By Scott Foundas
"It’s very intense, some of the films are very long, and some of them are very weird,” observed the British screenwriter and novelist Hanif Kureshi of his experience serving on the 2009 Cannes Film Festival competition jury. “I saw things I’ve never seen in my life in some of these films,” he added during the annual closing-night press conference, perhaps flashing back on Best Actress winner Charlotte Gainsbourg’s act of clitoral mutilation midway through Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, or the large CGI penis that penetrates an equally photorealistic vaginal canal in the final minutes of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, the penultimate competition title to screen for the press and the one that symbolically brought Cannes 2009 — if not cinema itself — to an apocalyptic close.
The grandest folly of a festival in which it was often difficult to parse the radical from the ridiculous, Noé’s self-proclaimed “psychedelic melodrama” arrived 15 minutes longer than the published 150-minute running time, leading to widespread speculation that the Cannes version was in fact “unfinished” — a generous designation for a film that should never have been started in the first place. Set in a neon-drenched, nocturnal Tokyo that one British critic aptly likened to a very expensive screen saver, Noé’s film opens with an extended hallucinogenic trip experienced by Oscar (monosyllabic nonprofessional actor Nathaniel Brown), an American ex-pat drug dealer who, like most of the film’s thoroughly repellent characters, harbors no higher ambition in life than to get high. (“Everyone who has a real job is a slave,” he assures us, speaking, one suspects, for the director himself.) Tweaking the subjective camera gimmick of the 1947 film noir Lady in the Lake, Noé literally shows us things through Oscar’s eyes, with intermittent frames of black meant to represent the blinking of the character’s eyelids. Then, around the 25-minute mark, Oscar takes a bullet to the chest, watches his entire stultifying life flash before his eyes like an acid-laced version of A Christmas Carol, and spends the rest of the movie as a disembodied spirit floating through the Tokyo skies, where he serves as a sort of guardian angel to the slutty, go-go dancer sister (Pax De La Huerta) with whom, in life, he enjoyed a pseudo-incestuous bond.
As in his previous film, the reverse chronological rape and revenge yarn Irreversible, Noé keeps his camera on an endlessly roving, pirouetting crane, pausing just long enough to linger on extreme close-ups of a bullet wound, a lactating breast and an aborted fetus before Oscar finally finds himself all the way back inside his mother’s womb (where Noé, too, seems eager to return). The illusion is supposed to be one of perpetual motion, yet so monotonous is Noé’s grunge eye candy that one instead feels something closer to atrophy. Yet in Cannes, where no empty provocation is without its perverse defenders, there were some (including, rumor had it, at least one jury member) who praised Into the Void as a work of visual virtuosity, perhaps agreeing with the movie’s zonked-out protagonist that “dying would be the ultimate trip, you know?”
Far more authentically trippy was the latest film by Last Year at Marienbad director Alain Resnais, a filmmaker who’s been bending cinematic time and space since Noé was indeed still an embryo, and who, at 86, delivered his most freely associative dada mindfuck since the 1968 time-travel opus Je t’aime, je t’aime. Adapted from Christian Gailly’s novel The Incident, Resnais’ Wild Grass playfully follows the fate-altering ripples triggered by a seemingly ordinary purse snatching. The purse belongs to Marguerite (Resnais regular Sabine Azema), a dentist who moonlights as an aviatrix; its partial contents are retrieved by Georges (André Dussollier), a man for whom time — as evidenced by a broken watch — has begun to stand still. The unexpected find introduces an element of adventure into Georges’ staid existence, and as he attempts to arrange a rendezvous with Marguerite, his growing infatuation with this mystery woman, whom he knows only from her wallet photos expresses itself in ways that straddle the line between romantic infatuation and psychotic obsession. And things only get weirder from there.
Where Noé labors to induce the feeling of an altered state, Resnais (who received a deserved career achievement prize from the Cannes jury) effortlessly pulls us into a lucid, luxuriant dream, as his characters move towards their unpredictable destinies under the glowing, impressionistic gaze of cinematographer Eric Gautier’s widescreen camera work. The music, by X Files composer Mark Snow, is jazz, and so is the movie itself. Moment by moment, no film in Cannes conveyed such an elating sense of creative freedom — something often associated with youth, but which Resnais, like those other great old men of the cinema Clint Eastwood and Manoel de Oliveira, suggests is the provenance of the aged.
The continuing initiative of Cannes’ artistic director Thierry Fremaux to invite more genre films onto the festival’s main stage this year resulted in the return of Old Boy director Park Chan-wook with Thirst, an anything-goes vampire melodrama, leaden with overtones both psychosexual and religious (the film’s subtitle reads “... for this is my blood”), that runs out of ideas well before the end of its egregious 133 minutes. (Still, Park’s revisionist take on Zola’s Thérèse Raquin proved outré enough to earn a special prize from the Isabelle Huppert–headed jury.) Meanwhile, tucked away in Cannes’ noncompetitive sidebar of midnight screenings, Sam Raimi’s vastly more enjoyable Drag Me to Hell delivered a screwball horror romp for our lean economic times, with Alison Lohman’s bank loan officer suffering the wrath of an old Gypsy hag after denying the woman an extension on her mortgage. The following 90-odd minutes find Raimi gleefully at play at the top of his gross-out game and taking obvious pleasure at his momentary reprieve from the weight of a certain comic book franchise.
No invented horrors, however, could compare with the real ones of Filipino director Brillante Mendoza, whose family-porn-theater escapade Serbis upset the delicate sensibilities of more than a few festivalgoers during last year’s edition. This year, Mendoza was back with Kinatay, a considerably darker and more upsetting descent into the underbelly of Manilla, set mostly over the course of one long night in which a young police cadet becomes an accomplice to the murder and mutilation of a debt-addled prostitute. In something like real time, Mendoza shows the woman’s abduction, killing and the hacking up of her corpse, interspersed with many long scenes of the cadet riding around in a darkened van going to and from the scene of the crime.
Singled out by no less a Cannes veteran than Roger Ebert as the worst film ever to screen at the festival, Kinatay (the title is Tagalog for “slaughter”) isn’t pleasant to watch, nor is it intended to be. A jugular piece of agitprop that wouldn’t seem out of place on a grindhouse double bill with the original Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave, the movie wants to rankle audiences at home and abroad by confronting us with the senseless cheapening of human life, which happens daily on the streets of the developing world and too easily passes unnoticed. Mendoza, who was one of the only directors present at Cannes this year to use such explicit violence for a discernible artistic purpose rather than for superficial titillation, seems aghast at the potential brutality of his fellow man, and how those men can wash away their sins with a shower and a change of shirt — sometimes even a police shirt. To that end, he has made a duly aghast film that cannot easily be shaken — a feeling evidently shared by Huppert’s jury, which awarded Mendoza the Best Director prize to the lusty boos of the international press corps. (Defending the decision afterward, jury member Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the winner of last year’s directing prize for Three Monkeys, praised Mendoza’s film as “one of the most powerful, original films in the competition,” while Kureshi acerbically added, “This is not a dating film.”)
Mendoza could also count among his supporters none other than his fellow Cannes competitor Quentin Tarantino, who was seen enthusiastically applauding at the gala screening of Kinatay a few days before his Inglorious Basterds premiered to its own chorus of mixed reviews and general misapprehension. A jaunty World War II romp about a dirty half-dozen American grunts trying to bring an end to the Third Reich, Tarantino’s seventh feature as director was pooh-poohed even by some of its supporters as a frivolous popcorn movie undeserving of the Cannes competition, while others — including some of the same critics who have condemned Hollywood for its steady parade of solemn Holocaust memorials — shook the finger of historical revisionism at the director for daring to make a WWII film in which vengeful Jews exult at scalping Nazis and tattooing swastikas onto survivors’ heads. Still others called the movie a bore, perhaps because Tarantino’s penchant for long dialogue scenes — here taken to new extremes — is fatally out of step with the world’s increasing Twitterization. The one thing everyone could agree on: the show-stopping, star-making performance of Austrian actor Christoph Waltz as Basterds’ polyglot Nazi villain Col. Hans Landa. Appropriately, Waltz gave his Best Actor acceptance speech in a free-flowing mix of English, French and German.
Oh, what fools we critics can sometimes be. To these eyes, it seems absurd to condemn Tarantino on the grounds of political incorrectness, given that his film so obviously holds no serious political convictions. Loosely inspired by the same-named 1978 B movie by Italian schlock director Enzo G. Castellari, Basterds is framed as a fable — an opening title card reads “Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France” — and, as is usually the case with Tarantino, couches virtually everything in terms of movies themselves. Among the main characters are a theater owner, a projectionist, a soldier turned film star and — yes — even a critic turned soldier (played by Hunger star Michael Fassbender). The head bastard, Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, takes his name from the character actor Aldo Ray, who had two of his best roles in Anthony Mann’s Men in War and Raoul Walsh’s The Naked and the Dead. The mission at hand: the sabotaging of a Nazi propaganda film premiere in occupied France.
At the same time, this smashingly entertaining movie isn’t nearly as superficial as some have claimed. Throughout, Tarantino makes direct and indirect references to the canon of wartime propaganda cinema and the ways in which movies attempt to influence or rewrite the course of history, from German propanda director Leni Riefenstahl and actor Emil Jannings are name-checked, as is French director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 Occupation parable Le Corbeau, while the comically over-the-top Adolph Hitler from the 1949 Stalinist propaganda film The Fall of Berlin seems as much of a model for Tarantino’s own Fuhrer as the more obvious influence of Chaplin’s Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator. By the end, it’s clear that Tarantino is manufacturing his own brand of propaganda movie — one in which Jews and Nazis may battle it out to a fiery finish, but it is cinema that emerges triumphant.
While Tarantino was busy romanticizing the downfall of German fascism, Michael Haneke set about exploring its roots in The White Ribbon, a masterful sociological drama that brought the Austrian filmmaker (who previously won Cannes’ Grand Jury Prize for The Piano Teacher and Best Director for Caché) his long-overdue Palme d’Or. The setting is a rural German village during the year lead-up to World War I, where the local schoolteacher (excellent newcomer Christian Friedel) comes to believe that a rash of deadly accidents befalling the townsfolk may be the work of one or more of his eerily withdrawn, stoic pupils. The ribbon of the title, a symbol of innocence and purity, is one that Haneke gradually unravels as the teacher hones in on the ritualistic cycle of domination, submission and humiliation churning beneath the town’s placid Protestant surface. Less conceptual and more novelistic in structure than Caché and the Americanized Funny Games remake, this disturbing, challenging and austerely beautiful film (shot in forbidding black-and-white) methodically works its way through a dense, multi-character narrative while refining the director’s trademark concerns about society’s hidden violence and the evils transmitted from parents to children. As usual in Haneke’s films, guilt is a communal rather than individual affliction, human decency a fragile flame flickering in the gale. For these reasons and more, Haneke has always been too bitter a pill for some audiences to swallow, but The White Ribbon reaffirms him as the leading European filmmaker of his generation. It feels like a classic even as you are watching it for the first time, and is one of the films for which the 2009 Cannes Film Festival deserves to be remembered.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Primera parte: 20/05
Bodily fluids, bowel movements and dismembered human remains were the dominant design principles as the official competition of this year’s Cannes Film Festival arrived at the halfway point, having begun with the pansexual love quadrangle of Chinese director Lou Ye’s Spring Fever and reaching something of an Act 1 apotheosis with the premiere of Lars von Trier’s patently silly PMS/PTSD horror show, Antichrist.
Von Trier’s film featured the inimitable one-two punch of Willem Dafoe nearly being castrated by cinder block and co-star Charlotte Gainsbourg masturbating like a bitch in heat in the midst of a disenchanted Pacific Northwest forest. In between, British director Andrea Arnold (Red Road) offered up a tedious slice of public-housing nihilism in Fish Tank, whose dejected teenage heroine pisses on the living-room floor of her deadbeat mother’s no-good married boyfriend (Hunger star Michael Fassbender), shortly before kidnapping and nearly murdering said boyfriend’s young daughter. A heavily symbolic white horse also makes several appearances, unhappily tethered by the side of a highway, although in a Cannes that has sometimes felt like a very special episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, I would like to propose Antichrist’s talking fox — and his less verbose but ever-present traveling companions, the deer and the crow — for special jury recognition.
Even Cannes’ more artistically successful offerings have been anything but lighthearted affairs, beginning with French director Jacques Audiard’s brutally intense and often quite brilliant prison drama, A Prophet, which follows an illiterate French-Arab inmate during his six-year odyssey from new kid on the (cell) block to holy underworld kingpin of the title. Along the way, Malik (impressively played by newcomer Tahar Rahim) learns how to read not only books but people, too, much of that education coming at the hands of a merciless but fair-minded Corsican gang leader (the electrifying Niels Arestrup, who was the father in Audiard’s previous The Beat That My Heart Skipped), until the pupil overtakes the master, playing every one of Paris’ rival gangland factions to his own advantage.
Another rise to political preeminence could be found in the competition’s second early dazzler, Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere, which observes the power plays of Benito Mussolini from the perspective of his first wife, Ida Dalser (the excellent Giovanna Mezzogiorno), and that of their love child, Benito Albino Mussolini. (Mussolini would go on to deny any relationship to either Dalser or his son, with the two spending much of their respective lives tucked away in asylums.) At 69, age has diminished none of Bellocchio’s sting — he opens his film with Mussolini the young socialist denying the existence of God and climaxes two hours later with the 1929 creation of the Papal State, in between revisiting all of his career-spanning concerns about the many faces of fascism and the hypocrisy of Catholic family values. The through line for Bellocchio is cinema itself, from an early scene in which fighting movie patrons become a sort of living newsreel, to the many archival film clips and propaganda slogans ingeniously worked into the body of the film. The history of 20th-century Italy emerges as a kind of grandly cinematic delusion, and Vincere as a timely cautionary tale about despots who fancy themselves media barons — and vice versa.
More superficial in its thrills, Hong Kong action maestro Johnnie To’s Vengeance still manages to bring a surprisingly philosophical dimension to its balletic bloodshed, as a Paris restaurateur (French pop star Johnny Hallyday, in a role originally written for Alain Delon) enlists a trio of Macao hired guns (played by To regulars Anthony Wong, Ka Tung Lam and Suet Lam) to help him avenge the murder of his daughter’s entire family. The catch is that Hallyday, a man with a shadowy past himself (the character’s name, Francis Costello, is a riff on Delon’s Jeff Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s iconic film noir, Le Samouraï), is rapidly losing his memory — the result of a bullet lodged in his skull. And so he must constantly be reminded of why he’s intent on revenge and, ultimately, of the very definition of revenge itself.
A similar spirit of literal-mindedness guides Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, easily the best film in Cannes not screening in the main competition. (Instead, it was inexplicably relegated to a single 11 a.m. screening in the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar.) Set, like Porumboiu’s previous 12:08 East of Bucharest, in the filmmaker’s hometown of Vaslui, Police, Adjective depicts an absurdly protracted sting operation designed to catch a lone high school student in the act of selling marijuana. Cristi, the cop assigned to the case, realizes the futility of his mission, though his attempts to convince his bureaucratic superiors of the same are met with contempt, derision and the reminder that it is not his place to question the letter of the law. But it is nothing less than letters and laws — of both the legal and grammatical variety — that are the keys to Porumboiu’s wonderfully pliable, allegorical theme. For much of the running time, Porumboiu gives us a series of long, nearly wordless scenes of the cop pursuing his suspect, which turn out to be the carefully laid groundwork for a show-stopping final act of Stoppardian verbosity, as the cop and his superior engage in a verbal tennis match about conscience, personal morality and the true meanings of words.
Down the Croisettea few paces, Cannes’ renegade parallel festival, the Directors Fortnight, got off to a strong start in its 41st year with the world premiere of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, another reported competition also-ran that nevertheless finds the Godfather auteur delivering his most ambitious, personal and richly satisfying film in the 20 years since Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Like most of Coppola’s best films, Tetro is another coded autobiography about success and failure, domineering patriarchs and sibling rivalries, here set in contemporary Buenos Aires (although the high-contrast black-and-white images and generally dreamlike mood evoke a timelessness), where a quixotic aspiring writer (Vincent Gallo) who has fled from the family nest is visited by his adoring younger brother (18-year-old newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, with the devil-may-care smirk of the young Leonardo DiCaprio).
Elsewhere at the Fortnight, Portugal’s Pedro Costa unveiled the feature-length version of his performance film Ne Change Rien (an in-progress excerpt screened during Costa’s 2007 Los Angeles retrospective), in which he documents the French actress and singer Jeanne Balibar rehearsing and performing an extensive repertoire that ranges from husky-voiced torch songs to Jacques Offenbach’s La Périchole. The last of those is sung repeatedly by Balibar while taking exacting notes from an offscreen vocal coach, by which point it has become clear that Costa’s very beautiful film is, like his earlier portrait of the filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, a rare chronicle of work and the creative process. Also shooting in lustrous black-and-white, Costa first shows Balibar onstage performing the song “Torture” from her 2003 Paramour album, and he proceeds to film her in a variety of poses and locales as she works out various approaches to a song, always (even in close-up) retaining a respectful distance from his subject, never vulgarizing her in typical music-video fashion.
The wonderfully idiosyncratic South Korean director Hong Sang-soo was in fine form with Like You Know It All, his latest film à clef about the peccadilloes of emotionally immature Korean men and the women they hopelessly lust after. Like many Hong films, this one is set in and around the film industry — specifically, at a film festival where Hong’s onscreen avatar is invited to serve on a jury. Once there, the filmmaker proceeds to miss and/or sleep through most of the screenings, something that happens a good deal more frequently than most festival organizers would care to admit.
Meanwhile, back in Un Certain Regard, another film shed light on a rarely heralded aspect of the movie business — the maverick independent producers who gamble their livelihoods on the uncommercial visions of leading art filmmakers. The film, Mia Hansen-Løve’s The Father of My Children, takes its inspiration from the real case of the late French producer Humbert Balsan, who killed himself in 2005 with his company on the verge of bankruptcy. In sharp relief to Hollywood’s constant supply of mawkish dead child/parent weepies, Hansen-Løve’s film — her second — casts its clear-eyed gaze upon the unpleasant business of lawyers, unpaid debts and everything else that must be reckoned with before anyone has the time to sit around grieving. (As one who has spent much of the past year settling my own father’s untidy estate, I had many moments in which I sensed my life passing before my eyes.) Ultimately, the film renders tribute to Balsan’s artistic vision (which supported films by the likes of Claire Denis, Youssef Chahine and Bela Tarr), to the many others who work for little personal gain to make the movies that broaden our cinematic horizons, and to the festivals, like Cannes, where we line up to see them.
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