A few final thoughts for my last entry on Cannes:
- The general consensus among critics seems to be that the 2010 was one of the worst years in recent memory for the Cannes Film Festival. The consensus has also said that there were at least a few masterpieces at the festival this year and at least a dozen or so films that were solid filmmaking of the highest order. Oh, woe is the life of the jaded film critic!
- Juliette Binoche is quite good in Abbas Kiarostami’s “Copie Conforme”, but for the festival to give the official poster-girl of this year’s Cannes a Best Actress award doesn’t so much suggest “conflict of interest” as it does scream it. No doubt that Francophilia also played some part in Mathieu Amalric’s Best Director award for his excellent but relatively minor “On Tour”.
- I will miss many things about Cannes – the movies, the breathtaking beach views, the beautiful pastel-colored beach-front architecture, the preponderance of famous and attractive people milling about, the free press espressos, etc. But perhaps what I will miss most of all is the cheapo sandwich cart which was the only place I could afford to eat at regularly, whether it was the South-France specialty pan bagnat sandwiches made from tuna, Nicoise olives, eggs, and assorted vegetables, or even the hot dogs, which were served with ultra-high quality baguette bread that was almost comically mismatched to the humble origins of the contents it would hold.
- You may have noticed that I’ve talked quite a bit about press kits, mainly because this is the first time I’ve ever had access to actual physical versions of them for writing reviews. As you may have gathered, some of them are helpful, but most of them are decidedly not, spewing fawning enthusiasm as they do. The kit for “The Housemaid” (which, as noted below, I rather like) sets some new records in this regard. This obvious rush translation job not only gushes over every person involved in the production, but even humors director Im Sang-Soo’s attempts at poetry. To quote his statement about the film:
“Our main character who looks empty-headed and naïve…
What is it that she couldn’t endure for the life of her?
That is…
Something we give and take from each other,
we stomp in agony and try to forget
but we cannot so we crush on it and live on…
It is like the hard callus stuck around out soft, erogenous zones.”
The kit also features Im’s ground-breaking costume design philosophy: “All women have to be sexy!”
As a final entry, here is a comprehensive list of everything I saw at the festival, complete with new thoughts about films I haven’t yet discussed, links and snippets from past coverage, and lazy listings of films that I am now too tired to talk about. The films are ranked in tiers I, II, and II, which respectively correspond to excellent filmmaking of the highest order, solid filmmaking with issues, and films that range from noble failures to unholy messes (the ranking within each tier is meaningless). This officially concludes my coverage for The Daily Princetonian – if you simply can’t get enough my writing, feel free to take a look at The Asphalt Jungle, where I usually write every week or so. In any case, thanks so much for humoring my humble film musings – I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this coverage at least half as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.
Tier I
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (dir. by Apichatpong Weerasethakul) – Palme D’Or Winner - In Competition
Just as it defies the basic conventions of narrative, imagery, and filmmaking itself, Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" defies any conventional form of critical analysis. But that's precisely why it's so exciting - more than any other film in competition, "Boonmee" stretches the limit of what can be done with filmmaking, pushing its boundaries towards new ways of sensory, allegorical, and metaphysical expression (that should give you a pretty clear idea of the level of trippiness we’re dealing with here). "Boonmee" shares a fair amount with the rest of this Thai filmmaker's oeuvre, which includes past Cannes award-winners like "Tropical Malady" and "Syndromes and a Century". Using an enigmatic and symbolic narrative as a framework, Joe once again focuses on painterly compositions highlighting the contrasts between the verdant lushness of Thai jungles and the plasticky, artificial radiance of Thailand's urban spaces. He also again complements that visual emphasis with a complex sound design that pairs natural jungle recordings with ebullient pop music.
What's new this time is a new emphasis on the spiritual and supernatural. The elliptical narrative this time focuses on Uncle Boonmee, a man dying from a kidney infection who starts to be visited by ghosts, which appear both in human form and as startling shadowy shapes in the forest with laser-bright red eyes. This central story is surrounded by other vignettes, such as an ox breaking free from his master and a beautiful fairy-tale like story of a princess seduced by a catfish, which are suggested to be past lives that Boonmee is remembering. The film treats these supernatural ideas quite earnestly, but for Joe, "past lives" aren't solely the province of otherworldly realms - the recording of lives of film, self-image and memories of one's past self, and even political consciousness. For Joe, flow between these lives is a universal constant, despite the emphasis we put on the transition of death. History also keeps on repeating itself, even visually - the garish Christmas lights at Boonmee's funeral hall echo the naturally sparkling rock formations in a cave he visits near the end of his life.
I heard a critic in the press room noting that the amount of praise a certain writer bestows upon “Uncle Boonmee” is directly proportional to said writer’s pretentiousness, a statement that I find both thoroughly obnoxious and not too far from the truth. But if you can give yourself over to the mystery of Joe’s work, there are immense satisfactions to be had. Joe has made a film on a cosmic level that at the same time has deeply autobiographical elements (the kidney infection comes from Joe’s father, and the red-eyed ghosts are hilariously revealed by direct light to be men in cheap gorilla suits, an homage to the horror films of Joe’s youth). It’s a film with staggering artistic ambition that nevertheless encourages the audience to laugh with and at it, a film with laser-guided formal precision that nevertheless luxuriates in the swaying, gentle rhythm of wind rustling the palm trees. It’s a film quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and it’s a daring and truly deserving choice for the Palme D’Or.
Ha Ha Ha (dir. by Hong Sang-Soo) – Grand Prize - Un Certain Regard
Poetry (dir. by Lee Chang-Dong) – In Competition
The Housemaid (dir. by Im Sang-Soo) – In Competition
South Korea was the country to beat at this year’s festival, with all three of its films ranking as some of the best that the entire festival had to offer. My favorite of the trio was “Ha Ha Ha”, the latest film by two-time Palme D’Or contender Hong Sang-Soo, the winner of the top prize in the Un Certain Regard category, and essentially the Woody Allen film at the festival that Woody Allen himself could not provide. Hong’s detailed depictions of relationship minutiae have garnered comparisons to Allen and Eric Rohmer, but he has an extra interest in formal and structural games. Here, he tells the story of two friends reminiscing about their recent visits to a Korean shore town. They believe they went separately, but they were actually there at the same time, becoming entangled in love triangles with the same people. Hong ends up doing less with this structure than you might expect, but his writing and performances are pitch-perfect the whole way through. Hong is one of the premier poets of awkwardness, drunkenness (a trademark directorial method of his is to get drunk with his actors), and immaturity – imagine Judd Apatow’s films with less scatological humor and actual empathy for the female sex as well as the male and you’re not too far off.
Another past Palme D’Or contender, Lee Chang-Dong, returned this year with another character study after his “Secret Sunshine”. “Poetry” took home the best screenplay award on Sunday, fittingly enough given the rich, novelistic texture of this off-kilter morality tale. “Poetry” focuses on Mija (Yun Junghee), an aging grandmother who takes a poetry class hoping to counteract her gradual memory loss and starts to rediscover the beauty of the world. You’ll be forgiven for ignoring the movie based on this description – I skipped the first press screening myself – but “Poetry” quickly reveals itself to run darker and deeper. Mija’s grandson, whom she lives alone with, is implicated in a terrible crime, and “Poetry” soon becomes a fascinating parable about the parallels between personal artistic repression and broader societal repression, looking incisively into a word where hush money is enough to cover up even the most egregious offenses and writing a poem is only for the occasional rare genius. Rounding out the film is the brilliant performance by Yun Junghee, who probably deserved the best actress award for this year’s festival. Yun is brilliant as a woman rediscovering deeper emotions that shake up her shallow world, and her performance is the binding emotional glue that holds together this wide-ranging story.
The visual aesthetic of Im Sang-Soo’s “The Housemaid” reminded me quite a bit of Tom Ford’s “A Single Man” – here is a film where the human presence struggles to compete with the impossibly polished fashion-spread set design and the immaculate tailoring of the haute-couture costumes. Unlike that film however, “The Housemaid” applies this aesthetic to the kind of film to which it is best suited: a trashy tabloid romp of a thriller. On that level, Im’s latest film is some kind of idiot masterpiece, a potboiler on which the heat is ramped up until the pot starts to melt. “The Housemaid” is based on a 1960 Korean film of the same name, a film that is revered as perhaps the greatest Korean film of all time. As you might expect from a director whose last Cannes entry (“The President’s Last Bang”) played the assassination of a South Korean dictator for laughs, the irreverent Im plays fast and loose with his source material – where the original was about a psycho maid terrorizing a happy rich family, here the rich family terrorizes the maid. As said maid is seduced by the head of the family and plotted against by his vengeful wife, Im goes for broke with baroque formal gesture after baroque formal gesture – it’s safe to say that Im never met a cant angle he didn’t like. I can’t say I was ever able to take Im’s thoughts about class warfare too seriously given the fundamental silliness of the enterprise, but I was continually held in thrall by the nutzoid spirit of the work, and the sheer chutzpah of the ending is unforgettable.
My Joy (dir. by Sergei Loznitsa) – In Competition
Where the hell did this come from? I ignored this during the festival due to generally tepid reviews and went to the final repeat screening mostly because nothing else was playing at the time, only to be pretty blown away by first-time feature film director Sergei Loznitsa’s nightmarish vision of rural Russia. “My Joy” starts with a throat-grabbing opening – we see a churning maw of concrete swirling around like a vortex, followed by a shot of a body being dumped into a ditch. The rest of the film never explains these events, but they set an appropriately brooding tone for this story about a truck driver who finds himself trapped in a Russian village. Working with Oleg Mutu, the DP for “4 Months, 3 Weeks 2 Days”, Loznitsa captures much of that film’s overt-manipulation-free suspense as things get worse and worse for the truck driver in a seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape. Far more interesting is his decision at the halfway point to explode the film’s narrow focus and map out a canvas of the many sociopaths and victims of his setting, creating something like an Altman film on mushrooms. The film is probably too unrelentingly nihilistic for the social criticisms at play here to really scan, but the filmmaking holds you all the way through to the horror-show ending, which seems about as absurd as it seems right.
Copie Conforme (dir. by Abbas Kiarostami) – In Competition
On Tour (dir. by Mathieu Amalric) – In Competition
Carlos (dir. by Olivier Assayas) - Out of Competition
...It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a biopic that so thoroughly scourged its subject, and I’ve certainly never seen a movie that spent this much time doing it. “Carlos” seems like a reaction to movies like “The Baader-Meinhof Complex” (or for that matter, nearly any gangster film), which eventually get around to condemning their criminal protagonists, but not before admiring the thrilling way they live outside the law. You’ll be thrilled in “Carlos” as Assayas bounds from country to country, from criminal enterprise to enterprise. But you’ll be hard-pressed find anything admirable in this sleazily charismatic womanizer with frightening fetishes (Carlos quite literally makes his women handle his weapon), this self-aggrandizer willing to sell any cause he adopts out to the highest bidder, this dialectical materialist who couldn’t stop showing off his Mercedes...
Another Year (dir. by Mike Leigh) - In Competition
...As the synopsis may suggest, not all that much happens plot-wise. Leigh has always been much more interested in meticulously observing the way that people interact. Leigh used his trademark method of letting his actors interact in character off-camera for about a year, and then fleshing out a loose plot outline with improvisation during filming. As a result, the film's relationships have an unforced realism - characters who have know each other for years have the kind of gentle rapport where glances can sometimes substitute for full conversations, while characters who have just met have a painfully chilled awkwardness to their interactions...
Outrage (dir. by Takeshi Kitano) - In Competition
...Kitano has the kind of exquisite formal control that makes the film’s flaws easy to forgive, at least for this viewer. Every shot is carefully crafted to exhibit the symmetry to sleek lines, to catch the play of Tokyo neon light on gunmetal gray and waxed Mercedes black, and to plant disorienting visual surprises - what appears to be an iris shot in one early scene, for example, is created through millimeter-precise placement of a camera between two suited gangsters. This intense visual focus is a joy, and Kitano uses it to depict some inventive and gut-wrenching examples of violence – the traditional yakuza collection of fingers comes in way you might not expect and Kitano’s twisting camera moves and unpredictable cuts manage to make the expected approach of death consistently surprising...
Of Gods and Men (dir. by Xavier Beauvois) - Grand Prix Winner - In Competition
...Beauvois dispassionately watches the monks as they waver in their decision to stay and continue to pray, for deliverance, for strength to match their convictions, for courage to accept their fate. And this plot focus is exactly why Beauvois' clinical nature as a filmmaker is absolutely critical - for most materials, addressing topics like this would no doubt lead to mawkishness or sanctimony (and this film does in a few moments), when the monks try to drown out the noise of an army helicopter by loudly singing a hymn), but understatement both in formal terms and restraint in the performances lets the audience feel the full weight of the emotions at play without feeling unduly manipulated...
Aurora (dir. by Cristi Puiu) - Un Certain Regard
...Puiu has a sharp visual eye as a director, imprisoning his characters in the industrial wasteland of Bucharest with vertical barriers and Ozu-esque hallway shots, and the sheer unknowability of the early sections maintains enough suspense that you could charitably call this a crime thriller, especially in the shocking scenes of violence. But those virtues and Puiu's own excellent performance don't change the fact that the audience is left begging for a hint of explanation as the final scene rolls around. And in the fascinating payoff of the ending, they get it - without spoiling anything, Puiu provides all the answers we could have asked for and more in a comic rebuke to our expectations of explanations, psychological or otherwise. "It worries me that you seem to understand this," says a character as the info begins to flow and reduces a ordinary person into a familiar type. Puiu wants the viewer to recognize the inherent falseness of attempt to patly explain the three-dimensional psychology of a real human being, and his epistemological approach to the mind reminded me a bit of Scorsese's struggle to understand Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull"...
Tier II
Blue Valentine (dir. by Derek Cianfrance) - Un Certain Regard
As the great American indie hope of the festival, Sundance breakout “Blue Valentine” was one the best reviewed films to play at Cannes. I did find the film to be a pretty powerful experience as I was watching, although I couldn’t help shrugging my shoulders at it after it was over. The film’s central idea is to intercut the happy courtship of a couple (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) with the final days of their marriage. For the most part, this central structural device is kind of pointless, seeming to reveal only that many divorcing couples were actually happy at one point – making the film sometimes feel like empty aping of something more substantive like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. But the performances by long-time indie darlings Gosling and Williams do quite a bit to save the film, bringing believability and palatability to the shrill verbal battles of the to-be-divorcees as easily as they bring romantic charm to the courtship.
Carancho (dir. by Pablo Trapero) - Un Certain Regard
A Screaming Man (dir. by Mahamet-Saleh Haroun) - In Competition
...the heart of the movie is Haroun's sensitive depiction of a man dealing with a shattered world. Haroun makes clear that the sense of identity created by one's profession and the ensuing existential crisis following its loss are not solely applicable to white-collar businessmen (like the similarly struggling men of Laurent Cantet's "Time Out" and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Tokyo Sonata"). Even in his menial task, Adam finds immense meaning, and the drastic change to his life induces a temporary madness with horrifying consequences. "Man" is all the more powerful for the understated stoicism that Djaoro brings to his performance - when cracks inevitably appear in his facade, they truly mean something...
Route Irish (dir. by Ken Loach) - In Competition
...I'm going to be vaguer than most critics have been about the film's central moral arc, because I do think that the way it slowly and surprisingly reveals itself is quite stunning. Suffice to say though that where the first part of film takes pains to emphasize Iraq's distance, relying on the mediating technology of cell phones and Skype to separate the two worlds and depicting the Liverpool setting with watery blues and sleek modern architecture, the second half brings Iraq home in frightening visual and thematic ways. "Route Irish" soon reveals itself to be a novel take on depicting the toxic effect of war on men returning home, employing metaphor instead of the relative realism of films like "The Messenger" or "Stop-Loss"...
Film Socialisme (dir. by Jean-Luc Godard) - Un Certain Regard
...There’s a wealth of ideas here, to be certain (I’ll spare you my rambling attempts at interpretation). There’s surely also plenty of nonsense, as well as contempt for segments of the audience. Godard’s English subtitles generally only translate nouns and the occasional preposition from the original French (although there’s plenty of German to alienate native viewers). I’m terribly suspicious of anyone who exalts or dismisses this film after a single viewing – there’s no way anyone could fully engage with the density of the flurrying images here after a single viewing. Not that many really want to – avant-garde cinema of this sort has never packed seats and was never intended to. But it’s great to see that even at the age of 79, Godard is still frustrating, exciting, and provoking viewers as he did when he was a young man...
Tier III
Udaan (dir. by Vikramaditya Motwane) - Un Certain Regard
...My least favorite scenes in movies about artists force the viewer into accepting an opinion about the art they produce. Take one scene in "Udaan", a film about a boy who wants to be a writer and a father who wants him to go into the family business. At one point, the boy recites a poem he has written to a group of people that includes his father. The reaction that director Vikramaditya Motwane clearly is looking for from his audience is "What a talented young man! If only his father was more understanding!". The actual reaction is "Don't quit your day job"...
Outside the Law (dir. by Rachid Bouchareb) - In Competition
...Bouchareb is a thoroughly mainstream filmmaker - one who's interested in bringing an Arab's version of the history of France and its colonies to the masses - and he can achieve Spielbergian zest in his filmmaking sometimes (consider his rousing war epic "Days of Glory"). But "Law" feels like a half-hearted "Godfather" retread - oddly enough, considering that the film is about Algerian revolutionaries acting covertly in Paris. This is mainly because Bouchareb is far less interested in his character's psychologies here than he was in "Glory", which was gratifyingly thorough in getting into the heads of his characters....
Fair Game (dir. by Doug Liman) - In Competition
...those who were confused about why the director of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "Jumper" had a film in the most prestigious film competition in the world were thoroughly justified. "Fair Game" isn't ever bad, exactly, but it's nothing to write home about (ha). It's a pretty generic geopolitical thriller, right down to the irritatingly boilerplate score (pompous thumping percussion! little bits of electronic stuff!), and anyone who has a basic handle on the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal isn't going to learn anything here...
Biutiful (dir. by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) - In Competition
...In lieu of a plot summary, here is a list of things that happen to Barcelona-based Uxbal over the course of the film: cancer, poverty, a bipolar wife, a cheating wife, a wife who beats his kids, kids in poverty, spooky ghost hauntings, guilt over exploitation of illegal immigrants, more guilt after exploitation of illegal immigrants goes wrong, a drug-addled brother, a drug-addled brother having sex with his wife, spiritual uncertainty, police brutality, bloody urine, bloody urine combined with incontinence, hangnails, etc. Could all of this happen to a single person? Possibly. Are people, even in extreme poverty, generally affected by only a subset of these issues? Probably. Would a film that reined in its focus be more effective at tackling one or a few of these issues? Definitely...
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (dir. by Woody Allen) - Out of Competition
..."Stranger" seems shallow on most every level. Few of the characters are sketched with any depth (as the titular attractions, Pinto and Banderas function mostly as exotic cardboard cutouts) and the comedy is often stale (Hopkins' slow realization of his wife's golddigging nature seems too obvious to ever be really funny). Worst of all is the ending. Late in the film, Allen introduces some dark twists that ramp up the drama, but at the point where better movies would be rolling towards a climax, Allen simply cuts the film off, leaving only a few lazy and abrupt implications as to his characters' ultimate fates. You get the unmistakable impression that he doesn't care enough about these people to follow their stories through to the end - and if he doesn't care, why should we?
The Princess of Montpensier (dir. by Bertrand Tavernier) - In Competition
...Tavernier hints in the press kit that his intent is in part feminist, given his heroine's lack of control over her destiny and the cruelty of some of the men in her life, but he seems a little too fond of gratuitous nudity for that explanation to really pass muster. Perhaps Tavernier was aiming for something like Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" (famously and unfairly slammed in its Cannes premiere), which captured a young queen's entrapment in royal ennui with sympathy and formal ingenuity. What he ended up with is a wealth of admittedly fine production values devoted to a knockoff Jane Austen story with none of the romantic heat that made those stories work. Full disclosure: I'll confess that I stopped paying much attention during the last 20 minutes. It was much more interesting to look around the theatre as a steady trickle of audience members walking out of the theater expanded into a flood...
Chatroom (dir. by Hideo Nakata) - Un Certain Regard
...Nakata's hyper-caffeinated style makes the mind-games fun for a while, and if the obvious telegraphing of William as "the evil one" dampens some of the suspense, Johnson's leering grin and nervy intensity mark a terrific step up from his bland performance in "Kick-Ass". Ultimately, though, Nakata doesn't have anything particularly interesting to say about the potential wealth of ideas concerning teenagers and the internet. The eerie terror that the early scenes conjure starts to fade quickly as the plot contorts far past the breaking point. It's a shame that the second half of the film resorts to characters acting in absurd and implausible ways (William's climactic push to make Ben kill himself is egregiously confusing), particularly when the incidents that inspired the film involve motives and behavior that are real, terrifying, and all too understandable...
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Cannes Dispatch #10 - Epic Festival Overview
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Cannes Dispatch #9 - "Outside the Law"
A busier day than expected, and I'm going to pack as many films as possible into Sunday - the entire competition slate is screening all day, and I'll be doing my best to fill in my blanks so far. This, therefore, will be my last entry from France. Once I've arrived back in the States and recovered from jet lag (let's say Wednesday or so), I'll put up an entry or two more about a few notables that I haven't yet addressed, as well as my reactions to the awards (which are revealed Sunday night) and my own picks for festival favorites. Before I go, though, here's a few thoughts on a film that I don't feel like talking about that much.
Outside the Law (dir. by Rachid Bouchareb) - In Competition
As aforementioned, this has inspired plenty of political tumult, but the filmmaking itself is hardly that interesting. Bouchareb is a thoroughly mainstream filmmaker - one who's interested in bringing an Arab's version of the history of France and its colonies to the masses - and he can achieve Spielbergian zest in his filmmaking sometimes (consider his rousing war epic "Days of Glory"). But "Law" feels like a half-hearted "Godfather" retread - oddly enough, considering that the film is about Algerian revolutionaries acting covertly in Paris. This is mainly because Bouchareb is far less interested in his character's psychologies here than he was in "Glory", which was gratifyingly thorough in getting into the heads of his characters. Two of the three central brothers (Sami Bouajilla and Roschdy Zem) are solemn, humorless sons of the revolution here, which also means that they are boring. The movie only sparks to life when the third brother, played by Jamel Debbouze (also the most fun at the press conference), bursts onto screen doing one hell of a sleazy Peter Lorre tribute as a pimp/boxing-trainer who could care less about Algerian independence.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Cannes Dispatch #8 - "Route Irish", "Udaan"
Assorted assessments, as always:
- I was comically oblivious to the big news of the day. During the screening of "Outside the Law" that I was attending, apparently 1200 protesters gathered outside the theater and police wielding batons and riot shields were called in to maintain order. The protest was inspired by the film's depiction of the Setif Massacre in 1945, which the film depicts as an unprovoked slaughter of Algerians by the French - the protesters argue that the French were only restoring order and fighting armed militants. To be fair, this all isn't quite as big as it sounds - a large amount of the protesters were around at the time of the massacre, making the average age of the crowd about 65, and the protest dissipated before the end of my screening (hence my obliviousness). None of that stopped me from having a mild retroactive freak-out in any case.
- Best Red Carpet Performance of the Day: A quite-possibly drunk Jamel Debbouze decided to grab a camera from one of the photographers at the "Hors-La-Loi" photocall. He then spent his entire time on the carpet snapping shots of the wall of photographers in front of him. He later attempted to pull down the large plastic Palme D'Or affixed to the wall during the regular interview.
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" wins the award for best press kit by a country mile. At the screening, staffers handed out the small hardcover book, which has a gold-embossed cover and contains pages of Weerasetakul's sketches and fold-out photos to go with the usual information. But don't think it's just the press kit talking when I say that the movie is on another level compared to rest of the competition, which I mean partially in terms of quality but more in the cosmic space-time sense. I guess I have to find words to address this elliptical and mesmerizing experience (favorite reaction I heard about - Variety's Robert Koehler interrupting a conversation about the film with "Don't you dare try to explain it!"), but I know that I want to see this one again immediately, which is a feeling I haven't had about anything else in the competition.
- If the name sounds frightening, know that Weerasethakul goes in press conferences by the self-applied nickname "Joe", which may be the most endearing filmmaker gesture ever.
Route Irish (dir. by Ken Loach) - In Competition
Poor Doug Liman - not only was his Iraq War-related thriller met with overwhelming indifference by the majority of the press, but it was upstaged just six hours later by the new Iraq War-related thriller from legendary British director (and two-time Palme D'Or winner) Ken Loach. "Route Irish" represents a kind of culmination in Loach's slow progress towards the mainstream during the past decade with films like war movie "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" and the comedy "Looking for Eric" - "Irish" wouldn't be out of place in your average multiplex, and as it turns out, that's not a bad thing.
The title refers to "the most dangerous road in the world", the highway between Baghdad airport and the military-secured Green Zone in the center of the city. Private military contractors and best friends since childhood Fergus (Mark Womack) and Frankie (John Bishop) shared a tour of duty acting as bodyguards for travelers on this road, but after Fergus has returned home to Liverpool, Frankie is killed in a mysterious ambush. The official explanation is vague, a mysterious package Frankie left for Fergus has some frightening details about private military company misconduct, and Fergus needs to ask a lot of questions and look menacing, etc.
This, of course, is a plot that wouldn't be out place in a boilerplate thriller directed by, let's say, Doug Liman, but Loach does a lot of clever set-up to plant the seeds for the unexpected path the film eventually takes. I'm going to be vaguer than most critics have been about the film's central moral arc, because I do think that the way it slowly and surprisingly reveals itself is quite stunning. Suffice to say though that where the first part of film takes pains to emphasize Iraq's distance, relying on the mediating technology of cell phones and Skype to separate the two worlds and depicting the Liverpool setting with watery blues and sleek modern architecture, the second half brings Iraq home in frightening visual and thematic ways. "Route Irish" soon reveals itself to be a novel take on depicting the toxic effect of war on men returning home, employing metaphor instead of the relative realism of films like "The Messenger" or "Stop-Loss".
Once all the dust has settled, you may actually realize a strong plot similarity to a few other prominent films (annoying hint: both the ones I'm thinking of were in competition at Cannes!), and there is a dull preachiness to how the film handles the issue of military companies run amok. But it's hard to care too much, given the depth of feeling that Loach has summoned to back up the plot here. A romance between Fergus and Frankie's widow is haunting, although not as much as the bro-mance between Fergus and Frankie themselves, a pair of friends whose long-standing devotion to each other is expressed poignantly through a concise childhood scene where the two teens share a bottle of malt liquor on a ferry. I don't think that "Route Irish" is at the very top tier of competition titles this year, but it's a solid and moving accomplishment that reaffirms that Loach is a powerfully relevant voice even after a career of nearly 40 years.
Udaan (dir. by Vikramaditya Motwane) - Un Certain Regard
My least favorite scenes in movies about artists force the viewer into accepting an opinion about the art they produce. Take one scene in "Udaan", a film about a boy who wants to be a writer and a father who wants him to go into the family business. At one point, the boy recites a poem he has written to a group of people that includes his father. The reaction that director Vikramaditya Motwane clearly is looking for from his audience is "What a talented young man! If only his father was more understanding!". The actual reaction is "Don't quit your day job."
"Udaan" is the first film from India to play in a competition category in seven years. It is also, unfortunately, a film that has no business playing here, with its tediously overdone plot (this topic that has been done to death in any culture, but particularly so in recent Indian cinema), reliance on gushing mawkish sentiment, and child-in-peril emotional manipulation that would make Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu proud. This all may sound overly harsh for a modest little film from a first-time director, but I'm terribly disappointed given that Anurag Kashyap was a writing and producing partner. Kashap has been one of the most exciting voices in Indian cinema over the past decade, and his "Black Friday" is in particular a landmark of sorts - a "Battle of Algiers"-styled investigation of the build-up to and aftermath of the 1993 Bombay bombings.
In fact, commercial cinema in India as a whole has been undergoing an interesting transformation. The rapid growth of multiplexes in even the smallest areas of India has allowed for the new rise of niche film instead of the must-appeal-to-all-demographics bland universality of much of traditional Bollywood cinema. Other directors like Vishal Bhardwaj and Dibakar Banerjee have been doing exciting and innovative work, so it's especially irritating to see India being represented by piffle like this.
Cannes Dispatch #7 - "Carlos"
More later today, but a movie this long probably deserves its own entry.
Carlos (dir. by Olivier Assayas) - Out of Competition
One of the key clues to understanding Olivier Assayas’ “Carlos” is right there in the soundtrack. Misidentified as punk rock by many reviewers, the throbbing rhythmic guitar tracks that play in the background throughout the film mostly come from the genre known as post-punk. Post-punk drew heavily from the sonic palette and methods of punk, but the spirit had been completely lost. Nihilistic though they may have been, punk rockers wanted a revolution - post-punkers just wanted to make music.
And so it is in Assayas’s 5.5-hour-epic “Carlos”, which functions not only as a biopic of internationally infamous terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known popularly as Carlos the Jackal, but as a survey of the international failure of revolutionary Marxist guerillas during the last half of the 20th century – movements that started out as ideological above all else but descended into random violence that served no cause other than self-preservation.
As portrayed by Assayas, Carlos, played by Edgar Ramirez, is a perfect harbinger of things to come. Carlos talks a good game – his only religion, he says repeatedly, is Marxism – but it’s clear that Assayas thinks he’s full of shit. Carlos’ concerns are far more local than global; if the spitting-image Che Guevara get-up he wears for a major hijacking operation doesn’t convince you of his all-consuming narcissism and need to be an icon, his first words to the hostages he takes certainly will. “My name is Carlos,” he says, smiling. “You may have heard of me.” And, of course, when the situation suddenly changes and he is forced to choose between the Church of Carlos and the Communist Manifesto, he acts in a way that would have Guevara gyrating in his grave.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a biopic that so thoroughly scourged its subject, and I’ve certainly never seen a movie that spent this much time doing it. “Carlos” seems like a reaction to movies like “The Baader-Meinhof Complex” (or for that matter, nearly any gangster film), which eventually get around to condemning their criminal protagonists, but not before admiring the thrilling way they live outside the law. You’ll be thrilled in “Carlos” as Assayas bounds from country to country, from criminal enterprise to enterprise. But you’ll be hard-pressed find anything admirable in this sleazily charismatic womanizer with frightening fetishes (Carlos quite literally makes his women handle his weapon), this self-aggrandizer willing to sell any cause he adopts out to the highest bidder, this dialectical materialist who couldn’t stop showing off his Mercedes.
“Carlos” was designed as a three-part TV series (which apparently kept it out of the competition, despite its superiority to most of the competing titles) and unlike the similarly long “Che”, where seeing both parts together was a must to appreciate the connections between the mirrored halves, “Carlos” would probably benefit from being watched in multiple sittings. In something of a rarity for trilogies, the second part is actually the most accomplished. The first and third parts, which are devoted respectively to Carlos’ rise and fall as his associations with various terrorist networks and governments change, have a relatively standard biopic structure, although Assayas ensures they always remain far from conventional.
The second part, on the other hand, spends over an hour on a single riveting set-piece before moving to other material, Carlos’ kidnapping of the board of OPEC ministers and subsequent escape attempt. Unrelentingly taut, the sequence is also notable for the way its extended length allows for the depiction of minute detail that is always revealing – the way Carlos engages the politician captives in conversation as equals, the way the politicians mold Carlos through flattery, the way Carlos’ subordinates pace and puke to manage their nerves.
For my money, Assayas is second only to Arnaud Desplechin as the most interesting director working in France today and his achievement in making this behemoth feel relatively fleet is stunning. Even more impressive is his decision to emphasize character over incident throughout the film. “Carlos” is no laundry-list of happenings. It’s a detailed depiction of a world of Carlos and his co-conspirators, all of whom are fully realized individuals, from the German terrorist disgusted with the anti-Semitism of Palestinian collaborators to the devoted feminist who is helplessly molded into a petit-bourgeois housewife by the charisma of Carlos. For all the sturm and drang found in this sweeping story, “Carlos” is a film about people who are venal, flawed, and above all, human, and that’s why this epic sticks in the mind.
-Raj Ranade
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Cannes Dispatch #6.5 - "Fair Game"
No real entry today, as I attempt to get some sleep/sanity - the Cannes whirlwind has a way of wearing you down. Twitter-esque thoughts on Doug Liman's "Fair Game" though - those who were confused about why the director of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "Jumper" had a film in the most prestigious film competition in the world were thoroughly justified. "Fair Game" isn't ever bad, exactly, but it's nothing to write home about (ha). It's a pretty generic geopolitical thriller, right down to the irritatingly boilerplate score (pompous thumping percussion! little bits of electronic stuff!), and anyone who has a basic handle on the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal isn't going to learn anything here (one of the few novel insights the film has - about informants left in the lurch when Plame left the CIA - is completely forgotten by the film's second half). Naomi Watts and Sean Penn have pretty good chemistry together as Plame and Joe Wilson, but Penn's presence strikes me as a casting error - when Joe Wilson goes on a TV tour criticizing government officials, the meta-recognition of Sean Penn being shrill about politics on TV drowns out the character we're supposed to be seeing.
Light screening slates for Friday and Saturday, so expect plenty of coverage forthcoming!
-Raj Ranade
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Cannes Dispatch #6 - "Of Gods and Men"
When it rains, it pours (and it actually rained today) - in one day, I walked past Gael Garcia Bernal and sat two rows behind Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling, and Bollywood superstar Deepika Padukone. This was a bit of relief, not because I care all that much about star-searching, but because I can now tell stories that don't receive the immediate reaction of "Who?". Beyond shiny happy people, Cannes also provided a number of other odd insights yesterday, namely:
1. Press head into premiere screenings of competition films about a half hour before cast and crew members and other such notables, so you'd think that the paparazzi would know better. But as it turns out, if your neon-yellow press badge isn't clearly visible as you're walking up the red carpet, and you're dressed in some vaguely formal attire, photographers will not hesitate to unleash a flash-bulb fusillade.
2. If you're audacious enough to direct a 5 1/2 hour movie about international terrorism and present it at Cannes, as director of "Carlos" Olivier Assayas is, you are also audacious enough to enter your tuxedo-required premiere screening wearing a suit jacket over jeans and bright white sneakers.
3. The French apparently have no problem with leaving their phones on, answering their phones, or taking flash photography of the screen during screenings.
4. Walk-outs in the early morning screenings may be a less a function of film quality and more a function of industry people being hungover from their (presumably wild yacht) parties the night before. This possibility occurred to me when I noticed the pant-suited woman at the end of my row throwing up on her shoes during a not-particularly-disgusting movie.
5. If you decide to skip a movie (Lee Chang-dong's Poetry) because you'd like to sleep in before the 5.5 hour epic, by cosmic law, the film you skipped will be acclaimed as brilliant by everyone you speak to that day.
A shorter entry today, as "Carlos" is both fascinating and thoroughly exhausting to watch. More tomorrow on that film, the latest from Ken Loach, and the first Indian film to screen in a competition category in nearly a decade. But first, a review of the new film by Xavier Beauvois, which managed to overcome my immediate "Tropic Thunder"-induced skepticism.
Of Gods and Men (dir. by Xavier Beauvois) - In Competition
Xavier Beauvois' "Of Gods and Men" opens with pastoral calm. In a North African monastery, nine French monks tend their vegetable gardens, pray in respectful silence, and live peacefully with the Islamic village below the sloping hillside, providing them with advice and medical care and accepting gifts and respect. Coexistence seems written into the very landscape itself - the fertile soil of the monastery transitions gradually across the hillside into windswept Algerian sand, verdant trees and hills generously giving way to arid brush and plateaus.
It's serene - and of course, it can't last. Islamic radicalism encroaches - jihadis slit the throats of Croatian contractors at a local work-site, an occurrence that Beauvois shoots with Cronenbergian clarity. And so the audience naturally expects the worst when bandanna-clad rifle carriers force their way into the monastery gates. But Beauvois has no interest in making a simple story of martyrs versus demons - the fighters are only looking for medicine, though the monastery can't spare it. There's a tense chill as the head monk Christian (Lambert Wilson) and the rebel leader (Roschdy Zem) negotiate. Christian knows his Koran and recites a passage, and the leader, a man of genuine faith, respectfully defers. But it becomes clear through the conversation that the rebel's position amongst his people is precarious, and cooler heads may be losing their influence. Should the monks leave and abandon their flock?
Xavier Beauvois has a kind of clinical, detached style of filmmaking - long and static shots that often keep their distance from his characters - that can recall Michael Haneke, except for the fact that Beauvois actually has faith in humanity. His underrated last film, "The Young Lieutenant", would probably be categorized as a crime thriller by the time the credits rolled, but the first half of the movie was comparatively light on incident and heavy on calm observation. It instead soaked us in the rhythms of the lives of the characters, following their daily routines (not quite in "Aurora" detail, mind you) and keeping an eye out for the nuances of their interactions with each other, so that when dramatic incident arises, the audience has a much better grasp on how this changes the world of those in the film.
Beauvois uses that method again in "Gods", which is based on the real-life tragedy that befell a monastery of Trappist monks in Algeria in 1996. This time, however, the rhythm that his characters live in is one of fear and uncertainty. Beauvois dispassionately watches the monks as they waver in their decision to stay and continue to pray, for deliverance, for strength to match their convictions, for courage to accept their fate. And this plot focus is exactly why Beauvois' clinical nature as a filmmaker is absolutely critical - for most materials, addressing topics like this would no doubt lead to mawkishness or sanctimony (and this film does in a few moments), but understatement in formal terms and restraint in the performances lets the audience feel the full weight of the emotions at play without feeling unduly manipulated. Lambert Wilson, who was in perhaps the worst film in competition ("The Princess of Montpensier"), has now given one of the festival's best performances in one of its best films, portraying a man who has spent his life studying Islam and gaining the respect of its believers, only to see the world he so respects turning on him.*
"Gods" is probably too long (after a climactic epiphany, the time until the ending starts to feel a bit like repetitive padding) and it occasionally veers into excessive sentimentality (one scene has the monks joining together in song to drown out the noise of an army helicopter). But for the most part, it's a film of incredible force. The psychological process that the characters go through is understandably poignant, but Beauvois even manages to capture silent prayer in a way that's surprisingly affecting. In one scene, a monk prays in a shot lit by a single candle that's visible only as a small speck on the screen, a glimmer of light staving off overwhelming darkness. And the ending left me a wreck. In the final shots, we see aggressors marching the monks off screen into the distance, solid shapes slowly transforming into ghosts of their former selves. Beauvois also shows a montage of various shots of his landscape. Those features of the landscape that were so prominent early on the film have now been obscured by a dusting of snow, obliterating the memory of a land that once exemplifies the values of brotherhood and peace.
*Weird Dissonance of the Day: Lambert Wilson deciding to make out with the woman who plays his teenage disciple in the film on the red carpet before his premiere.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Cannes Dispatch #5 - "Biutiful", "Film Socialisme"
I have little to no experience when it comes to French (I’ve gotten really good at charades during my time here), France (they have Chinese food here?), or Frenchmen (Gerard Depard-who just walked by?), but I do consider myself something of an expert on the annual cycle of press coverage, particularly the whining that ensues. To start off, you have your whining about the slate, ideally in terms that contradict whatever you said the year before. This year, the whining focused on the lack of famous directors and actors present in the competition entries (where’s the glamour? where are the icons of cinema?). Last year, of course, the whining focused on the preponderance on famous directors who were blocking opportunities for new talent (the purpose of film festivals is discovery! these people have had their day in the sun!).
Next, you have your mid-festival griping about how the festival has been a washout. In the Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt said (I’m paraphrasing) that the competition had for the most part been “a rush to the bottom”. He sensibly called that unfair in the next sentence (although he also noted that the joy of discovery was exemplified by “Biutiful”, which suggests that a Universal production that’s part of a 100-million-dollar deal with a director needs “discovery”) but the sentiment has been echoed far and wide throughout some of the press here. Keep in mind that half the festival slate has not screened yet.
The next wave should occur soon as people talk about how film A in Un Certain Regard belongs in the competition slate more than competition film B. Maybe it’s just because my presence here is comically incongruous and implausible (seat-trading and slipping past a chatty guard got me a better seat than “real” newspaper critics for Godard’s new film) and I’m happy just to be here, but I’m always surprised by the complaining that you only get, say, one masterpiece and several other top-quality films over a period of five days. I just know I’m more than pleased with the competition slate – I’ll be bringing you reviews of two more top-notch competition films (Abbas Kiarostami’s “Copie Conforme” and Xavier Beauvois’ “Of Gods and Men”) soon. For now, here’s two films that were a bit more difficult to deal with.
Biutiful (dir. By Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) – In Competition
I find few filmmakers as frustrating as Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, because his egregious weaknesses as a filmmaker go hand-in-hand with his astonishing strengths. Take "Babel", for example - a staggering visual achievement, a showcase for a series of incredible performances, and a fundamentally stupid movie that thinks it can explain the entire world by contriving up a web of implausible connections. I rarely fault filmmakers for excessive ambition, but that clearly seems to be Inarritu's problem - every film he makes has to be about everything all at once. So when I heard that Inarritu's new film "Biutiful" would focus on one character in one country speaking one language, I was tentatively excited. That was a bit premature - if "Babel" told too many stories exploring too many issues, "Biutiful" piles too many issues onto the story of one person. Overall, that’s an improvement, but not really by much.
Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is the center of “Biutiful”, and he is as much of a Job figure as Larry Gopnik was in “A Serious Man”, except this time we’re supposed to take it oh-so-seriously. In lieu of a plot summary, here is a list of things that happen to Barcelona-based Uxbal over the course of the film: cancer, poverty, a bipolar wife, a cheating wife, a wife who beats his kids, kids in poverty, spooky ghost hauntings, guilt over exploitation of illegal immigrants, more guilt after exploitation of illegal immigrants goes wrong, a drug-addled brother, a drug-addled brother having sex with his wife, spiritual uncertainty, police brutality, bloody urine, bloody urine combined with incontinence, hangnails, etc.
Could all of this happen to a single person? Possibly. Are people, even in extreme poverty, generally affected by only a subset of these issues? Probably. Would a film that reined in its focus be more effective at tackling one or a few of these issues? Definitely. But Inarritu has to tackle his three Gs (globalization, God, and griminess) every time at bat, and swallowing the implausible concoctions he comes up with requires another G, gullibility.
And again, it’s extraordinarily frustrating that the film is loaded down with so much horseshit because Inarritu is spectacular at most every other aspect of filmmaking. Working with Inarritu, Javier Bardem has not only a lock of the Best Actor award here at the festival, but a very likely Oscar nomination in the works. Bardem comes as close as anyone possibly could to selling his character’s misery, and the sorrowful lines seemingly etched into his face are the most moving things about the film. And working with DP Rodrigo Prieto again, Inarritu has crafted a terrifying world of strobe lights and supernatural terrors with an array of indelible images – the strip club that characters visit towards the end of the film takes the objectification of women to horrifyingly literal new levels and is surely one of the creepiest ever filmed. Gustavo Santaolalla’s electronic-noise-inflected guitar score also provides a nice elegiac quality to the proceedings though.
But the world’s tiniest violin would probably have been more appropriate – Inarritu tries to stomp on our heartstrings until we weep, but all I could do was scoff. Despite a decidedly mixed critical reaction, I do have an ominous premonition that this will be the Palme D’Or winner. Enough critics seem to be bowled over by this thing –Jeffrey Wells wasted no time throwing out comparisons to “The Bicycle Thieves” and “Open City” (the famously unhinged Wells also wasted no time calling the film’s opponents “dweebs” and “elite know-it-alls who live in a cloistered realm”, but let’s not go there). Oscar attention in many categories seems likely as well. C’est la vie, I guess – preposterous rigmarole always has its defenders.
Film Socialisme (dir. by Jean-Luc Godard) – Un Certain Regard
LOLcat Egypt Palestine. Il n'y a pas de cuillère. Israel oil balalaika Stalin. Globalization economies equal cheese sandwiches. Tire fire gaslight doom gloom floor. Ce n'est pas une critique de film. Godard ist eine Kunst, Gott, Gemini Kriegsführung Vieh prod? 戛納電影節更像電影節可以可以在這裡有一些詞在 This sentence is written in Arabic. كما هو مكتوب في هذه الجملة العربية
OK, I’ll stop now. But a bit of a prank is a good way to get into the latest from film icon Jean-Luc Godard, who played at least a few jokes on his audience here at Cannes. “Film Socialisme” begins with a series of title cards that flash on screen for less than a second each – each contains about fifty or so names. I only really caught some of the credited writers, who happened to include William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. The final words on screen before the lights go up are “No Comment”, and fittingly enough, Mr. Godard abruptly canceled his post-screening press conference just hours before it was to occur.
Those were the easiest points/gags/provocations to glean from Godard’s film, everything contained in between is closer to the opaqueness of my opening. In the first main section of the film, people on a yacht (including Patti Smith, for whatever reason) adrift in sea discuss politics in gorgeous HD shots while what looks like cell-phone quality video films herds of people in malls, pools, and discotheques. In the second section, a journalist at a gas station is harassed by a Balzac-reading attendant and a child wearing a CCCP t-shirt who paints exact Renoir replicas. The third section is a loose image-association involving world politics (Americans love Youtube cat videos -> cats were gods in Ancient Egypt -> Americans are at odds with the modern Islam found in Egypt).
There’s a wealth of ideas here, to be certain (I’ll spare you my rambling attempts at interpretation). There’s surely also plenty of nonsense, as well as contempt for segments of the audience. Godard’s English subtitles generally only translate nouns and the occasional preposition from the original French (although there’s plenty of German to alienate native viewers). I’m terribly suspicious of anyone who exalts or dismisses this film after a single viewing – there’s no way anyone could fully engage with the density of the flurrying images here after a single viewing. Not that many really want to – avant-garde cinema of this sort has never packed seats and was never intended to. But it’s great to see that even at the age of 79, Godard is still frustrating, exciting, and provoking viewers as he did when he was a young man. (Ironically, the most difficult film of the festival will be one of the first that general audiences will be able to see if they're so inclined. You can buy a stream of the film here and the attached trailer is actually the full film, fast-forwarded to fit into a minute and a half).
Cannes Dispatch #4 - "Outrage"
An abbreviated entry today, as screenings of new films from Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu beckon. More on all of those tonight or tomorrow, but here's a bit about one of the more divisive entries playing this year.
Midway into Takeshi Kitano’s “Outrage”, two yakuza thugs storm into a noodle shop for a shakedown. One customer flees immediately as the yakuza sit waiting for the manager, but soon enough another distracted one strolls in, headphones in his ears and Nintendo DS in hand. He remains there obliviously slipping noodles as the thugs head into the kitchen, stab the loudly-screaming man to death with a pair of chopsticks, and take control of the business. It’s a goofy bit of comedy, but there’s something striking about the moment – this anesthetized everyman is so blinded by consumption that he doesn’t see the changes that will affect his world happening right in front of his nose.Judging from Roger Ebert’s takedown and the general festival buzz, “Outrage” has rapidly gained a reputation as one of the worst competition entries to screen so far. I’m not going to argue that the film is an unsung masterpiece, and my reasons for enjoying the film are for the most part not particularly deep, but I do think “Outrage” is smarter than most people are giving it credit for. Gangster films have often been metaphors for the effects of capitalism, and “Outrage” certainly feels like appropriate as a metaphor for the state of world capitalism right now – which is to say, on the brink of implosion.
The instigating act of “Outrage” is a two-bit scam – low-level hoods running a bar over-charge a patron by a few thousand dollars and threaten to bash his head in if he refuses to pay. He takes them to his workplace to get the cash, which happens to be the headquarters of a rival family. They take control of the bar, and the one-upmanship begins – first grabs for cash, then property, then territory, then international influence. Mergers and hostile takeovers start to consolidate the various families together, but that only turns a gang war into a domestic dispute. In the end, the downfall of the central business comes not from the ineffectual intervention of police and governments, but from within, as risky and unsustainable business practices prove toxic.
Admittedly, there’s a certain Looney Tunes monotony to the ever-increasing double-crosses and reprisals that Kitano continually layers on top of each other, which is one reason that critics may be having trouble taking the film seriously (although I'd venture that its absurd comedy is part of the point). The other main reason is the general lack of any thorough characterization for the main players – aside from a lower-level mob boss played by Kitano himself, the various characters are generally defined by one or two salient traits and little more.
But Kitano has the kind of exquisite formal control that makes the film’s flaws easy to forgive, at least for this viewer. Every shot is carefully crafted to exhibit the symmetry to sleek lines, to catch the play of Tokyo neon light on gunmetal gray and waxed Mercedes black, and to plant disorienting visual surprises - what appears to be an iris shot in one early scene, for example, is created through millimeter-precise placement of a camera between two suited gangsters. This intense visual focus is a joy, and Kitano uses it to depict some inventive and gut-wrenching examples of violence – the traditional yakuza collection of fingers comes in way you might not expect and Kitano’s twisting camera moves and unpredictable cuts manage to make the expected approach of death consistently surprising.
Echoes of greater relevance aside, “Outrage” may just be a genre exercise in high style, but when talent of Kitano’s magnitude is involved, that’s hardly anything to scoff at. As the lone genre entry in an otherwise heavily high-brow competition slate, “Outrage” may go against the year’s prevailing trends, but it’s nevertheless a film that’s worthy of a slot here at the Croisette.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Cannes Dispatch #3 - "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger", "The Princess of Montpensier", "A Screaming Man"
Apologies to anyone who may have expected a review of that movie with the homicidal rubber tire I mentioned - I ended up catching the African competition entry "A Screaming Man" instead. That decision, of course, has everything to do with my noble passion for highlighting under-represented world cinema and absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there were about 600 people in line for "Rubber" by the time I arrived at the 400-person-capacity theatre.
That latter lateness was the result of my being ensnared in one of the worst cases of human gridlock I've ever experienced (which is saying something given that I've frequently visited Mumbai). Having foolishly attempted to cross through a crowd gathered for a red carpet premiere with a slim group of people, I soon found myself completely unable to move in the sweltering mass that gathered to get a peek at the stars of Mike Leigh's "Another Year" (a TigerBeat cast if there ever was one). The lack of group cohesion from those looking to escape the crowd created a horrible human Chinese finger trap - the two pushes to get out happened to be in directly opposing directions. Polite French pleas proved to be no help - what ultimately worked was screaming loudly in English along with a few frustrated New Yorkers. So, yes, maybe we reinforced the awful Ugly American stereotype, but sometimes stereotypes are both surprisingly effective and kind of fun!
When I wasn't catching screenings and tarnishing my country's reputation, I had quite a bit of fun observing and eavesdropping while walking around the Palais des Festivals, the center for screenings and industry negotiations at Cannes. Blind item - which major Hollywood industry player was caught excoriating a lackey via cell phone in the film negotiations marketplace?* As for star sightings, Pedro Almodovar and Michael Haneke were seen walking around, but the way weirder sight was Valerie Plame, presumably in town to promote competition entry "Fair Game", which focuses on her CIA leak scandal. But all play aside, I got some work done - here are reviews of a few competition entries and the most prominent American film of the festival.
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (dir. by Woody Allen) - Out of Competition
Anyone who caught Woody Allen's post-film press conference knows that the man hasn't lost any of his comedic timing or zest for one-liners. "My relationship with death remains the same," he noted. "I'm strongly against it". It's a shame to report, therefore, that Allen's new film doesn't reflect that skill. "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" is a wispy little nothing of a comedy, a trifle that is never unpleasant, exactly, but also never particularly interesting.
More in the farcical vein of "Whatever Works" than the darker territory of "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" and "Match Point", "Stranger" takes Allen back to London to observe the comic self-delusions of a small group of characters. The Allen surrogate of sorts here is Josh Brolin, who has been given a floppy, tousled hairdo in an unconvincing attempt to nebbish up his He-Man physique. Brolin plays Roy, a one-novel wonder struggling to replicate his past success. As his frustrated wife Sally (Naomi Watts) nurses a growing crush on her boss (Antonio Banderas), he becomes equally drawn to an attractive neighbor (Freida Pinto). Also in the mix are Watts' divorced parents Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), whose mid-life crisis has led him to marry a hooker, and Helena (Gemma Jones), a devotee to psychics and New Age mysticism.
I'll confess that I was pretty taken with the preponderance of movie stars making googly eyes at each other here (after all, exposure to extended scenes of a man eating breakfast alone can leave you craving a little frivolity). And "Stranger" certainly hints at a few interesting ideas, particularly the necessity of some degree of self-delusion for everyday survival. But "Stranger" seems shallow on most every level. Few of the characters are sketched with any depth (as the titular attractions, Pinto and Banderas function mostly as exotic cardboard cutouts) and the comedy is often stale (Hopkins' slow realization of his wife's golddigging nature seems too obvious to ever be really funny). Worst of all is the ending. Late in the film, Allen introduces some dark twists that ramp up the drama, but at the point where better movies would be rolling towards a climax, Allen simply cuts the film off, leaving only a few lazy and abrupt implications as to his characters' ultimate fates. You get the unmistakable impression that he doesn't care enough about these people to follow their stories through to the end - and if he doesn't care, why should we?
The Princess of Montpensier (dir. by Bertrand Tavernier) - In Competition
Allen's film may have problems, but it has some charms - medieval costume drama "The Princess of Montpensier", on the other hand, is the first out-and-out dud that I've seen here at the festival. Director Bertrand Tavernier took home the Best Director Prize at Cannes in 1984, but his latest film offers little that is notable beyond gorgeous autumn foliage and abundant French cleavage.
The film takes place during the French Wars of Religion, where Protestant Huguenots took up arms against French Catholics. Hoping to protect his family's status through strategic alliances, the Marquis de Mezieres forces his daughter (Melanie Thierry) into marriage with the Prince of Montpensier, despite her long-standing love for the dashing Henri from the House of Guise. Soon, the two rivals battling for her hand are joined by two other suitors, a grizzled old warrior turned the princess's tutor and the Duke of Anjou, who would later become King. Backstabbing ensues. This is all familiar ground, but I'm not automatically opposed to a well-done retread. But "Princess" just isn't - on a meat scale, it's closer to a bloody raw. The film is bogged down by dull and incoherent action scenes, arcane and uninteresting political manuevering, and endless talkiness.
A few French critics supporting the film have noted that a pretty thorough familiarity with the political world of the time is needed to fully appreciate the film. Whatever - what I know is that the passion that a romance like this needs to stir the heart is conspicuously absent. As the princess, Melanie Thierry is good enough, portraying a woman struggling against the social restrictions of the time (heard that one before?). But she has no spark with any of the several suitors after her, who all range in personality from noble brooding to whiny brooding.
Tavernier hints in the press kit that his intent is in part feminist, given his heroine's lack of control over her destiny and the cruelty of some of the men in her life, but he seems a little too fond of gratuitous nudity for that explanation to really pass muster. Perhaps Tavernier was aiming for something like Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" (famously and unfairly slammed in its Cannes premiere), which captured a young queen's entrapment in royal ennui with sympathy and formal ingenuity. What he ended up with is a wealth of admittedly fine production values devoted to a knockoff Jane Austen story with none of the romantic heat that made those stories work. Full disclosure: I'll confess that I stopped paying much attention during the last 20 minutes. It was much more interesting to look around the theatre as a steady trickle of audience members walking out of the theater expanded into a flood.
A Screaming Man (dir. by Mahamet-Saleh Haroun) - In Competition
Working with a budget that is undoubtedly a pittance compared to Tavernier's lavish resources, Mahamet-Saleh Haroun has created a film far more worthy of its competition berth. "A Screaming Man" is the first African film to play in competition for 13 years, and although it's a small film with modest ambitions, it's nevertheless a moving experience. The film centers around Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), known to everyone in his hometown in Chad as Champion for long-past victories in national swimming competitions. Adam and his twenty-something son work as pool attendants at a hotel where business is threatened by the civil war raging throughout the country. Intensely devoted to his humble work, Adam is shocked when he is demoted to a position as hotel gatekeeper and incensed when he finds out that his soon has engineered this demotion to keep his own job. Adam soon arranges a severe betrayal of his own in turn, a betrayal that he soon realizes will haunt him.
Haroun low-budget technical achievement is quite impressive. War is never overtly seen in the film, but it continually haunts the action through the sound design, which counterpoints even the film's calmest moments with the sounds of distant gunfire and helicopters. The visual design is no less remarkable - Haroun captures the sandy, sunburnt palette of village streets as vividly as he does the crisp blues and greens of chlorinated water and plastic flora. His frames are also rich
with information, whether he's crafting Tati-esque setups of Adam dashing back and forth between busy entry and exit gates to lift them by hand or if he's showing Adam driving his moped down a narrow alleyway at night, his headlight creating a narrow square of light that dwindles into nothingness.
But the heart of the movie is Haroun's sensitive depiction of a man dealing with a shattered world. Haroun makes clear that the sense of identity created by one's profession and the ensuing existential crisis following its loss are not solely applicable to white-collar businessmen (like the similarly struggling men of Laurent Cantet's "Time Out" and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Tokyo Sonata"). Even in his menial task, Adam finds immense meaning, and the drastic change to his life induces a temporary madness with horrifying consequences. "Man" is all the more powerful for the understated stoicism that Djaoro brings to his performance - when cracks inevitably appear in his facade, they truly mean something.
"A Screaming Man" is no world-changing masterpiece, and it is unlikely to claim much awards attention at the end of the festival. But this film tells its small story exceedingly well, and when the story comes from a region so often neglected in film festival circles, it's something worth celebrating. And in case you were wondering, on the "A ____ Man" continuum, it ranks above "Single" but below "Serious".
*The correct answer, of course, is all of them.
-Raj Ranade
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Cannes Dispatch #2 - "Another Year"
Another day, another flurry of film-related magic. In between screenings at the Grand Theatre Lumiere, I caught glimpses of Roger Ebert and Oliver Stone (currently sporting a hilarious mustache), indulged in an amazing shrimp risotto with noted cinephile and gastronome Fareed Ben-Youssef '09, and received an elbow to the stomach during the frenzied rush to get into the premiere of Woody Allen's new film. I'll have much more about the sparkling atmosphere (including photos!) throughout the rest of the week, as well as a review of Allen's "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" (for now, two words: frothy trifle), but at the moment I have to rush to a screening of a film about a rubber tire that kills people (which, for whatever reason, is featured in the ultra-highbrow Critic's Week selection). For now, here's a review of my first screening of the day, which happened to be the best film I've caught at the festival so far.
Another Year (dir. by Mike Leigh) - In Competition
Time will tell if Mike Leigh's new film "Another Year" takes home any prizes at Cannes this year, but it can certainly claim one distinction already: the most irritating synopsis of any film in the competition. Here it is, quoted in full:
"Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Family and friendship.
Love and warmth. Joy and sadness. Hope and despair.
Companionship. Loneliness. A birth. A death. Time passes..."
Those unfamiliar with Leigh's work might be understandably suspicious about the film's quality given the substitution of high-school poetry for information in the press kit and the rather bland title. But the three-time festival-competition veteran has long had one of the most consistent quality records of any leading auteur, and "Another Year", undoubtedly a strong contender for the Palme D'Or, is no exception.
"Year" works quite nicely as a complement to Leigh's last film, the joyous "Happy-Go-Lucky". Like that film, "Year" deals with the contrasts between those in life who manage to achieve happiness and fulfillment and those who are left alone on the margins of society. But the canvas of this new film is wider than the character study of "Lucky", providing opportunities for a full talented ensemble to shine.
The center of "Year" is the London couple of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a pair sharing marital bliss with the kind of glowing warmth that recalls the Gundersons in "Fargo". Bouncing off this calm center are a series of visitors in varying degrees of distress - there's the couple's unmarried and lonely thirty-year-old son Joe, the husband's one-time drinking buddy Ken who has descended into alcoholism, and, most notably, the wife's ditzy 40-something co-worker Mary (Lesley Manville), who is prone to ill-advised flirtations and loud desperation.
As the synopsis may suggest, not all that much happens plot-wise. Leigh has always been much more interested in meticulously observing the way that people interact. Leigh used his trademark method of letting his actors interact in character off-camera for about a year, and then fleshing out a loose plot outline with improvisation during filming. As a result, the film's relationships have an unforced realism - characters who have know each other for years have the kind of gentle rapport where glances can sometimes substitute for full conversations, while characters who have just met have a painfully chilled awkwardness to their interactions.
"Another Year" is suffused with a deep melancholy - by the end of the film, Leigh has suggested that the differences that resign the socially marginized to loneliness are irreconcilable, and (like "Aurora") that there are fundamental limits to the empathy of even the most caring souls. This kind of dour insight is well within Leigh's comfort zone, as demonstrated by past films like "Vera Drake" and Palme D'Or Winner "Secrets and Lies". What's new in "Happy-Go-Lucky" is his additional new emphasis on happiness and optimism. "Another Year" is frequently laugh-out-loud funny (particularly when Broadbent employs razor-sharp snarky deadpan to tease his visitors) and Leigh recognizes here that the goal of happiness is as achievable as its opposite.
Midway through the film, Broadbent's character discusses the environment and notes that the magnitude of the problem is large enough that personal conservation efforts might as well be "pissing in the ocean". But he soldiers on with those efforts, because he must at least do what he can. Leigh has catalogued the miseries of life as thoroughly as any other director, and he sees their occasional insurmountability. But it seems that he's now more interested in those who do what they can - like them, he's pushing forward and soldiering on with a smile.
- Raj Ranade
Friday, May 14, 2010
Cannes Dispatch #1 - "Aurora" and "Chatroom"
It took about 48 hours of flight delays and cancellations that sent me bouncing through four cities in Europe, but I arrived in Cannes last night, and it quickly became difficult to recall any of the bad vibes from my Iceland-volcano-travel-delay reenactment. I hopped off the shuttle to the sight of fireworks bursting in the sky above the Riviera, and the experience has been rather thrilling ever since, from the postcard-ready glittering beach views to the constant presence of beautiful people pretty much everywhere (except the press tent, natch). The best part, of course, is the fact that all this energy is devoted towards highlighting the finest in world cinema. Now, I won't echo the traditional line about Cannes, which is that this is a festival where someone like Manoel De Oliveira gets as much red carpet attention as Naomi Watts (hint: which premiere required large police cordons?). But Cannes is undoubtedly a hallowed Mecca for cinephiles, and I'm absolutely delighted to be able to bring you coverage from the heart of the festival. I'll have plenty more about the city and the festival throughout the week, but here are some (admittedly jetlagged and rough) impressions of the first two films I saw.
Aurora (dir. by Cristi Puiu) - Un Certain Regard
Even by the rather exacting aesthetic standards of the Romanian New Wave, "Aurora", the new film from Cristi Puiu ("The Death of Mr. Lazarescu") is a rather tough sit. During its three hour running time, "Aurora" sticks to the static, unadorned camerawork and rigorous accretion of mundane detail that have marked past films of this Romanian film movement (like Palme D'Or winner "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days"), but manages to be even more withholding in how it reveals its plot and characters. For the majority of the film, the name of the game is ellipsis. We follow our lead character (Puiu himself) through a thoroughly ordinary daily routine of bathing, eating and commuting, but we don't learn his name for about two hours; we think the plot may be kicking in when the man buys a gun and begins lurking suspiciously in dark alleyways, but when the film's acts of violence start to occur, they raise more questions than they answer; we see the man's extensive conversations with others, but it takes a while to determine what his relationship with them is exactly.
Puiu has a sharp visual eye as a director, imprisoning his characters in the industrial wasteland of Bucharest with vertical barriers and Ozu-esque hallway shots, and the sheer unknowability of the early sections maintains enough suspense that you could charitably call this a crime thriller, especially in the shocking scenes of violence. But those virtues and Puiu's own excellent performance don't change the fact that the audience is left begging for a hint of explanation as the final scene rolls around. And in the fascinating payoff of the ending, they get it - without spoiling anything, Puiu provides all the answers we could have asked for and more in a comic rebuke to our expectations of explanations, psychological or otherwise. "It worries me that you seem to understand this," says a character as the info begins to flow and reduces a ordinary person into a familiar type. Puiu wants the viewer to recognize the inherent falseness of attempt to patly explain the three-dimensional psychology of a real human being, and his epistemological approach to the mind reminded me a bit of Scorsese's struggle to understand Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull".
Of course, Puiu is no Scorsese when it comes to, shall we say, user-friendliness. If the ending challenges a central cliche of the crime genre, that daunting length certainly puts the term "thriller" to the test, and it is a bit hard to see what exactly Puiu might accomplish in three hours that he couldn't do in two. Nevertheless, "Aurora" is another uncompromising and daring vision from the bold new generation of Romanian filmmakers, and it represent the kind of risk-taking spirit that Cannes at its finest has always encouraged.
Chatroom (dir. by Hideo Nakata) - Un Certain Regard
The teenagers of "Chatroom" wander through their everyday lives in color-desaturated, gloomy shots that cast their skin in a sickly pallor - they're like walking ghosts crying out for some kind of release from their dreary existences. Director Hideo Nakata, director of the Japanese "Ringu" films, gives them one in his teen cyber-horror thriller, which takes the internet chat-rooms that the kids frequent and literalizes them as surreal physical meeting locations. Nakata's vision of cyberspace looks a bit like "The Shining" with brighter wallpaper - a long hallway leads to different chatrooms where reality shifts at will, mirroring the ease with which users can adopt and shed entire new personas.
But Nakata is less interested in the "Matrix"-style possibilities opened up by such a world than in the frightening underbelly of these technological systems. "Chatroom" is inspired by the recent spate of real-world teen suicides that stem from cyber-bullying with a magnitude of cruelty made possible by internet anonymity. The lead psychopath here is William (Aaron Johnson of "Kick-Ass"), a hacker who funnels rage from family troubles into elaborate psychological torture of his internet friends, particularly a depressive named Jim who seems to be only one short mental push from self-harm. Pouncing on their insecurities and past emotional traumas, William plays his victims like theremins, establishing fierce loyalties and breaking friendships at will.
Nakata's hyper-caffeinated style makes the mind-games fun for a while, and if the obvious telegraphing of William as "the evil one" dampens some of the suspense, Johnson's leering grin and nervy intensity mark a terrific step up from his bland performance in "Kick-Ass". Ultimately, though, Nakata doesn't have anything particularly interesting to say about the potential wealth of ideas concerning teenagers and the internet. The eerie terror that the early scenes conjure starts to fade quickly as the plot contorts far past the breaking point. It's a shame that the second half of the film resorts to characters acting in absurd and implausible ways (William's climactic push to make Ben kill himself is egregiously confusing), particularly when the incidents that inspired the film involve motives and behavior that are real, terrifying, and all too understandable.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
BodyHype: A Company of Performers
At Princeton, when I say “Body,” you probably think of clamoring audiences and shaking hips. But what else can you expect from BodyHype Dance Company’s spring show this year?
Without a theme or a title, this show presents itself as a bit of a wildcard. It opens with “Spicy,” a flashy homage to Latin dance, but proceeds to pieces set to songs by Lily Allen, Radiohead, and many other contemporary music artists.
Throughout the first half of the show, it seems that the theme could be “girls versus guys.” Most of the pieces are made up of three girls and three guys, all who engage in some type of choreographic struggle. This formula works well to showcase company members’ strong partnering skills, and it allows the student choreographers to experiment with innovative partnering techniques. But as well executed as these may be, too many similar pieces clustered together tend to dilute an otherwise exciting program.
The show also falls victim to the formula of using lyrics to generate movement (i.e., making a muscle at the word strong, running a hand down one’s cheek at the word tear). While this is a great way to draw in audiences that might not be familiar with dance, it doesn’t seem that pantomime should be at the top of the agenda for these talented dancers.
Indeed, the most successful pieces in the BodyHype show are those that do not fall into any choreographic traps. One of these is a dance by Sibley Lovett ’12, entitled “Where are the Edges?”. Here, Lovett found the perfect combination of dancers, movement style, and song (“Mother” by John Lennon).
Two other standout pieces are “Like Forgetting” by Gretchen Hoffmann ’13 and “Bury It” by Fletcher Heisler ’10. The former, set to “Eet” by Regina Spektor, is beautifully lyrical. The latter, set to “Time Is Running Out” by Muse, is wonderfully acrobatic.
All of these pieces, particularly Heisler’s, make great use of lighting. Costumes, for the most part, are plain, and the wait-time between pieces is tremendous (clocked at 1.5-2.5 minutes). But in the end, BodyHype's dancers let their incredible stage presence and energy shine. With infectious expressions, Hoffmann and Steven Chen ’12 could be considered MVPs in terms of stage presence and energy. But truly, this is an entire company of performers, and in this show, BodyHype's dancers demonstrate that they will deliver, no matter what the choreography - or wait-time - may be.
3.5 paws
Pros: Fantastic stage presence and energy from the dancers
Cons: Excessive wait-time between pieces, formulaic choreography and illustration of lyrics
BodyHype’s spring show ends today, Saturday, May 8, with performances at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. in Theatre Intime.
- Meghan Todt ‘11
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