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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS 2011 CANNES 2011 – DANCING IN THE CLOUDS |
CANNES 2011 – A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH FICTIONS AND AFFLICTIONS by
Harlan Kennedy It’s
a tough subject but somebody’s got to tackle it. The Cannes Film Festival has
often focused our minds on the human body. But the bodies you think of first
are the semi-nude ones draped over golden sand and snapped by paparazzi. What
of the bodies that aren’t in good shape? What of the bodies that go wrong,
decline or decay, that no longer pulsate with the beguilements of youth? The
bodies that remind us, above all, we won’t have our bodies for ever. Three
films at Cannes pushed as close as any to looking death, disease and
disability in the face. All use real characters “as themselves”, though only
PORFIRIO does so in a leading role. The others, tellingly or exploitatively,
scatter reality through the supporting roles. Andreas
Dresen’s powerful and prize-winning STOPPED ON
TRACK (HALT AUF FREIER STRECKE), about a family man dying of brain cancer,
won Best Feature in
the Un Certain
Regard section. It powerfully and unselfconsciously casts non-professionals
as themselves: doctors and carers playing doctors and carers. By contrast,
when filmmaker Urszula Antoniak
in CODE BLUE, shown in the Directors Fortnight, fills her fictive
nurse-heroine’s terminal wards with real dying geriatrics, she makes this seem
an attention-seeking stunt. The images are expressionistically loaded to
provoke at best an aghast empathy (“There but for the grace…”), at worst a
prurient voyeurism. CODE
BLUE, among these movies, is the runt of the litter. It offers no insight
into age or ailment: it uses affliction merely as a specious contrast, an MSG
to jaded sensibilities seeking stimulation from a dynamic of opposites. Death
and dying spur the spinsterly heroine into a
re-discovery of her hormones and by the close the Body Erotic has routed the
Body Sclerotic. The aged supporting players, after their day’s work, are gurneyed off to oblivion. STOPPED
ON TRACK is the complete opposite. First, the ‘real’ performers aren’t cast
in the roles of sufferers. The cancer victim and his family are played by
actors, although director Dresen ensures a fierce
realism by use of improvised dialogue and scenes workshopped
to pitches of harrowing plausibility. What
the nonprofessionals, in supporting roles, supply
is depth-of-field credibility. We believe these are doctors, nurses and
care-workers because they are. Yet
unlike the patients in CODE BLUE, they don’t seem to be wearing wear signs
saying “We are real”. They don’t need to: we sense it. And the reality
authenticates the ambience of the movie’s scenes in medical institutions. Ironically
it is the cancer-suffering hero’s family in STOPPED ON TRACK who wear
‘signs’. As father/husband Frank (harrowingly played by Milan Peschel) succumbs to loss of memory and cognition, his
wife and children stick post-it notes bearing their names to their foreheads.
Other notes are placed as signposts to the ‘bathroom’ or ‘toilet’. It’s
comical. (It’s like a parody of a bad
movie, where everyone/everything is signposted because an idiot director
assumes a kindred idiocy in his audience). Here it’s comical, but also
affecting and catastrophic. This is what it means to lose, almost literally,
your mind. STOPPED
ON TRACK doesn’t, like CODE BLUE, turn infirmity into showbiz Schadenfreude. It has self-restraint
and criticises self-restraint’s opposite. It knows the tragedy of signposting and of hyperbole as responses to human
suffering. The film’s most grimly funny scene is a daydream in which Frank
imagines his tumour as a talk-show guest.
Even the home video – that mundane, universal method of turning pain
into media immortality – is allowed to the salvation of inconsequence. Frank
records on his i-Phone his dying days and his
family’s dismal attempts at cheer (Christmas has arrived by the film’s
close), but we never see the results. They fade into kind forgetfulness.
Maybe a later generation will value them: will see the images and gain
strength, insight and wisdom. Dresen’s last film,
CLOUD 9, another Un Certain Regard prize-winner, did use nonprofessionals in more
prominent roles, playing versions of themselves. It was the right choice for
that movie. We didn’t want to be distracted by known actors. The subject was
sex between old people: the treatment was honest, graphic, intimate,
compassionate, shocking. All
those epithets belong to Alejandro Landes’s
PORFIRIO. The title character in this true story is played by himself. Porfirio Ramirez Aldana really
is a Colombian paraplegic who carried a bomb onto a plane to draw attention
to his plight as a lifelong cripple living below the radar of social welfare. Most
of the movie just chronicles Porfirio’s daily life.
But “just” isn’t the word. All human life really is here. He eats, sits, sleeps, dreams, daydreams. He even, in a
scene just as startling as – perhaps more than – CLOUD 9, has sex. His
girlfriend bestrides him; sexual joy is a bout of awkward but awesome
gymnastics. Again,
as in STOPPED ON TRACK, there is almost no showbiz. No signposts; no special
pleading; no warnings or apologies to the squeamish. We look at the film or
we look away. If we look away, we miss everything and deserve to. The
only “show business” – but it’s as ironic, contrapuntal and cleverly crafted
as the “show business” in Dresen’s movie – comes
right at the end. We don’t see the hijacking of the plane. We only see,
before the supposed event, Porfirio’s primitive but
determined bomb-making preparations. And afterwards we only see, or hear, Porfirio’s version of what happened. It is delivered in
song! The narrative ballad is sung a
cappella and straight to the camera: in a style as simple,
confrontational and even celebratory as the rest of the movie. The way to
depict suffering on screen – the best films on that subject told us at the 64th
Cannes Film Festival – is to serve it straight, bold and uninflected, in all
its seriocomical complexity and its simultaneous,
affecting human simplicity. 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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