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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS 2010 |
CANNES REALS – 2010 INVENTING THE REAL by
Harlan Kennedy Is
there intelligent life on Planet Earth? If so, who now holds the licence to
make it? Just
when you thought God was winning all the battles in a world at war with
reason and science – all those Creationist classrooms (at least in ‘God’s
country’), all those deaf ears turned to Darwinian theory – along comes a
man-made living cell. Yes: the human species has created life. It has created
a bio-storm in a test tube. And it has done so without God’s permission. It
hasn’t needed to use a spare rib from Eve. It hasn’t even needed a
thunder-and-lightning show over Castle Frankenstein. So
far the human species hasn’t been struck down for its hubris. But keep
watching this space. No
wonder the 63rd Cannes Film Festival celebrated three score years
and three – a new trinitarianism – by showcasing
three films about human beings who invent, create or reconstruct the real.
Reading from east to west they are Abbas Kiarostami’s CERTIFIED COPY (in competition), Christoffer Boe’s EVERYTHING
WILL BE FINE and Jean-Stephane Bron’s
CLEVELAND CONTRE WALL STREET (both Directors Fortnight). In
all three movies the main characters manufacture actuality, or a likeness of
it, from the projection of their wills and imaginations. It’s an act of
faith, by which we mean the new faith – in human potentiation
– not the old faith in a supreme being with a beard and sheet. Iran’s
Abbas Kiarostami has been
here before. Quite literally. He competed at But
CERTIFIED COPY, in content if not form, is bolder still. In Tuscany a French
single mother (Juliette Binoche)
meets and romances an English author (played by opera singer William Shimell) on his book-signing tour. After attending his
lecture, she hooks up with him; they walk and talk. They impulsively, improvisatorily start to playact being a married couple.
Before our eyes they start creating new lives, spinning new backstories. Soon the notionally unreal seems to be
becoming real. It’s
a simple if novel conceit for a story, and the story takes place all in one
day. But as Shimell’s character says: “There’s
nothing very simple about being simple.” At the end the man and woman find
their old honeymoon hotel – or pretend to or appear to – and visit their old
honeymoon room. Like Garbo in QUEEN CHRISTINA Binoche wanders the furnishings, touching and feeling
them, palpating the past. Shimell ends the movie
gazing and soliloquising into a mirror, wondering who he really is. These
two people have, as it were, given each other memory implants. They have
injected each other with cells from lives that never happened – their own
lives! Never happened, except in that most nourishing and fostering of hosts,
the human imagination. Kiarostami is playing God,
you could say, except that in our new age God no longer exists. People
themselves shape their destinies, with the intriguing notion here that that
existential shaping can extend to
past as well as future. (And in a parallel universe, which today has more cred than God anyway as a sciento-philosophical
possibility, who is to say the shared past of Binoche
and Shimell’s characters did not happen?) In
Danish director Christoffer Boe’s
EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE an entire, thrillerish
chain of events is forged – ‘forged’ here being the right ambivalent, morally
enshadowed word – by the paranoid mind of a hero
convinced that what is happening is real. So are we convinced.
Until it isn’t. And even then it still might be. Think of THE CABINET OF DR
CALIGARI (or if you’re too young SHUTTER ISLAND) and take away the finality
even of their surprise twists. Who
says the protagonist’s world in those films, which is really a lunatic
asylum, isn’t really the world after all? Or in a Wagnerian sense a
world-asylum, a Welt-Krankhaus? We
are the makers of our individual worlds and dimensions, suggests Boe (whose past films include the similarly Borgesian, metaphysical RECONSTRUCTION). Or, for good or
ill, through volition or the volatile vagaries of victimhood,
we can be. Esse est percipi: ‘To be is to be perceived’ (as the
philosopher Bishop Berkeley put it). If reality is proved only by being
perceived – fact of human existence – ergo, what we perceive and the way we
perceive it are the reality. CLEVELAND
CONTRE WALL STREET is as nutty a title as you would expect from a
French-produced ‘documentary’ staging a mock trial in the main city of Ohio.
A group of foreclosure victims act as plaintiffs – act in the existential not
theatrical sense (though you could argue that
too) – against 21 Wall Street
banks put in the dock as villains of the meltdown. It
was in the poorest quarter of Cleveland, we are told, that the first days of
America’s subprime crisis were worst felt. The
Clevelanders lodged a suit for real against the banks, but the banks wouldn’t
play. They stalled and stymied. So this fantasy courtroom fight is the best
the action-bringers can get. They play or present themselves, with help from
a local lawyer, while the banks are represented by a ‘hired gun’ flown in
from New York. For
an unreal trial, it becomes scarily real. It’s as if the Clevelanders have
rubbed a magic lamp and the genie – the genie of believable make-believe – comes out. They get, after a
fashion, what they wish. But beware of what you wish for. The life-giving
properties of the human imagination confer autonomy on their creations, just
as parents hand down self-determination to their children. The Clevelanders
lose the trial. They are outfoxed by the hired gun. In
all three films the freedom to re-think or re-invent a life ends ambiguously
at best, chasteningly at worst. So is creating life
the ultimate power or the key to ultimate powerlessness? Think
of poor God, up in His Heaven. So lonely, so insecure. He demands to be
worshipped. He demands to be praised and thanked. He seems to need these
things in order to be reified, never mind deified. How insecure can you get?
He seems to need to know that His creations won’t injure, reject, repudiate
or despise Him. That they won’t end up, in their ungrateful way, un-creating
their creator. Which,
let’s face it, they now have. The living cell new-made by man kicks over the
last traces of God, or might be reckoned to. Like a hurricane whirling
backwards it wipes out the Bible from Revelations to Genesis. Genesis?
We do the genesis from now on. But as Kiarostami, Boe and Bron so note, don’t
expect the power of creating life to turn our own lives into a walk in the
park. Or perhaps they will be a walk in the park. But, as any filmmaker will
tell you who comes from the noir
side of the tracks, nasty things can happen during a walk in the park….. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM
INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved |
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