations. Ultimately, whether we do or don’t enjoy a movie pivots on any number of subjective predilections and biases; what goes down in history are those rare, cherishable films that make everybody, no matter their personal opinion, exit the theater looking dazed and uncertain—capable of no more trenchant analysis, at least for the moment, than “Well, that was something.”
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is something and a half. If you’re familiar with Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul (affectionately known as “Joe”)—his previous films include Blissfully Yours, Syndromes and a Century and the astounding Tropical Malady—then you’ll surely raise an eyebrow when I say that Uncle Boonmee may be his strangest and most mysterious picture yet, juxtaposing the earthly with the fantastic in a way that induces a nearly continuous trance state. Joe being Joe, Uncle Boonmee’s previous adventures in reincarnation barely figure into the quasi-narrative—I believe we see him as a water buffalo and as a facially disfigured princess who gets drilled by a talking catfish (there’s no time, just move ahead)—but the film as a whole is devoted to limning the porous border separating this world from the next, to mesmerizing effect. This is a film in which a mundane conversation is interrupted by the sudden materialization of Uncle Boonmee’s long-dead wife (an effect handled so subtly that I didn’t notice her until someone onscreen leapt startled from his chair), and just moments later this ongoing ghostly visitation gets almost completely forgotten, as you’re far too busy being freaked out by the appearance of Boonmee’s long-missing son, who is now a deeply unnerving cross between Chewbacca and a Jawa, all shaggy fur and pinpoint red eyes. (The first glimpse of this creature—there’s more than one—will be haunting my nightmares for years, though Joe reportedly based the look on cheesy monsters from the low-budget Thai horror films of his childhood.)
Still, tales of the supernatural aren’t exactly thin on the ground. What makes Uncle Boonmee so captivating is the way that Joe anchors the weirdness in everyday details, like the steps required for the title character’s kidney dialysis (which is initially administered by what I think is a medical student for hire, but gets taken over by the ghost of Boonmee’s wife). Even the film’s primary setting reflects this dichotomy, allowing for gorgeously eerie shots of a ramshackle house nestled in the thick darkness of northeastern Thailand’s jungle. And while parts of the movie are currently inexplicable to me, they’re inexplicable in a way that nonetheless “feels right” (unlike, say, the baffling bits in yesterday’s much less poetic Poetry)—I have no clue why Joe suddenly introduces a still-photo montage of what appear to be behind-the-scenes photos at a key dramatic moment, but some deeply buried region of my consciousness clearly understood, because I had to restrain myself from clapping my hands in what could only be called glee.
Because I’m a left-brain zealot who tends to distrust anything I don’t fully comprehend, I can’t yet give myself fully to Uncle Boonmee. (Tropical Malady is my favorite of his films in large part because it’s the one for which I can construct an intelligible thesis, though I’m also just partial to his animist-jungle mode—the more talking animals, the better.) It may take another viewing for me to feel as if I have a handle on what Joe’s up to, and my grade may go up or down (more likely up) accordingly. But there’s no denying that the movie’s sui generis mundane grandeur makes everything else in this year’s Competition—including Certified Copy, as much as I loved it—look thin and paltry by comparison. Ordinary. It’s been a long wait, but someone finally added the extra-. Very tentative grade: B+
Let me emphasize again, however, that extraordinary doesn’t automatically mean good. Case in point: Lodge Kerrigan’s inscrutable Rebecca H. (Return To The Dogs), playing in Un Certain Regard, which resembles no other film I’ve ever seen in a way that frankly made me want to claw my face off. In all honesty, I have zero idea what Kerrigan meant to accomplish with this doodle (it runs just 75 minutes), in which French actors Géraldine Pailhas and Pascal Greggory play characters in an unconventional Grace Slick biopic, as well as themselves as actors starring in an unconventional Grace Slick biopic (called Somebody to Love) directed by Lodge Kerrigan (appearing as himself—it’s probably ideal to see Rebecca H. at a film festival where he’ll introduce it), as well as their no-this-time-for-real selves (maybe) starring as actors in the previous film within the even more previous film (suck it, Charlie Kaufman!), as well as remote camera subjects who could just as easily be either the characters or the “actors” or the actors, since their only function is to be followed surveillance-style along the streets of Paris for minutes at a time as if they were in a Lodge Kerrigan movie, which of course they are, though who knows which one. Fans of this tediously self-reflexive exercise claim that it’s intended as auto-critique, but it seems a little premature for someone who’s only made three moderately interesting features (Clean, Shaven; Claire Dolan; Keane) to devote the fourth to puckish navel-gazing. In any case, absent any trace of wit or real complexity, much less any sense of why Kerrigan chose Grace Slick as his biographical MacGuffin, Rebecca H. will have trouble justifying its existence on any level…though I’d still rather have seen it in Competition than something like The Princess of Montpensier. Grade: D
Not much time left before I have to run over to the Espace Miramar and take a look at the grand prize winner in Critics’ Week, so in brief: Fair Game, starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn as Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, does an amazingly zingy job of laying out the convoluted CIA-leak scandal, serving as a welcome reminder that director Doug Liman, who’s been wasting his energy on vapid Hollywood crap like Jumper,was once at the helm of a movie very aptly titled Go. Once Plame’s cover is blown, however, the film gets busy turning both her and (especially) her husband into Great American Martyrs, which means that fast-paced Beltway machinations are replaced by lofty speeches in which we’re exhorted to “demand that truth!” Penn becomes insufferable—never give that guy a soapbox—and Watts, while adequate, is no match for Vera Farmiga’s awesomely blunt turn as Plame in Rod Lurie’s little-seen Nothing But The Truth.Grade: C+
Still, Fair Game is both more entertaining and less didactic than Ken Loach’s Route Irish, in which Mark Womack, apparently the shoutingest actor in England, bellows his way through a lackluster suspense plot involving a dead man’s cell phone that contains video footage of a cover-up in Iraq. (The film concerns private security contractors rather than the military, but that just seems like a token effort to do something slightly different—it could just have easily been soldiers.) As it turns out, the protagonist, who’s convinced that his best friend’s death was no accident, is meant to be unsympathetic—if you learn nothing else from this film, you’ll damn well learn that information extracted via torture isn’t always reliable—but while an unexpectedly bleak ending provides a welcome sting, it can’t remotely compensate for all the high-decibel tedium along the way. Seriously, this guy makes 24’s Jack Bauer (“WHERE ARE THE FILES! TELL ME! [gunshot wound to thigh] WHERE ARE THE FILES!”) look like freakin’ Jeeves. If you decide to see this one, bring earplugs. Grade: C
Tomorrow: Predictions for Sunday’s awards, plus a few stray films. Winding down.
I know that either Certified Copy or Another Year will win the Grand Prix. I just don't know which one. I guess in retrospect, it's more likely that they're going to give their Grand Prix to more of a crowd-pleaser than a conversation piece. I'll stick to my choice.
PALME D'OR: Uncle Bomnee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
GRAND PRIX: Another Year
JURY PRIZE: Bitiful
ACTOR: Javier Bardem, Bitiful
ACTRESS: Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy
DIRECTOR: Lee Chang-dong, Poetry
SCREENPLAY: Of Gods and Men
"Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good."
- Minor Myers, Jr.
I'm just going to make my predictions...
PALME D'OR - Uncle Bomnee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
GRAND PRIX - Certified Copy
JURY PRIZE - Of Gods and Men
BEST ACTOR - William Shimmel, Certified Copy
BEST ACTRESS - Yun Hee-Jeong, Poetry
BEST DIRECTOR - Lee Chang-dong, Poetry
BEST SCREENPLAY - Mike Leigh, Another Year
Whatever. I'm going to the Onion for Cannes-fo and that's all there is to it.
DAY EIGHT
by Mike D'Angelo
The most thrilling movie I’ve seen at Cannes this year runs just a little over an hour, telling an explosive real-life story in minute, riveting detail and yet with brutal economy. Sharply written and beautifully directed, and featuring a star-making, coldly charismatic performance by little-known Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramírez, this miniature docudrama achieves a degree of nail-biting tension that the Bourne series would envy, while also functioning as a pitch-black comedy of errors and a genuinely incisive depiction of the ever-present struggle between idealism and pragmatism. It’s as expert as fact-based filmmaking gets—a tour de force guaranteed to leave audiences breathless. It wastes not a second. It arrives unexpected, it awes, and then it motors. It also constitutes maybe 20% of the total running time of the actual movie in which it can be found.
Clocking in at roughly five-and-a-half hours, Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, a sweeping portrait of terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (sometimes known as the Jackal, though the movie never uses that nickname), was created as a three-part miniseries for French television, though it’ll be released theatrically in the U.S., both at its original length and in a condensed three-hour cut. And for most of that epic journey, it’s an engrossing but fairly typical biopic, providing a visual representation of its subject’s Wikipedia entry. Assayas (Irma Vep, Summer Hours) has clearly done his research, and he keeps things moving along swiftly enough to avoid the plodding, and-then-this-happened rhythm endemic to the genre; he’s also found a terrific lead actor in Ramírez, who gives Carlos an ugly sense of entitlement at odds with his professed hatred for all forms of imperialism.
All the same, Carlos suffers, if to a lesser degree, from the same problem as most biopics: It isn’t really about much of anything. Great narrative works require drama, not merely a recitation of events, and while Carlos’ professional life inevitably reflects the enormous historical upheavals surrounding the end of the Cold War, the movie doesn’t make much effort to employ his psyche as a geopolitical microcosm. It just doggedly lays out everything that happened, beat by beat. The last hour, in particular, starts to feel interminable—Assayas is determined to depict Carlos’ downfall accurately, but it’s fidelity for fidelity’s sake, piling on details (like the fact that Carlos was being treated for a varicose vein in one testicle at the time of his arrest) that seem increasingly irrelevant.
Or maybe I was just feeling restless after the virtuoso slow-motion thriller that takes up most of part two. In December of 1975, Carlos and his gang stormed an OPEC meeting in Vienna and took more than 60 hostages—ostensibly to make a statement regarding the oppression of Palestine, but with the actual intention of murdering Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ahmed Zaki Yamani, and Iran’s finance minister, Jamshid Amuzgar. Assayas turns this bungled operation into a Middle Eastern Dog Day Afternoon, observing Carlos’ gradual metamorphosis, over the course of three hectic days, from strident ideologue to frazzled quarterback to hypocritical, self-justifying mercenary. Indeed, this single incident, as depicted here, is so thematically rich, so relentlessly gripping, and so overstuffed with fascinating minutiae (psychopathic underling Nada retreating to the rear of the getaway plane to cry; Yamani munching on the ham sandwiches provided by the cops, which most of the Muslim hostages can’t eat) that it makes the rest of Carlos feel almost redundant. I’ll be curious to see how the three-hour cut plays, but I’d also be perfectly happy to see the OPEC raid refashioned into a 90-minute masterpiece of its own. Grade: B- (but Grade for the OPEC-raid section: A).
Of the films that screened in Competition here three years ago, only a handful still have yet to receive any kind of U.S. release. I find it odd that one of them is Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, which won the Best Actress award that year and was generally received warmly by critics—albeit not by the Wet Blanket, who found himself unable to make any emotional sense of it. And I’m having the same difficulty with Lee’s new picture, Poetry, which works beautifully on a moment-to-moment basis but falters badly when the time comes to assemble its various vivid elements into a coherent, satisfying whole. Or maybe I’m just doing it wrong, being a prose guy at heart. Emerging from a 15-year retirement, noted Korean actress Yun Jung-hee plays Mija, an elderly woman who impulsively signs up for a poetry class, then struggles to find inspiration in everyday beauty—perhaps because she’s too busy negotiating the terms of a financial settlement to recompense the family of a young girl who committed suicide after being repeatedly gang-raped by Mija’s grandson (for whom Mija cares) and his pals. Yun’s slightly dotty yet deeply felt performance is a wonder, but I can’t find a sensible context for it—some of her actions late in the film make no sense to me, and the early revelation that she’s suffering from the first stage of Alzheimer’s disease, forgetting the words of common objects, goes nowhere that I could discern. And while it’s plenty disturbing that the other parents in the movie seem blithely unconcerned that their kids committed multiple rapes, worrying only about how they can buy the dead girl’s family’s silence, I struggle in vain to work out how Lee intends this as any kind of devastating social critique, mostly because I can’t make it fit with the poetry class and the Alzheimer’s and the dude with cerebral palsy who demands a mercy fuck from Mija (did I mention him?) and so forth. It’s not that I can’t appreciate poetry, but a poetic juxtaposition’s truth and beauty generally makes itself felt even when its meaning remains elusive. In Lee’s last couple of films, I’m not feeling it. Grade: C+
Even more weirdly inexplicable was the ostensible Italian melodrama La Nostra Vita (Our Life), which seems to go out of its way to create potentially explosive situations and then dilute them of any emotional power whatsoever, leaving only a boisterous void. If your wife, with whom you’re still very much in love, suddenly died giving birth to your third child, don’t you think you’d be pretty upset about it? Apart from bellowing the lyrics of their favorite song at her funeral, however, Claudio (Elio Germano) seems strangely unaffected, quickly turning his attention back to his construction job, where he finds a dead Romanian night watchman buried at the bottom of a deep pit. Okay, there’s our drama, right? Well, no. The corpse’s ex-girlfriend and son turn up, and Claudio romances one and becomes a paternal figure to the other, but he pretty quickly blurts out the truth about his involvement in the cover-up (which he used to blackmail his boss into giving him a sub-contract), and he’s just as quickly forgiven—the whole thing is dismissed, forgotten, meaningless. Everything is meaningless, really. As the movie ended, at an arbitrary moment, I found that I couldn’t think of any reason why it exists, unless it’s some sort of avant-garde experiment meant to demonstrate how narrative cinema plays when divorced from drama, tension, plausible psychology, visual brio, and thematic interest. What’s weirder still is that the film, directed by Daniele Luchetti (whose My Brother Is An Only Child is much more robust), remains watchable throughout, holding your mild, indulgent interest as you await further developments. Only in retrospect, do you realize that despite all the hubbub, nothing. fucking. happened. Grade: C
Tomorrow: With the fest winding down, everyone’s last hope for a masterpiece is the latest by Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a.k.a. “Joe,” whose Tropical Malady was my fave in the 2004 Competition. But there’s decent advance word on Ken Loach’s Route Irish, and I’ll also be checking out the new Lodge Kerrigan (Clean, Shaven; Keane) and Fair Game, starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn as Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. If I can’t enjoy one of those, it’s time to pack it in.
Someone else should really be posting reviews of Cannes. Should this have gone in 2010 reviews?
DAY SEVEN
by Mike D'Angelo
Not that it’s anything new, by any means, but the movies that are exciting the masses here at Cannes aren’t the same movies that are wowing me. Having spoken to several friends and colleagues who shared my rapturous response to Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, I expected to see it receive high marks today in the trades’ daily critics’ polls, but it seems that a sizable contingent of the international press (including nearly all of the French critics) feel that the K-man has totally sold out by making a talky, derivative (whether intentionally or not), Italian-set Juliette Binoche vehicle. Of course, these are the same folks who bitched and moaned about the Dardennes’ terrific Lorna’s Silence because it dared to have something vaguely resembling a plot, so it’s probably best to just shake our heads sadly and wish them all a speedy aesthetic convalescence.
To add insult to injury, however (and to badly mix my medical metaphors), everybody has now flipped for Of Gods & Men, Xavier Beauvois’ dramatization of a real-life 1996 incident in which a group of Trappist monks in Algeria were kidnapped and murdered. Problem is, I think they’re applauding the monks rather than the movie, which is nicely understated and reasonably absorbing but amounts to little more than mass hagiography. Knowing that their lives were in danger due to Muslim extremism in the area, the “martyrs of Atlas” (the two most prominent are played by Munich’s Michael Lonsdale and Lambert Wilson of the unfortunate Matrix sequels) nonetheless chose not to return to France, as the government urged, but to remain and continue assisting the impoverished locals, who relied on them for clothing, medical attention and moral support. Which means that the movie, not to be too reductive or anything, basically amounts to two hours of eight dudes in robes not getting on a plane. Oh, they falter a little at the outset, with three or four of the monks played by less famous actors expressing a desire to flee; by the film’s midpoint, though, its entire cast fairly oozes doomed nobility, and Beauvois (with whose work I’m mostly unfamiliar—I saw Don’t Forget You’re Going to Die, but that was 15 years ago and I barely remember it) even goes so far as to throw Swan Lake on the soundtrack and give each monk in turn a lingering, now-this-is-courage close-up just before they’re marched into oblivion. Of Gods & Men never sets a foot wrong, but neither does it challenge the viewer to feel anything but passive admiration—it’s the sort of thoroughly upright docudrama that people hail to the skies but then quickly forget. Go see how much dust is on your local video store’s copy of The Killing Fields, assuming you still have a local video store. I guarantee that Netflix says: Available. Grade: C+
Critical opinion is far more divided on Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first film since his fractious split from screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. Good news first: Apart from a brief and deliberately mysterious prologue, the entire film (written by the director with Armando Bo and Nicolás Giacobone) unfolds in strict chronological order, focusing on a single character, rather than hopping all over creation. Uxbal (Javier Bardem), a petty crook who strives to keep his exploitation of illegal immigrants to a bare minimum, races all over Barcelona dealing with his various rackets; his two cute kids; his crazy bipolar ex-wife, who’s fucking his brother behind his back; his late father, whose remains need to be removed from his grave (technically a “niche”) as the location is being turned into condos or something (I was starting to tune out by this point); various people who want him to speak to their freshly dead relatives à la Miles on Lost; and his doctor, who, just to keep things interesting, informs Uxbal that he has terminal prostate cancer and maybe one or two months to live. Bardem plays all this piled-on chaos to the hilt, and his commitment to the role makes it impossible not to feel for the guy to some degree; at the same time, it’s hard to keep your eyes from rolling as more and more shit falls on his head, to the point where death starts to seem like it might be a relief.
Speaking of which, the film’s most interesting and curious aspect involves Uxbal’s connection to the afterlife, which turns out not to be a scam, is treated with refreshing matter-of-factness (nobody in the film even questions it), and affords González Iñárritu the opportunity for some creepy, barely glimpsed images of ghosts clinging to the ceiling like flies that would fit comfortably in a fairly good J-horror knockoff. In the end, however, Biutiful joins both 21 Grams and Babel (I still like Amores Perros) in the folder labeled Trying Too Hard, overemphasizing scuzziness and misery rather than fate, chance and narrative hopscotch. Grade: C+
And then there’s My Joy, which I don’t know what to do with, frankly. This is the only debut feature in Competition this year, from a Russian named Sergei Loznitsa (he’s made some short documentaries, which I haven’t seen), and for about an hour I was sure I was witnessing an exciting new talent, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what the hell was going on. Following a nondescript truck driver en route to deliver a load of flour, My Joy (WARNING: titular irony) initially has an engaging shaggy-dog quality, as the trucker’s encounters with folks along the road—an elderly hitchhiker, a scarily young hooker—spin off into unrelated mini-narratives of their own; Loznitsa’s camera functions like a wandering eye, forever ready to be distracted by something of potential interest that just happened to wander into the frame. (One tour de force shot leaves the trucker behind in a crowded marketplace to light upon several dozen different faces for a split-second each.) About an hour in, however, the film goes well beyond discursive and becomes almost completely random, abandoning the trucker entirely (in a startling way) and flitting around without even that vague semblance of a narrative skeleton. (A new central figure, bearded and mute, recurs throughout the second half, but there’s no longer any sense of potential identification or character interest.) At the same time, Loznitsa’s view of Russia becomes more and more capriciously violent and ugly—so much so that the only thing I ultimately took away from this remarkable but confounding picture is: Life sucks here, and don’t even bother trying to make sense of it. I’m not gonna chicken out like I did last year with Resnais’ Wild Grass, to which I refused to allot a grade, but be advised that this is far and away the grade I feel least confident about at this point, despite the fact that it’s the same damn grade every other movie received today. Here you go again: C+
Tomorrow: Will be largely swallowed up by Olivier Assayas’ five-and-a-half-hour biopic of Carlos the Jackal (to be released in the U.S. both in that ass-numbing 3-part version and in a shorter cut that “only” runs about three hours). Also, Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, which would probably sell more tickets if it were called, with equal accuracy, Oh Noes, My Grandson Is a Rapist.
Doesn't it seems like it was just Day One a couple of minutes ago?
DAY SIX
by Mike D'Angelo
What responsibility does a critic have to overcome his/her personal biases? The scope of that question is a bit much for a quick blog-post intro, but it’s on my mind this morning all the same, for a couple of reasons. Yesterday’s rundown, in which I dismissed a movie from Chad while copping to a lack of appreciation for African cinema in general, inspired a charge of racism in the comments thread; I was accused, among other crimes, of “self-satisfied parochialism,” by which the dude in question meant that I’m totally cool with my blanket dismissal and wholly uninterested in taking steps that might conceivably reverse it. Which is horseshit. Were I really as complacent as he suggests, I wouldn’t even have bothered to see A Screaming Man, which was the least-attended Competition screening to date by a considerable margin; most of the critics I know blew it off in favor of a horror-comedy about a killer tire (seriously) playing over in Critics’ Week. Instead, I made a good-faith effort and wound up unimpressed, which is the best I can do, really. (I might note that it’s not as if the overall critical response to this film is especially rapturous—in the survey of French critics published in Le Film Français, it currently has a dismal 1.29 average (out of a possible 4), faring even worse than Robin Hood at 1.64.)
On the other hand, sometimes even a good-faith effort seems kind of pointless. The most anticipated screening on Day Six—the most anticipated screening of the entire festival, for many—was the world premiere of Film Socialism, the latest ornery cine-essay from Jean-Luc Godard, by any measure one of the four or five most important filmmakers of all time. At the last minute, I opted to skip it. Partly, that was due to inconvenient timing: I carve out most of the afternoon to write these posts, seeing movies in the morning and at night, and Film Socialism at 4 p.m. would have screwed up my whole routine. But that’s an excuse, frankly. I’d already received the A.V. Club’s blessing to file a bit late yesterday. I didn’t go because I’ve found Godard’s last umpteen films—certainly everything from the past couple of decades—just this side of unwatchable. You could show me ten minutes of footage right now and I doubt I could identify whether it came from Notre Musique or In Praise Of Love or For Ever Mozart or Nouvelle Vague—to me, it’s all one undifferentiated mass of word salad, gnomic epigrams-à-go-go. (Godard’s films from the ’60s are another story entirely.) Since Film Socialism had already been reported to be more of the same, it seemed like an act of masochistic futility to endure it; I had every reason to believe that I’d wind up saying pretty much exactly what I just said. And yet skipping it still feels like dereliction of duty, and I still feel guilty for doing so.
Plus, you never know. After a string of terrific, visually stunning films in the ’80s and ’90s, Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami gave up celluloid and spent a decade making cruddy-looking video experiments like 10 and Five; I’d completely given up on him by the time his latest, Certified Copy, was announced for this year’s Competition, and my step into the Debussy theater for its evening press screening was fairly doom-laden. Cut to your jaded correspondent two hours later, choking back tears in his seat. Delicate and mysterious, this is the kind of movie about which it’s best to say relatively little; I’d encourage those of a trusting nature to just resolve to see it as soon as it comes anywhere near you, then skip ahead to the next paragraph. For the rest, I’ll only say that the film begins with an academic, played by first-time actor William Shimell, giving a lecture (genuinely fascinating in its own right) on the value of artistic reproductions—he argues that a masterful forgery or replica has no less worth than the original—and then proceeds to further examine that argument in the headiest and loveliest imaginable way, via the academic’s afternoon excursion with a gallery owner played by Juliette Binoche, who is a total stranger to him, or his wife of 15 years, or neither, or both. I suppose it’s possible to view Certified Copy as an exercise in gamesmanship along the lines of Last Year In Marienbad, but its tone is closer to a philosophical, magical-realist, fiftysomething version of Before Sunset—one in which identity is mutable and emotion is paramount. Best of all, Kiarostami the magnificent imagemaker is back with a vengeance—there are sequences here as stunning in their use of offscreen space as anything he’s done before, coupled with a massive leap forward in his recent fascination with the close-up. (No, it does not date back to Close-Up.) Welcome back, Abbas. I missed you. Grade: A-
British director Stephen Frears’ output has been more consistently inconsistent, but Tamara Drewe, adapted from a comic strip that ran in The Guardian, finds him at his snappiest since, well, The Snapper. With a busy plot and a cast of Dorset characters borrowed from Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd, this engaging, energetic lark isn’t so much about the title character (Gemma Arterton), a former ugly duckling who’s just returned to her home town sporting a nose job and plenty of attitude, as about the effect of her presence on the entire populace, which includes a philandering middle-aged popular novelist (Roger Allam) and his long-suffering wife (Tamsin Greig); the shy hunk who dumped Tamara back in the day (Luke Evans); the obnoxious rock star she’s shagging now (Dominic Cooper); two hyperactive teens obsessed with the rock star to the point of near-apoplexy (Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie); an American academic writing a book about Hardy (Bill Camp); and a gigantic herd of cows. All those elements come to loggerheads in an agreeably silly way, thanks to the uniformly excellent cast—Barden in particular is a marvel as the more headstrong fangirl, maintaining an exhausting level of solipsistic breathlessness throughout—and, especially, thanks to the film’s precise, staccato comic rhythm, which has been calibrated by Frears, screenwriter Moira Buffini and editor Mick Audsley so that the narrative unfolds with a continual series of tiny, pleasurable jolts. Those allergic to whimsy are advised to steer clear, but everyone else will likely echo the remark I made to a colleague on the way out, one rarely heard at Cannes: “Well, that was fun.” Grade: B
Even though this is my eighth time at Cannes, I had never once before made it over to the Espace Miramar, located about a 15-minute walk down the Croisette, which is where the films in the Critics’ Week sidebar are primarily screened. And I’m not especially eager to return, I have to say, because, frankly, it’s kind of a hole—shoddy projection standards, poor sightlines, uncomfortable seats. But I’m still glad I trekked over for The Myth of the American Sleepover, making an appearance in Critics’ Week after winning the award for best ensemble at South By Southwest a couple of months back. First-time director David Robert Mitchell has indeed collected a remarkable group of kids for his slightly clumsy but hugely endearing high-school nostalgia piece, which plays like a gentler, sweeter version of Dazed and Confused. (When the movie takes place is unclear; there are no signifiers of the present—not one cellphone or iPod—but no obvious signifiers of any particular era in the past, either. Given the story’s essentially timeless nature, I assume this was very much by design.) Scattered across a neighborhood’s worth of summer parties, hangouts, and, yes, sleepovers, various Michigan teens bounce from one awkward flirtation to the next, constantly mindful of their place in the hierarchy—in every introduction, the person’s name is quickly followed by which year of school they’re about to start—and forever uncertain whether to choose caution or adventure. Of the various mini-narratives that unfold (some of which get wrapped up a bit tidily), my favorite involved Scott, a college senior who hears that one of a pair of identical twins used to have a crush on him; after ambushing both girls at an orientation event for their own college-to-be, he spends an entire night trying to figure out which one wants him, all the while insisting that he’s hot for them both…which only repels them, understandably. That tenuous sense of push-pull is the heart of the movie, which starts off ungainly but slowly grows into a modest, gossamer joy. Grade: B+
Tomorrow: Except, hey, wait a minute, did the Wet Blanket actually like everything today? Should we alert the Papacy of a miracle? Well, no. I also saw Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, and was underwhelmed, just as I was underwhelmed by 21 Grams and Babel. But I can’t bring myself to sully today’s unprecedented cavalcade of approval, and tomorrow looks kind of light (Competition films are by Xavier Beauvois and Sergei Loznitsa—yeah, me neither), so I’ll save that one for next time. Also, Sundance favorite Blue Valentine, playing here in Un Certain Regard.
When Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Fast Food Nation screened here a few years back, I ended my review by noting that the film’s climactic slaughterhouse scene, clearly intended to inspire revulsion, had instead sent me straight to the McDonald’s located just a short walk from the Palais (Cannes’ enormous festival complex). Which was the truth, but not nearly as significant as I implied, since I was probably headed to Les Arches d’Or anyway. French dining is fantastic if you have a couple of hours to devote to the meal, but until last year I hadn’t found any local cuisine that serves the needs of the harried, on-deadline journalist—something you can wolf down quickly between screenings. (At the Toronto fest, for example, street-vendor hot links are my circle’s pseudo-meal of choice.)
Then I discovered the kebab-frites. (Not sure if that’s the proper name, but there is a website at kebab-frites.com.) Sick of McDonald’s, I stopped randomly at a small café off the Croisette and pointed to a picture of what looked like a chicken sandwich of some kind on their menu, also asking for fries (frites—as Steve Martin once said, it’s like those French have a different word for everything). A few minutes later, the sandwich arrived, but no fries. My mangled attempt to inquire as to their whereabouts provoked only a puzzled look from the counter dude, who pointed at my still conspicuously frite-less plate. Long story short, the fries were in the sandwich. Which turns out to be the greatest idea ever, at least for those of us with unapologetic junk palates. I have no idea why a tortilla filled with grilled chicken, hot sauce, and fries tastes so much better than eating the same sandwich and fries separately, but trust me, it does. Now all we need to do is figure out a way to bring this item to the U.S. without alerting KFC, home of the Famous Bowl and the Double Down, as they’ll take the idea way over the top and add not just fries to the sandwich but also corn on the cob, 16 oz. of soda, a bunch of napkins, and your receipt.
Of course, this is all irrelevant, since I may never eat again after seeing Outrage,Takeshi Kitano’s first yakuza flick in a decade. Emerging from a creative wilderness that involved a great deal of bizarre self-reflection—little-seen pictures like Takeshis’ (2005) and Glory to the Filmmaker! (2007) rank among the weirdest movies ever made by a brand-name auteur—Kitano has apparently decided to see what happens if he strips his signature genre exercise of everything save for its most crowd-pleasing element, viz. abrupt, gory violence. To that end, Outrage introduces a convoluted, virtually incomprehensible plot involving various rival families, then proceeds to spend the better part of two hours annihilating its entire ensemble cast, one by one (with occasional group massacres). For a while, the sheer absurdity of all the over-the-top carnage makes for fine black comedy; Kitano’s deadpan style wreaks big laughs from morning-after shots of gangsters sitting somberly in elaborate post-surgical gear (they usually wind up dead before recuperating), and once the audience catches on, just a view of a dentist’s office or the question “How many tongues do you have?” produces nervous titters. By mid-film, however, the endless parade of functionally anonymous deaths becomes monotonous, numbing, even dull—which was precisely the point, I believe, of Alan Clarke’s short feature Elephant,but there’s no indication here that Kitano intends any sort of statement about modern desensitivity. (Also, Elephant was only 40 minutes long.) What made Kitano’s early yakuza films memorable was their droll juxtaposition of cruelty and some diametrically opposed quality—frivolity in Sonatine, tenderness in Hana-Bi (Fireworks). Cruelty alone, Outrage conclusively demonstrates, amounts to an aesthetic dead end. Grade: C+
Moving just a little bit westward from Japan to China, but a world away in sensibility, brings us to I Wish I Knew, the latest state-of-my-nation report from Jia Zhang-ke. Given Jia’s stature among the egghead set—his Platform and Still Life placed 2nd and 3rd, respectively, in Cinematheque Ontario’s poll of the best films of the last decade—many were surprised that his latest wound up in Un Certain Regard rather than Competition, but they’ll be less so after they see the film, which is perhaps his least ambitious and his most scattershot. Like 24 City,it’s a documentary-fiction hybrid (more doc than fic this time), consisting primarily of interviews in which subjects sit comfortably and reminisce about their past—specifically, in this case, about their memories of Shanghai in the years just before and after the Cultural Revolution. Between anecdotes, actress Zhao Tao silently wanders across the modern-day city in shots that are frequently even more gorgeous than she is, which is saying a lot. As far as I could tell, there are no fake interviews (as there were in 24 City), but this collection of just-folks seemed to me much less compelling than Jia’s last; the most interesting recollections come from film-industry figures like director Hou Hsiao-hsien (The Flowers of Shanghai) and actress Wei Wei (the 1948 classic Spring in a Small Town), in part because this allows Jia to compare footage of Shanghai past to his own depiction of Shanghai present. Still, I couldn’t for the life of me work out Jia’s organizing principle, if any, and a graph of my interest level throughout the film’s 138 minutes would look mighty familiar to any seismologist. Why exactly did Jia want to make this film, even? Punchline’s obvious, right? Grade: C+
I’ve seen two additional Competition films since my last report, but have precious little to say about either of them, as they both bored me into a stupor. They’re getting respectful reviews elsewhere, though, so I figure I should at least let you know they exist. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s A Screaming Man, about an elderly pool attendant in Chad who (in an inciting incident I just didn’t buy) sells out his son to the army in order to regain his job, probably falls into my longstanding blind spot regarding African cinema, which never seems to be able to transcend “worthy” in my eyes. Haroun’s widescreen compositions are sharp and evocative, but he has a regrettable tendency to slowly track into his protagonist’s sorrowful face whenever he thinks the film needs a shot of emotion, and it was hard for me not to imagine how much more urgent and purposeful this scenario might have been in the hands of, say, the Dardennes. As for Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier, adapted from the 1662 novel by Madame de La Fayette, I confess that I more or less checked out right at the jump, when the film opened with one of those historical-context scrolls that I’d thought Monty Python had killed forever decades ago. (“1568. It is a time of great strife in Europe,” le blah blah blah.) Others seem to be responding (albeit with more respect than passion), but for me the entire lengthy film was on costume-drama autopilot, with none of the wit and fire that (for example) Jacques Rivette brought to his adaptation of Balzac’s The Duchess of Langeais. We can only hope that this year’s Competition slate was back-loaded. Both films: C
Tomorrow: Looks more promising. Alejandro González Iñárritu has divorced his former screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, so we have reason to hope that his Biutiful won’t be yet another dopey exercise in fractured chronology. Also, Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami teams up with Juliette Binoche, and Stephen Frears adapts a popular English comic strip. And then there’s Godard. That should start an argument.
I’ve always wondered to what extent Thierry Fremaux (Cannes’ chief programmer) and his team can intuit which Competition films are most likely to be warmly received, and whether they devise the schedule with a particular critical rhythm in mind. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that in each of the last two years, after three days of titles that inspired rampant shrugging, the 8:30 a.m. screening on Day Four produced a sudden frontrunner. Last year, the insta-favorite was Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, which eventually won the Grand Jury Prize (second place); yesterday, Mike Leigh’s Another Yearearned the grateful, sustained applause of the weary press corps. Leigh’s film now leads Screen International’s annual critics’ poll by a wide margin (average rating: 3.3 stars out of 4; its closest competitor managed a mediocre 2.2), and I think it’s safe to assume that various awards, further high-profile festival slots, and a moderately successful U.S. release are in its future. Without question, Another Year is currently the toast of Cannes 2010.
So, of course, I found it mildly disappointing. That’s why they call me The Wet Blanket.
The problem, in my admittedly minority opinion, is that Leigh has recently started bending his characters to a predetermined theme, rather than allowing a fairly amorphous (but nonetheless resonant) theme to emerge organically from a collection of vivid characters. Happy-Go-Lucky seemed designed to upbraid us for our initial negative reaction to its relentlessly chirpy heroine, and Another Year, right from its stand-alone prologue (featuring Imelda “Vera Drake” Staunton, who then vanishes from the film), functions as a cautionary treatise on the unbearable misery of growing old alone. Of the moderate ensemble, only long-married Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), who have each other to lean on, seem remotely stable and content. (Their son stays on an even keel, too, but he’s only 30, and even he visibly perks up when he lands a new girlfriend midway through the year-long narrative.) Everybody in this model couple’s orbit, by alarming contrast, is a putrid cesspool of loneliness, and the movie ultimately does little more than observe these doomed specimens with measured pity. Most excruciating by far is Gerri’s coworker Mary (Lesley Manville), a middle-aged chatterbox whose desperation and neediness roll off of her in thick, congealed waves; Manville will very likely win this year’s Best Actress award, but I found her performance overly broad, telegraphing emotions that even really damaged people instinctively work to conceal. Like every Leigh movie, Another Year abounds in cherishable moments—I especially enjoyed Karina Fernandez’s goofy turn as the son’s girlfriend, who’s given to bursts of exaggerated pantomime—but the dolour gets laid on a little thick here for my taste, and Leigh’s choice to conclude the film by fading to black on an image of terrible sadness feels like a strange kind of rebuke. Okay, Mike, I’m depressed. Grade: B-
I felt depressed at the end of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, too, but only because it’s always a bit sad to see Woody Allen in slapdash, shoot-the-first-draft mode. His latest effort finds him back in London once again, engineering a series of hapless romantic entanglements designed to demonstrate his proposition—inarguable, really—that human beings are self-deceptive to the core, preferring comforting lies to the bleak, bitter truth. By the same token, though, most of us would rather see a movie featuring memorable characters and compelling situations than endure a lecture on the human condition, and Tall Dark Stranger comes up woefully short in the former category, stranding its able cast (Naomi Watts, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones, Josh Brolin, Antonio Banderas) in hackneyed variations on bits from previous Woody Allen movies. When Hopkins, terrified of growing old, dumps his wife and takes up with a bubbly young bimbo (Lucy Punch), only to become frustrated by her ignorance of Ibsen (“those ghosts weren’t even scary!”) and beg to return home, you may find yourself wondering whether Woody even bothered to rewrite his dialogue from Husbands and Wives; when an omniscient narrator tells us in carefully modulated prose what various characters are thinking, you’ll certainly appreciate how much more elegantly Woody used that device just two years ago in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Only once, very late in the going, does Tall Dark Stranger threaten to generate something approaching real drama, as Watts, who’s been happily enabling her dotty mother’s reliance on a fortune teller (hence the title, though the “tall dark stranger” also represents Death), discovers that the medium’s fake pronouncements have squelched a hefty parental loan Watts needs to launch her own art gallery. But it’s just a cute bit of Alanis-style irony, quickly rendered as forgettable as everything else. Grade: C+
Thankfully, two robust, maniacally inventive movies about horny adolescents came along to salvage the day. To say that Xavier Dolan’s sophomore effort lives up to expectations won’t mean much to most of you, since his terrific debut, I Killed My Mother, which swept the awards in the Directors’ Fortnight here last year, has yet to open in the States. So just trust me: This French-Canadian kid (he turned 21 in March) is a born filmmaker, with the potential for greatness once he manages to shake off his many influences and develop a style of his own. Saddled with the lame English-language title Heartbeats—the French title is Les amours imaginaires, or Imaginary Loves—Dolan’s new film, from a narrative standpoint, is a nearly threadbare tale of unrequited love: boy (Dolan) and girl (Monia Chokri) meet hunk (Niels Schneider); both fall for him instantaneously; a pointed rivalry ensues (boy and girl are best friends); hunk remains oblivious and uninterested. But Dolan, plundering world cinema’s entire bag of tricks, makes this familiar tale sing, depicting his characters’ romantic obsession in gorgeous Wong Kar-wai-esque slo-mo and offsetting their lack of self-awareness with Woody Allen-esque direct-camera interviews featuring various people who otherwise play no role in the story. (These interviews are themselves worth the price of admission: “And I thought, if somebody died every time I hit ‘refresh,’ there would be nobody left on the planet, fuck.”) In the end, Heartbeats—man, it’s painful to even type that—feels a bit too thin and derivative for its own good, but it’s still hugely refreshing, given the insane degree to which art cinema is now ruled by what one might call The New Austerity (cf. Aurora, Day Two), to see somebody exploring the medium’s lush, seductive, expressionistic possibilities with such unbridled enthusiasm. Also, Louis Garrel is in this movie, but the movie ends seconds after he appears, which is how all movies featuring Louis Garrel should work. Grade: B
Even more hilariously entranced with the confused longing of the young, hip and largely gay is Gregg Araki’s appropriately titled Kaboom, playing in Cannes’ tiny Midnight section. After achieving a measure of mainstream respectability with Mysterious Skin and some cult success with Smiley Face, both based on other people’s material, Araki has now re-embraced the ludicrously overheated, unapologetically salacious shock comedies he made back in the ’90s—which didn’t sound to me like a promising development, since I found those films (Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere)tiresomely frenetic. Turns out maturity + technical skill + deliberate regression = awesome. To describe this movie’s insane plot, which involves prophetic nightmares and telepathic witches and creepy animal masks and world-dominating doomsday cults and attempts at auto-fellatio, would be an exercise in futility, and beside the point in any case. What matters is that Araki’s young actors are now as talented as they are preposterously beautiful, and that his comic touch has become remarkably nimble—there’s an exhilarating confidence here that was entirely absent from his work prior to Mysterious Skin, and it allows him to throw away lines and gags that he’d previously feel compelled to beat into the dirt. (One great running bit involves a smash-cut from some horrific or bizarre flashback to the character relating it, who then dismisses everything we just saw with a split-second “whatever” eye-roll before just forging ahead.) Kaboom isn’t often laugh-out-loud funny, at least to judge from the screening I attended (which wasn’t at midnight, alas), but it’s the kind of movie that finds you massaging your jaw afterward because it hurts from 90 straight minutes of grinning like an idiot. And if it starts to seem towards the end like maybe the film is getting too caught up in its increasingly ridonkulous plot, to the detriment of its free-floating exploration of hormone-addled anxiety, all I can say is: have faith. Araki knows what he’s doing. Grade: B+
Tomorrow: Takeshi Kitano’s first flat-out yakuza flick in a decade and the latest state-of-my-nation report from China’s Jia Zhang-ke. Plus maybe some thoughts on the kebab-frites, a meal item that needs to come to America immediately.
For some reason, no Competition titles were screened today, so I wound up checking in with three filmmakers of whom I’m not especially fond, hoping against hope to be surprised. (It happens - after despising the first two films directed by Carlos Reygadas, his third, Silent Light, landed in my top ten for the entire decade.) No such luck, alas.
Pretty much the only thing I wanted from Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps was a Charlie Sheen cameo—not as Bud Fox, his character from the 1987 original, but as Two And A Half Men’s genial horndog Charlie Harper. And yet I barely cracked a smile when Sheen did in fact turn up halfway through the movie with a statuesque blonde tucked under each arm. By that point, the film had already followed a portentous speech about financial bubbles with a shot of little kids blowing actual bubbles on a playground, the camera craning skyward to follow their doomed path. By that point, we’d already seen Sheen replacement Shia LaBeouf answer a call from intense colleague Vanessa Ferlito while driving alongside girlfriend Carey Mulligan, then seen Ferlito’s face appear onscreen in a circular superimposed portrait, then seen the superimposed Ferlito portrait zip sideways and settle directly on top of Mulligan’s face. Oliver Stone has never been known for his subtlety, but this baldly opportunistic sequel is so overstuffed with dumb metaphors, stupid graphic tricks and actorly flourishes (Josh Brolin, as an amoral corporate raider in the Gordon Gekko mold, performs what can only be termed a double-take gasp) that it becomes impossible to watch with a straight face, even though fully half of the picture is devoted to a soggy subplot about Gekko’s desire to reconcile with his daughter. The other half is basically just a lot of finger-wagging about leveraged debt, with poor Michael Douglas, whose wily performance was the original’s only real virtue, so neutered here that he’s reduced to dispensing fatherly advice. (He also looks like he’s still in Wonder Boys—apparently, Gekko needs at least $100 million to afford hair gel.) Money Never Sleeps is never boring, but for all the jabbering about moral hazards and renewable energy sources (LaBeouf’s character, rather improbably, is a treehugger at heart), it feels even more like empty calories than do many recent superhero pictures. Two And A Half Men arguably provides the same shallow pleasure in a quarter of the time. Grade: C
Nobody, on the other hand, could credibly call Aurora shallow, given how determined director Cristi Puiu is to bore the viewer into submission. I should confess immediately that I was not a fan of Puiu’s wildly acclaimed The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu, which spent nearly three hours watching an ailing (if also irascible) geezer get dogpiled by the entire Romanian medical establishment. Aurora, too, runs a punishing three hours, during which so little happens, by even the broadest definition of narrative incident, that any mention whatsoever of what does happen constitutes a spoiler. (You are hereby warned.) Basically, the film depicts 48 hours or so in the life of a man, played with a frightening lack of affect by Puiu himself, who’s decided to commit several murders, for reasons left pointedly unstated until the final scene. Occurring at unpredictable intervals, the killings, and specific preparations for same (e.g. purchasing and test-firing a shotgun), take up only five or ten minutes of screen time; the bulk of the movie consists of utterly mundane activities, ranging from eating silent meals to directing some workers who are renovating the killer’s apartment. This idea of juxtaposing long, long stretches of quotidian detail with short bursts of shocking violence goes all the way back to Chantal Akerman’s masterful Jeanne Dielman (made in 1975), but where Akerman and her lead actress, Delphine Seyrig, managed to construct a fascinating neurotic ballet from ordinary bits of business, Puiu merely seems to be inflicting tedium as an intellectual weapon. (Expect plenty of critics to take the bait.) With few exceptions, individual “scenes” possess no conceivable interest apart from being expressly mundane—one could argue that a truly ballsy (and Warholian) version of Aurora would have run 10 hours or more and included several consecutive hours of its protagonist soundly sleeping. I confess that I did thoroughly enjoy the movie’s final scene, which pushes its modus operandi so far into the red that it finally becomes laugh-out-loud funny, but only the most patient and masochistic among you will want to slog it out for three hours getting there. Grade: D+
Returning from the soporific to the ridiculous, Hideo Nakata’s laughably dated Chatroom finds a quintet of annoying British teens, including Kick-Ass’ Aaron Johnson, gathering in virtual reality to humiliate and abuse one another from the comfort of their individual laptops. Since watching a bunch of pretty actors furiously typing for an hour and a half wouldn’t be terribly exciting, the film represents their cyber-interaction via an imaginary room, which looks like a neon-suffused cross between a classroom and a clubhouse. Oddly, though, the kids’ avatars (now there’s an idea for a movie!) look more or less as they do in real life—apart from the brief, jokey appearance of a middle-aged pedophile posing as a nymphette, the idea that people use the Internet to construct alternate identities remains completely unexplored. Instead, the angry one (Johnson) works to provoke the timid one (Matthew Beard) into committing suicide, while the hot one (Imogen Poots) strikes up a sadistic, phony friendship with the gawky one (Hannah Murray). (There’s also the black one, who seems just about that token, to be honest.) Shrill and insipid, Chatroom doesn’t work on any level—the dialogue is risible, the character dynamics are preposterous, and the rise of Chatroulette makes the entire concept of a tight-knit virtual community seem like a sad anachronism. Incredibly, the film was based on a play by Enda Walsh, who cowrote Hunger with Steve McQueen; it would be hard to imagine two films with less in common. EXIT. Grade: C-
Tomorrow: A major day, with new films by Mike Leigh, Woody Allen, and Gregg Araki, plus (already?) the second feature by I Killed My Mother’s Xavier Dolan.
Ready for the ol’ good news/bad news routine? The good news is that we’re only two days into the festival and I’ve already seen what’s certain to be one of the year’s very best films—a bona-fide, rattle-your-nerves stunner. The bad news is that, um, well, that particular motion picture isn’t actually “in” Cannes, technically, per se. Alongside its umpteen official sections, Cannes also hosts a gigantic market, in which literally hundreds of pictures are screened for potential acquisition; every year, I wind up blowing off a few unappetizing-looking titles in favor of big-buzz leftovers from Sundance and Berlin. But since Noel Murray has already tackled the movie that blew my mind (he gave it an A), I’ll save that for a (probably longish) postscript and turn my attention first to a couple of actual Cannes titles—both of which, I should note before you scroll down to the bottom of the page, feature plenty of casual, full-frontal nudity.
Sadly, the sex isn’t the only thing that’s explicit in Im Sang-soo’s perverse remake of the 1960 Korean classic The Housemaid, a movie that was plenty perverse to begin with. The original film (which you can watch for free at MUBI, formerly The Auteurs) set what must at that time have been a new standard for bugfuck psychodrama, depicting its title character as a voracious, amoral hellcat with a penchant for seducing the boss, terrorizing the kids and furtively eyeing a handy jar of rat poison in the cupboard. I couldn’t wait to see what Jeon Do-yeon, who won the Best Actress prize here three years ago for Secret Sunshine, would do with this dynamic, deranged role, never suspecting that the answer would be: nothing. Apparently determined to make the story his own, Im (whose previous films include A Good Lawyer’s Wife and The President’s Last Bang) has reimagined it so completely that his remake seems to have shot in OppositeScope. Once a sexual predator, the housemaid has been transformed into a passive, infantilized victim, at the mercy of a family so ostentatiously wealthy that their living-room fireplace has an aspect ratio twice as wide as the movie itself. Every destructive act, instead of being perpetrated by her, is now inflicted upon her, all in service of a painfully blunt treatise on the dangers of class warfare. (“I know you barely even see me as human,” she tells her monotonously arrogant employers, in case the message somehow escaped us.) It’s as if Hollywood were to remake Fatal Attraction, only this time, the other woman goes away quietly after a few passionate trysts, perfectly happy to be ignored, whereupon the husband and wife team up and spend the rest of the movie tormenting and stalking her, just for fun. What exactly would be the point of that, you ask? Good question. Grade: C
Over in Un Certain Regard, up-and-coming Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean takes that very scenario—your basic, no-frills extramarital meltdown—and manages to breathe a certain amount of new life into it, using nothing more than three fine actors and a lot of patient observation. Tuesday, After Christmas opens with a lengthy, static shot of a man and woman lying naked in bed, spent and happy, utterly comfortable in each other’s presence. Needless to say, they aren’t married. To each other, that is—the next scene introduces us to the man’s perfectly pleasant (but older and less playful) wife, as the two shop for their daughter’s Christmas gift. We then meet the daughter, a spunky pre-teen who needs braces, and would you care to guess who might happen to be her orthodontist? (Did I mention that the post-coital goofiness included the woman berating the man for letting cigarette tar stain his teeth?) The dramatic beats that follow are straight out of the Affairs Destroy Everybody handbook—guilt, jealousy, recriminations, the Big Confession, etc.—but Muntean, letting his camera gaze and gaze (there can’t be more than 20 or 25 shots in the entire film), gives his superb cast the freedom to locate numerous moments of painful awkwardness and razor-sharp intimacy, which make this overly familiar narrative feel somewhat less banal. And while the film doesn’t shy away from confrontation—the Big Confession scene is a corker, difficult to watch—it’s at its most indelible when its trio of love-addled characters are at their most quietly vulnerable, as when the mistress is forced to explain the advantages of orthodonture to the still-clueless wife through a tight mask of barely concealed agitation. I’d like to see Muntean strive for more originality in future, but he’s unquestionably a talent to watch. Grade: B
Okay, enough dutiful deflection. Today’s aforementioned jawdropper was Winter’s Bone,richly deserving winner of the Grand Jury Prize (fiction division) at Sundance this year. I’d heard good things about Debra Granik’s previous film, Down to the Bone (she’s got a thing for either phallic symbolism or calcium),but I was still wholly unprepared for the almost freakish assurance of this sophomore effort, which establishes a dogged yet otherworldly atmosphere in the opening titles and then somehow manages to sustain that tricky mood right through the poignant final shot. And just as Down to the Bone singlehandedly jump-started Vera Farmiga’s career, I suspect that Winter’s Bone marks the beginning of a long-term love affair between discerning moviegoers and Ms. Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a 17-year-old desperately trying to find her father before he skips bail and the bond company seizes the family’s ramshackle house. If that sounds like generic Sundance miserabilism, it’s because you haven’t yet experienced this film’s thrilling amalgam of uninflected naturalism (visual) and bold stylization (verbal). Shot entirely in Missouri, Winter’s Bone turns the Ozarks into a science-fiction landscape, artfully blending the familiar, the esoteric (for those of us in major urban areas) and the flat-out bizarre; it may sound like an odd point of comparison, but I found myself thinking more than once of Rian Johnson’s Brick, which imposed the insularity and argot of hard-boiled detective fiction onto a high-school campus. Granik achieves a similar feat of cognitive dissonance in a less overtly gimmicky context, and Lawrence turns in a performance so steely and yet so heartbreaking that maintaining an intellectual distance soon becomes impossible. I wish Cannes luck matching this one, frankly. Grade: A-
Tomorrow: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with a confirmed cameo by Charlie Sheen; another freakin’ Romanian picture, this time from the director of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu; and, well, we’ll see if I can talk myself into giving Japanese horrormeister Hideo Nakata (Ringu, Dark Water) one more chance. I’ve been underwhelmed so far.
Okay. I'm going to do a very lackluster job at this but someone has to get this started. I'm just going to post Mike D'Angelo's Day Logs that he wrote up on the Onion.
DAY ONE
By Mike D'Angelo May 13, 2010
So far, all anyone can talk about here at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival is that goddamn volcano. Was your flight delayed? How long? My trans-Atlantic took this enormous two-hour parabolic detour over freakin’ Greenland and Iceland—just how big is that ash cloud, anyway? I’ve heard blood-curdling tales of 14-hour layovers and multiple missed connections and (literally) entire novels read between boarding and takeoff, and that’s just me talking to myself in the shower. Everyone’s so relieved to finally be here that I can’t imagine the customary festival grumpiness taking hold, at least for a while; tomorrow morning’s art movie may well suck, but at least it’s not the edited in-flight version of When in Rome, and it won’t be interrupted by the question “chicken or beef?”
What I’m trying to say is that my name is Mike D’Angelo and I’m pleased and exhausted to be the A.V. Club’s Cannes correspondent again this year. Hopefully, some of you have now gotten a bead on my tastes from my biweekly Scenic Routes column; even if you agree with the commenter who declared just the other day that I’m reliably wrong about everything, that’s still information you can use, you know? Just calibrate accordingly. I’ll be filing daily reports through the awards ceremony on May 23rd, trying to see 3-4 movies per day, focusing mostly on the films in what’s known as the “Official Selection.” (Cannes has two semi-affiliated sidebars, the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week, but I tend to wind up seeing most of those films at the Toronto festival four months later, simply because they’ve stopped screening here by the time buzz begins to circulate. I may catch the award-winners at the very end, but right now the only film in either section on my must-see list is legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s Boxing Gym.)
Last year’s Competition slate, which included Antichrist, A Prophet, The White Ribbon, and Inglourious Basterds, was widely considered superb, although my own two favorite films from Cannes ’09 came out of nowhere. (Keep an eye out for the Greek black comedy Dogtooth and the French-Canadian melodrama I Killed My Mother in months to come.) This year’s lineup is a little wonkier, in part because a number of highly anticipated films—most notably, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life—weren’t ready in time. Still, I’m chomping at the bit for new efforts by Mike Leigh, whose Another Year features practically every actor he’s ever worked with (Jim Broadbent, Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Peter Wight), and by Thailand’s blissfully oddball Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady), here this year with the intriguingly titled Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. And while I’ve been repeatedly disappointed by Abbas Kiarostami and Takeshi Kitano over the past decade, I can still hope that their return to Competition after so many years also signifies a return to form.
What’s genuinely surprising about Cannes ’10 is how robust the “second-tier” Un Certain Regard section is, at least in terms of recognizable names. (The festival insists every year that UCR isn’t meant as a collection of also-rans; this is the first time since I started attending in 2002 that their claim actually seems plausible in advance.) Jean-Luc Godard reportedly requested a UCR slot for his Film Socialisme—supposedly because he prefers the smaller (but still pretty huge) theater where that section screens—but his eccentricity doesn’t explain the additional presence of such well-known fest-circuit names as Lodge Kerrigan, Hong Sang-soo, and even Romania’s Cristi Puiu, who you’d think would have graduated to Competition after so many critics bemoaned the UCR placement of his wildly acclaimed The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu. I know a number of critics who are more enthused about Un Certain Regard than about the Competition, and that has to be a first.
There’s also a handful of American films, all but one of which are screening “Out of Competition.” (Translation: We don’t expect to win any prizes.) The festival opened yesterday with Ridley Scott’s grimly revisionist Robin Hood, on which I won’t expend a whole lot of energy, since the official A.V. Club review will be up later today; suffice it to say that once you’ve stubbornly excised every popular, crowd-pleasing element from this particular enduring legend, there isn’t much of interest left. Woody Allen, here with You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, has a strong recent history at Cannes, which premiered both Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. (More to the point, they passed on Scoop and Cassandra’s Dream.)And while I can’t imagine it’ll actually be any good, there’s certainly an impending-train-wreck fascination in the spectacle of Oliver Stone desperately raiding his back catalog (or is he just being opportunistically topical?) via the further adventures of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
Beginning tonight, I won’t be sleeping much either, but Cannes always takes it relatively easy on Day One. Apart from Robin Hood, the only film to screen for the press so far is On Tour, the fourth feature directed by French actor Mathieu Amalric. (He’s probably best known in the U.S. for playing the lead role in The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, or perhaps as the villain in Quantum Of Solace.) Amalric’s previous work behind the camera has yet to make it far beyond the French border, perhaps with good reason—the only one I’ve seen, Wimbledon Stage, was diffuse and personal to the point of being completely incoherent. On Tour doesn’t have much of a center, either, apart from a ribald-surrogate-family theme lifted from Boogie Nights, but it’s far more compelling moment to moment. Amalric plays a former French TV producer who decamped to America and got involved with what’s apparently known as the New Burlesque, though it might as well just be called the Post-Feminist Burlesque. (Suggested motto: “They’re our damn tits and we’ll do what we like with ’em!”) Now, some years later, he’s collected five feisty performers for a whirlwind tour of his home country, though it becomes increasingly unclear, as he scampers around provoking confrontations with family members and ex-colleagues, whether his motivation for this enterprise is primarily financial or personal.
Amalric has clearly learned a lot working with such masters of glancing emotion as Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas, and there are a number of individual scenes in On Tour so arresting and exquisite that they could easily veer off into potentially terrific movies of their own. (My favorite is an impromptu flirtation with a gas station cashier that generates more electricity in two or three minutes than Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett manage in more than two hours.) Trouble is, Amalric is so detail-oriented that the big picture tends to escape him, even as he beats “we are fam-i-lee” into the dirt. The film stretches itself thinner and thinner as it goes along, and doesn’t seem to conclude so much as surrender; after a while, it starts to seem as entertainingly flashy as the women’s routines—fizzy, empty calories. Part of the problem may be that Amalric hired real-life burlesque performers (with names like Dirty Martini and Kitten On The Keys) to essentially play themselves, which they do superlatively well onstage but rather ineptly offstage — even their weariest, most casual dialogue gets projected to the very last row, undermining Amalric’s hectic but low-key naturalism. There are people who can be relaxed in front of a movie camera and people who can pull an endless feather boa out of their ass, but apparently there are precious few people who can do both. Grade: B-
Tomorrow: Im Sang-soo’s remake of the awesomely bugfuck 1960 Korean psychodrama The Housemaid; my first experience with an up-and-comer from the Romanian New Wave; and a special treat from the Cannes Market, which screens leftovers from Sundance and Berlin. If you’re feeling impatient, I’ll be posting immediate reactions on my Twitter account, along with ratings on the incomprehensible 100-point scale I use for myself, via which e.g. On Tour’s B- is a 58. Yes, 58/100 is a B minus. Don’t ask, just accept.
