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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS 2011 CANNES
2011 – DANCING
IN THE CLOUDS CANNES
2011 – FICTIONS AND AFFLICTIONS |
CANNES –
2011 THE 64TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL LIGHTING THE DARKNESS by
Harlan Kennedy What
did we expect – what didn’t we
expect – on arriving at the Cannes Film Festival? The world’s greatest movie
event is 64 this year: bonne anniversaire and many
happy returns. What would we see as we de-planed, debouched or de-taxi’d on the Boulevard de la Croisette?
Surely there would be a Beatles tribute band singing, “Will you still need
me? Will you still feed me?” Fireworks would go off; a dove would break from
the clouds; a giant hand would reach down.,…. It
wasn’t quite like that, but it was pretty good. Cannes looked as gorgeous as
ever, a Paradise on the Med, and around the Palais
steps on the first evening the rubberneckers were setting up for a
giddier-than-usual starspotting orgy. Woody Allen,
director of the opening night film, was there. Bernardo Bertolucci
was official cutter of the opening ribbon. Jury prezzer
Robert De Niro was accompanied by jurors Uma
Thurman and Jude Law. And in ensuing evenings the stars came down from the
sky to take earthly shape – Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, Jodie
Foster, Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz ….Were there ever so many screen celebs
here in one year? We onlookers, wearing torn T-shirts and holding hands to
faces blanched with emotion, could only look up into the night and howl, “Stell-ar! It’s stell-ar!” The
main theme arrived instantly and seldom went away. This was a festival whose
films were obsessed with the young. You never saw so many dramas crawled over
by children or teenagers. It was as if 2011 were a cue to replay like
drowning persons our younger lives or to prepare the planet for those who
come after, assuming it survives. (The Mayan calendar says the world will end
in 2012. Lars von Trier says sooner). Terrence
Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE, the big event for fans
of America’s most gladdening or maddening genius, was about kids growing up
to learn about nature, grace and revelation. There was a plethora of films
about teens or pre-teens troubled by the usual crises involved in leaving
infancy. There were tots here, urchins there, and the frightened little boy
in Germany’s MICHAEL, a paedophile abduction plot inspired by recent reality,
up to and including the lucky-break ending.
Best
of all, for me, was Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s
LE GAMIN AU VELO (THE KID ON THE BIKE). The Belgian brothers have won the
Golden Palm twice before, with ROSETTA and L’ENFANT, so Cannes bookies
scrawled “Not a chance” on blackboards at the fest’s beginning. But the odds
shortened overnight; the night being that of GAMIN’s showing when the Palais gave it a 12-minute ovation. They
suspected, as did I, that this was that rare and frightening phenomenon: a
perfect film. The title kid is brilliantly played by newcomer Thomas Doret: a combustive, breathless, full-alert energy, a
face aged with the precocious wisdom of victimhood. A motherless near-orphan
trying to break away from a juvenile home, 11-year-old Cyril stumbles –
accidentally and almost literally – into the arms of a young woman (Cecile de
France), a caring hairdresser, who agrees after a little coaxing to care for
him. A
storm of grief and rage erupts in the boy when his elusive father (Dardennes regular Jeremie Renier), a thirtyish wastrel, finally refuses to see him.
The story skitters into a crime-and-delinquency mid-plot, an +Oliver Twist+-ish episode with Cyril groomed for an assault/theft crime
by a smooth-talking artful dodger (his brief, ill-chosen father substitute).
But the drama regroups. One more grim surprise awaits. But by now we believe
in the grace and redemption forming, as if from the very motes of street dust
in the wake of the boy’s recurring bike trips. On
his beloved velo – a modern-day mediaeval charger
heraldically colour-matched with Cyril’s clothes (black jeans, red shirt) –
he is a knight of the winds. The bike gives the film its rhythm, a perpetuum mobile of hope and exhilaration edged
with desperation. That makes all the more effective the quiet, isolated
moments when stillness descends on a scene and when the Dardennes
overlay, like a caress, a rare, repeated musical gesture: a cadence from
Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. By the film’s close nothing is finally
resolved. But we have seen enough of the boy – and seen enough into him – to
recognize the possibility of salvation. Happy
endings? Cannes was big on those. Perhaps the mood was set by Woody Allen’s
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, the fest’s opener. Okay, it’s a frivol. It could have been
scribbled by Allen 40 years ago, circa his famous
time-traveller-meets-Madame-Bovary comic prose sketch. Here Owen Wilson,
incorporating deft Woody intonations, dips back into Paree
to meet Hemingway, Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Co. It does the young hero the
world of good. Bestowing a new perspective, it enables him to ditch his tinny
modern fiancée Rachel McAdams and her snob parents. It also teaches him that
‘golden ages’ shouldn’t be sought like sanctuaries in the past but worked
for, with might and main, in the present. Happy
endings? Well, they weren’t completely the rule. After the Woodywork the festival hit a reef of doomy
repetitiveness. Inside 24 hours we had three films about troubled teens, all
in English. The best was Julia Leigh’s SLEEPING BEAUTY from Australia, a
glacially curdled tale of sex and prostitution, whose student with the Barbie
doll looks (Emily Browning) is paid to take date-rape drugs so that elderly,
infirm or impotent gents can spend nights pawing her naked unconscious body.
(As in the well-known Aussie exhortation: “Throw another gimp on the
Barbie.”) Creepy?
You bet. Nympholepsy meets narcolepsy. In images so
frigid and insouciant you could be watching a series of Boucher tableaux
adapted for Down Under. The
two other tales of teen-related trauma performed an odd dance of concealed
cousinship. Lynne Ramsay’s WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is based on Lionel
Shriver’s novel about a demonically dysfunctional kid and his strung-out mom.
(Tilda Swinton does mom,
or overdoes her, as a human scarecrow in fright hairstyles). The film ends
Columbine High-style with a school massacre I found implausible, like most of
this blending of autistic tragedy with OMEN-style diabolism. Meanwhile Gus
Van Sant – whose ELEPHANT won the Golden Palm for
its powerfully persuasive picture of a high school murder spree – has sold
his mojo to Ron Howard’s Imagine Films. He presented the sappy, maudlin
RESTLESS. Two young funeral-crashers (Mia Wasikowa,
Henry Hopper) fall in love; she’s dying of cancer; he’s a heartthrob with a
hidden tragedy. It’s like BENNY AND JOON on tearjerk
drugs. Intrepid
critics, faced with peril and pottiness at the one
end of the Croisette, do the sensible thing and
make off to the other. Here are the homes of the Directors Fortnight and
Critics Week, main counter-event sideshows. The
critic’s journey is taken at a brisk walk, on legs that skilfully avoid the
oncoming tsunamis of humanity: the tenue de soiree
wearers advancing towards the evening gala, the fun-seekers surging west
towards the setting sun (scarletly matching the tapis rouge), even the Croisette
buskers who homeward plod their weary way after a day of Chaplin
impersonation, goat-balancing, breakdancing, firebreathing
or standing in goldpainted repose in the likeness
of Greek gods. What
fun. And this year there was more entertainment inside, once you reached Croisette East. In the Directors Fortnight I loved
Colombia’s PORFIRIO, directed by Alejandro Landes.
It’s the recreated true story of a paraplegic, a wheelchair-bound spinal
victim of police gunfire, who actually did try to hijack a plane with two
grenades hidden in his incontinence diapers. You couldn’t make it up. And if
you could, it wouldn’t be a better movie than this. The real Porfirio plays himself, in a screen portrait of
semi-paralysis startling for its humanity, humour and (in one scene) candid
sexuality. Three
other Directors Fortnight films took the eye. Rebecca Daly’s THE OTHER SIDE
OF SLEEP, shot in a slow hallucinatory style, was the haunting tale of a
somnambulant Irish girl who may or may not have committed a murder. Lots of trompe l’oeil – and trompe l’oreille
as the soundtrack trades eerie sounds of nature and the elements. Urszula Antoniak’s CODE BLUE
from the Netherlands was a success de scandale before it was even shown. Warning posters
were stuck up alerting viewers to distressing scenes. These must have been
either the passages featuring real terminal patients, in the hospital where
the heroine works, or the graphic erotic sequences, later, through which she
seeks a cure for her sexually frustrated loneliness. Oddly enthralling; a bit
gauche. Best
in show, Quinzaine-wise, was Bouli
Lanners’ LES GEANTS. Three young teenagers goof off one summer, in an
extended rural rampage, as if they have decided to pay tribute to Andre Techine’s LES ROSEAUX SAUVAGES (WILD REEDS), that classic
of the contemporary adolescent pastoral. The
movie begins and ends with tracking shots through lush riverland
rushes. In between we get a story combining Gallic growing-up with touches of
Huck Finn – a gorgeously shot sequence in a sylvan river cabin – or with
surreal dabs of Godard-worthy Dadaism. One house they break into proves a
treasure-trove of cosmetics and hair treatments. They go blonde overnight,
before haring off into the dawn at the first sound of returning owners. The
tale ends inconclusively, but in this film that’s completely apt. Will they
go back to their homes and parents? Or will they drift on deeper into their
bucolic Eden: victims of Man’s Fall re-seeking the prelapsarian
state. Back
in Croisette West the festival improved with the
weather. All it took to clear the clouds was a man-made storm, which came
late in the evening of the first Saturday. Yes: a firework display loud
enough to be heard in Marseilles and bright enough to be seen in Mar Del
Plata. Blue skies arrived the next day. So did the big-event movies, starting
with Malick, proceeding to Aki Kaurismaki,
climaxing with Lars von Trier and Pedro Almodóvar.
(The Dardennes had biked in early). The
serious prizefight, the tussle for the Palme d’Or,
was thought by many to be between THE TREE OF LIFE and MELANCHOLIA. Follies of grandeur both – or masterpieces
of reach and ambition? They gave us respectively a history of Creation and a
vision of the end of the world. THE TREE OF LIFE presents evolution from the
Big Bang to the dinosaurs in a half-hour fairground ride, co-fashioned with 2001
effects visionary Doug Trumbull. Quite whether this early extravaganza fits
with the ensuing tale of a family in 1950s Texas, or with the framing scenes
featuring Sean Penn as its grown-up oldest son pondering Mammon and meltdown
in high-rise Houston, is food for thought. Trier’s
vision isn’t. Or rather it is: the whole movie is a banquet for thought.
‘Melancholia’ isn’t just the condition of Trier’s despair-prone heroine,
played by a Kirsten Dunst stretched to the limit of
her talent (but successfully reaching it), it’s the name of the planet moving
towards collision with Earth. This director’s chutzpah is colossal. He made
the metaphysical uber-dramas BREAKING THE WAVES and
ANTICHRIST, rife with thoughts of life and death, good and evil, existence
and eternity. MELANCHOLIA brings a new authority and novelty of vision. It’s
a critical toss-up whether you are more stunned by the apocalypse ending –
terrestrial annihilation – or by the eerie, surreal tableaux that begin the
film. Still shots flickering with hints of motion: a lawn fiery with
lightning; footsteps quagmiring in the grass of a
golf course; a horse collapsing as if from some unseen bolt; a white-dressed
bride held back by mysterious trusses as she strides, or tries, across a
moonlit lawn…. There
will be, and is**, more to say about both films. It’s a tribute to the charm
and artistry of Aki Kaurismaki that, in Cannes
critics polls, his LE HAVRE kept pace with the bookies’ darlings. In this
Finn’s cinema seriousness performs a tango with comedy. Legs bent low, brows
held high, arms cinched round waists, the partners keep switching direction
and twitching heads – now this way, now that – as the music carries on. This
time the music is sombre and postwar-French. The
plot puts a stowaway African boy ashore in the bleak Normandy port, where his
only salvation – from fate, cops, jail – lies with a retired author turned
dockside boot-black. (Ah, the changes of fortune for Kaurismaki
heroes!) The dapper madness goes on, amid colours whose faux-naif gravity we
haven’t seen since Fassbinder and whose shadows we haven’t seen since Marcel
Carne. He’s the main influence here. Through these swathes of chiaroscuro,
varied by studio fog, we expect Jean Gabin to step,
his craggy features shaded by a felt hat but murkily lit by a Gauloise. Doom; foreboding; portent; done to a turn by
world cinema’s greatest Sunday painter.
Pedro
Almodóvar, at the other end of Europe, is off to
fresh fields and pastiches new. His latest film is THE SKIN I LIVE IN. He’s
never ‘done’ a horror film before, or not one so full of mad science and
gaudy guignol. (LIVE FLESH, based on a Ruth Rendell
novel, was a medium-saignant murder thriller).
Antonio Banderas, welcomed back to the Almodóvar
world where his fame began (TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN!), is oddly cast as the
demonic plastic surgeon who takes revenge on the boy he believes raped his
daughter. Didn’t we need a Spanish Vincent Price? An Iberian Bela Lugosi? That
may be Pedro’s point. Nice Senyor Banderas, with
his Mediterranean good looks and boyish tousle of dark hair, couldn’t
possibly be inflicting sex changes on reluctant patients, could he? Doc B
gives this practise the neutral name ‘transgenesis.’
The screen soon goes feral, even if the terminology doesn’t. Early on we get
the agonised young man in the mysterious tiger suit and mask, bursting into
the lab demanding emergency repair-work. (LES YEUX SANS VISAGE meets THE
ISLAND OF DR MOREAU). Later a half-naked youngster is chained raging to a
cellar wall, awaiting a cocktail of deranging drugs. This is the Doc’s
equivalent of a pre-op. The
movie doesn’t get seriously surreal till the scene of the beautiful young
heroine (or is it ex-hero?) exorcising his/her claustrophobia by writing down
and across the walls of the room – endlessly – the word ‘Respiro.’
It’s horror-film Cartesianism: “I breathe,
therefore I am (I hope).” The Almodóvar colours are more sober than usual. But the Almodóvar soundtrack, its supercharged score swelling at
each climax, is irresistible. So is the story’s logic of revenge and
punishment, ingenious enough to be called Sophoclean. Perched
on the edge, or almost on the lap, of the Competition – like an orchid on a debuntante’s knee or a dummy on a ventriloquist’s – is
the sideshow ‘Un Certain Regard.’ This is where the good-but-not-good-enough
(in theory) films go, having been found of secondary merit by the Competition
selectors. We
all know the truth. Many films in this section are more interesting than those in the Competition. Braver and
sometimes better. In what way is Bruno Dumont’s HORS SATAN inferior to Radu Mihaileanu’s
Palm-contending feminist tract, torrid with tendentiousness, LA SOURCE DES
FEMMES? And in what way is Mohamad Rasoulof’s AU REVOIR from Iran a less achieved work of
cinema than Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s
ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA, the talented Turk’s disappointing follow-up – a
longwinded police procedural – to UZAK and THREE MONKEYS. Dumont
and Rasoulof are both, in different fashions,
outcasts from mainstream cinema. Though the French mystical minimalist has
twice won the Cannes Grand Jury prize, for HUMANITY and FLANDERS, the first
film was jeered at its Cannes press screening and the second has struggled
against mockers, as will HORS SATAN. Dumont does wide, windy, untamed
landscapes and people walking through them. As they walk, they talk. Terse,
runic dialogue is stolen by the wind or sometimes merges into symbol-moments
as when, here, the semi-goth girl with the black
hair and nose-piercing ‘walks on water’ to fashion a miracle for the messianic
itinerant poacher she has fallen for. The
film is crazy like a fox, or like a Delphic Sybil. It knows exactly what it
does and says: complex matter about life, love, redemption, atonement. Rasoulof is an outcast
more literally. He has been banned from filmmaking and sentenced to jail in
Iran. Defiantly he sent this feature, clandestinely made, to Cannes. It made
a pair with a documentary about fellow jail victim Jafar
Panahi, co-made by Panahi,
THIS IS NOT A FILM, depicting a day in the WHITE BALLOON director’s life as
he awaited sentence. AU
REVOIR is the bitterly compelling tale of a young woman lawyer (Leyla Zareh) seeking to flee
Iran, by any means up to and including a bribery-obtained visa for a foreign
conference. She wants to escape the net. Her husband is a jailed human rights
activist. Pregnant herself, she doesn’t want her child born and growing up in
the land of the Ayatollahs. Suspenseful
to the last, the film is lit by the chiaroscuro of hope and despair and
photographed in a drained colour bordering on monochrome. That matches the
anxiety, bordering on paralysis, in the heroine. Marvellously played and
directed, this is a chamber drama in which we hear the acoustic of an entire
country. Light
relief? Was there any of that at Cannes? Well, there was PIRATES OF THE
CARIBBEAN 4, allowing visiting stars Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz to swing
aboard the good ship Festival amid musket-fire pops from the paparazzi bulbs.
There was Nicolas Winding Refn’s DRIVE, a
Danish-directed shoot-and-bash crime thriller starring Ryan Gosling. Above
all there was THE ARTIST, the sleeper hit of the competition. French director
Michel Hazanavicius fashions a spoof silent-era
comedy – black-and-white photography, intertitles –
with fizzing performances from Jean Dujardin, a
Douglas Fairbanks lookalike with a Sean Connery lip curl, and the funny,
talented soubrette/superbabe Berenice
Bejo. Both
the last two films were among the prizes. DRIVE’s Refn
won Best Director. ARTIST’s Dujardin won Best
Actor. The
jury behaved with genial evenhandedness, less
twelve angry men, more nine men and women blowing kisses in every direction.
Terrence Malick, predictably, won the Golden Palm. THE TREE OF LIFE was the
must-see festival movie even before anyone had seen it. Turkey
shared the runner-up Grand Jury Prize, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA going ex aequo
with the Dardennes’ more deserving LE GAMIN AU
VELO. Israel’s Joseph Cedar won Best Screenplay for FOOTNOTE. Best
Actress went to Kirsten Dunst. She not only acts a
storm in Lars von Trier’s MELANCHOLIA. She tsk-tsk’d
openly during the film’s press conference, a Hollywood actress determined to
show that mad Danish directors talking about their sympathy with Adolf Hitler
– L’affaire
Trier was the offscreen drama of the festival’s
closing days – did not get the approval of liberal movie stars sent from
Obama’s New America. Can
we free westerners show our disapproval of old-order European ubermensch
politics, when the need arises? Yes,
we Cannes. 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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