.
AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS PRINT ARCHIVE 2011 Click Here for: CANNES FILM FESTIVAL – 2011 Click Here for: 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 64^th 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