CANNES, France — The town may be somewhat quiet, despite the nightly red-carpet bedlam and the throbs of the occasional beach party, but the screens have been alive with the sights and sounds of horror. By the time the 62nd Cannes Film Festival ends on Sunday, audiences will have been subjected to an embarrassment of violent shocks: the whipping of one small child, the near blinding of another, a songbird skewered with scissors and a sexual predator run amok. And that’s just the new film from the Austrian director Michael Haneke.
After going Hollywood in 2007 with his own studio remake of his loathsome shocker “Funny Games,” Mr. Haneke has returned to art-house form with “The White Ribbon.” A two-and-a-half hour, slow-to-boil compendium of cruelty set in Germany right before World War I, the sumptuously photographed movie was met by its first press audience Wednesday with applause and a smattering of boos. (The director was last at Cannes in 2005 with the more approachable “Caché.”) The new movie centers on a series of increasingly violent incidents that beset a hamlet in the grip of several harsh patriarchs, including the baron whose land sustains the locals financially and the pastor whose sermons are meant to sustain the populace spiritually.
There’s much to admire, notably the finely etched, meticulous compositions. Yet while Mr. Haneke’s critique of systems of domination is certainly persuasive — the fathers who beat their children will soon march to war on behalf of the Fatherland — it lacks the intellectual and emotional nuance that would make this largely joyless world come to life. One of the truths about Mr. Haneke’s work is that his totalizing worldview can feel almost as punishing and sadistic as the cruelty he metes out on screen. That’s part of the point of course: the audience should feel wretched to appreciate that the world can be wretched, which reminds me of Sartre’s comment that he didn’t need to believe in God to be nice to his neighbors. Mr. Haneke’s competition entry closed a day that, for the press, had begun at 8:30 a.m. with another two and a half hours of rather different cinematic sadism: Quentin Tarantino’s feverishly anticipated “Inglourious Basterds.” (The misspellings are intentional.) A monument to cinema and to one cinematic self in particular, Mr. Tarantino — last at Cannes with his grindhouse pastiche “Death Proof” — has divided critics, this one included. Set in Germany in the early and mid-1940s, the new movie finds Mr. Tarantino playing ringmaster to an international circus that includes Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, a jaw-thrusting psycho who assembles a team to hunt Nazis behind enemy lines. The twist? The rest of these inglorious, not terribly dirty, half-dozen or so avengers are Jewish.
Crammed with movie allusions — Aldo Raine is a nod to the 1950s star Aldo Ray — “Inglourious Basterds” is a raucous showcase for Mr. Tarantino’s increasingly evenly balanced strengths and weaknesses. More than any of his previous films, this one underscores that while he can be a great writer and sometimes director of individual scenes, it can be difficult for him to assemble those parts into a coherent whole. That perhaps explains why the movie has been divided into separately titled chapters, a device that fails to obscure the story’s mounting raggedness. Mr. Tarantino’s command of his material, spaces and camera have rarely been better than in the opener that finds some Jews hidden in a French farmhouse murdered by Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), yet another of cinema’s charismatic Nazis.
Which is part of my problem: movie violence is so easy. All you have to do is scalp someone — as happens with loving graphicness — to put the audience on edge. And certainly the image of a cartoonishly diabolical Nazi annihilating Jews is an easy way to kick-start the narrative. It also provides a rationale for the carnage to follow. (Ed Zwick did the same thing in “Defiance,” his recent film about Jewish World War II partisans.) Given that this is a Quentin Tarantino movie it’s no surprise that the murdered Jews in “Inglourious Basterds” have no meaning in and of themselves however. They’re just props, as much a part of the production design as the farmhouse table and Landa’s comic pipe. But it’s a bummer.
Of course “Inglourious Basterds” is as much an artificial construct as any of Mr. Tarantino’s other films, what he’s called a movie movie. But the Holocaust, which he invokes in the very unfortunate final blowout — complete with the image of shrieking people engulfed in flames in a sealed room — is finally too big for Mr. Tarantino’s movie-geek enthusiasms. He thinks that the Holocaust should be answered with another holocaust. He was in his element at the news conference with the exploitation director Eli Roth (of “Hostel” notoriety), who plays one of the most violent Nazi hunters. Mr. Roth called the movie “kosher porn.” To which I can only say: Oy.
Movie love of a rather gentler and far more imaginative sort is just one of the many pleasures in Alain Resnais’s sublime competition entry, “Wild Grass.” A story about chance, possibility and strange, reckless, impossible desire, the film finds Mr. Resnais — who turns 87 next month — doing some of his finest work to date. The Resnais regulars André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma, wearing a cloud of red hair (warning!) and at times a coat that brings to mind Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, star as two strangers who begin circling each other after he finds her identity papers (including a pilot’s license), which had been stolen along with her purse. She’s a dentist; he’s possibly mad or maybe simply a man with a dark past.
When the characters meet face to face it’s in a street outside a Paris cinema where he’s gone to see the 1954 movie “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” with William Holden and Grace Kelly. (At one point Mr. Resnais inserts a few flourishes from the 20th Century Fox theme music.) Anything seems possible after a movie, the unseen narrator (Edouard Baer) says as Ms. Azéma’s character catches sight of Mr. Dussollier exiting the theater. He seems so lost in thought that she runs ahead of him a little so he can see her. Finally they look at each other as Mr. Resnais’s astonishingly mobile camera, which soars and soars throughout this film, lets us see the precise moment when seeing becomes the recognition of love.
Based on a novel by the French writer Christian Gailly, the film explores how the order of everyday life can be shaken up by coincidence and, as Mr. Resnais has put it, “the desire of desire.” Though he’s very slight and somewhat stooped, Mr. Resnais is as much a force off screen as on. In a far-ranging interview on Thursday, during which he discussed comic books (he’s a fan of both Frank Miller and Alan Moore); “the greatest French director” (his longtime friend Chris Marker); and the problem with flat-screen televisions (the color doesn’t pop), Mr. Resnais said, “I’m against illusion.” Although he likes watching documentaries, he prefers a level of exaggeration in his work, most evident in the new film’s vibrant use of red and blue. He doesn’t want the audience to think “I’m a cheat,” he said, as if we ever could.
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