The first thing I discover upon arriving at Cannes this year is that I'm still stuck with the same crappy press badge I've been stuck with since I first began attending the festival in 2002.
For what purpose I don't quite know—bloodsport seems the most plausible motive, frankly—Cannes, unlike any other film festival I've ever attended, employs a hierarchical accreditation system, so that the color of your badge (to be worn at all times, though mine stays pocketed whenever possible) broadcasts your status on the journalistic totem pole wherever you go. My badge is blue, just one step above sickly peon yellow; basically what it means is that I have to arrive at least an hour in advance of any screening that might attract a crowd, then stand by, seething, as those with more "weight" saunter in five minutes prior to the starting time and snag the last remaining seats that don't require special permission from the French equivalent of the FAA. Granted, in three years I have yet to miss a movie I wanted to see, but it's the principle that's grating—that plus all the hours in the hot sun, or the drizzling rain, or whatever wacky weather system is currently holding sway on the Riviera. My thanks to Apple for dreaming up the iPod just in time.
Anyway, I'd hoped that this blog might move me up the ladder a rung or two, since the more you file, the more the press office appreciates your presence and wants to make you happy. But maybe they intuited that it would take me two days just to find the time to bang this first post out. Cannes is many festivals in one, showing far more potentially awesome movies than anybody could possibly take in; down time is precious, and usually involves meals gulped rather than eaten. For those unfamiliar with the fest, here's how it breaks down:
COMPETITION
Reserved for the heavyweights, which this year includes new films from the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Atom Egoyan, Michael Haneke, Hong Sang-soo, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, David Cronenberg, and Lars Von Trier, among others. So far it's been a bit of a disappointment, but then the big guns have yet to be fired. The most interesting of the three I've seen is the movie that opened the festival, Dominik Moll's Lemming, a quasi-supernatural thriller in much the same vein as Moll's previous film, With a Friend Like Harry. I'd assumed the title was metaphorical, but in fact the plot involves an honest-to-goodness lemming, found wedged in the plumbing of the film's young model couple (Laurent Lucas and Charlotte Gainsbourg). Which is not to say the poor creature doesn't do double duty as a Symbol, but Moll and his co-writer, Gilles Marchand, are more interested in rupturing their protagonists' fragile happiness via an encounter with an older, bitter married couple, played by Andre Dussollier and Charlotte Rampling. Engrossing throughout, and Moll gets terrific mileage out of Lucas' job as the inventor of a remote-controlled flying webcam, but ultimately there's less here than meets the eye. Still, about 45 minutes into the film I had no idea where it was headed, and after the plodding inevitability of Harry and Marchand's Who Killed Bambi?, that uncertainty was a blessing.
UN CERTAIN REGARD
Festival honcho Thierry Fremaux swears up and down that UCR is not the minor leagues, but everybody knows otherwise; it's mostly populated by directorial debuts (competing for the Camera d'Or, for best first film) and lesser efforts by name auteurs. Efforts don't get a whole lot lesser than Kim Ki-duk's The Bow, inexplicably chosen to kick off this year's edition. Somehow, Kim recently became world cinema's designated punching bag, with various critics and programmers (notably Tony Rayns in a notorious Film Comment broadside) declaring the Korean director to be not merely overrated but (apparently) a threat to everything good and noble about the medium. As a fan of both of Kim's recent U.S. releases, 3-iron (now in theaters) and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, I've viewed these attacks with emotions ranging from amusement to scorn. But even I can't defend The Bow, a 90-minute adaptation of that godforsaken "If you love something, set it free" homily, usually seen only in needlepoint. The formula is familiar—mute characters, sexual obsession, abrupt violence (via arrow this time)—but the director's sentimental streak isn't tempered here by playful wit or wanton cruelty. The story involves an elderly fisherman who found a little girl ten years earlier and has kept her a willing prisoner on his boat, planning to marry her when she turns 17; once you see her look longingly at a plane flying overhead, then bat her eyes at a hunky young dude who rents the use of her captor/benefactor's boat, you can write the rest of the script yourself—and will want to, in a desperate bid to stay awake. Only when the geezer starts crossing multiple days off the calendar at a go, speeding the wedding way along, do we get a brief glimpse of what makes Kim special.
OUT OF COMPETITION
Self-explanatory, really. E-ticket items that were deemed unsuitable for the main event, for whatever reason. The big surprise here so far is Woody Allen's Match Point, easily his best film since [blank], where [blank] depends on who you're asking—I'd go back to 1999's Sweet and Lowdown, but I've heard others cite titles as ancient as Crimes and Misdemeanors, to which Match Point bears a significant family resemblance (Martin Landau half only). Most of Allen's late films have begun with fine ideas but suffered from sloppy or halfhearted execution; here, he's on top of his game throughout—it's invigorating to be reminded of what a superlative storyteller he can be when he puts in a little effort—but in service of ideas that he's already explored in greater depth. As someone who'd more or less given up hope of ever fully enjoying a Woody Allen film again, though, I'm not really of a mind to complain. The London setting seems to have kickstarted him somehow: his dialogue is sharper than it's been in years, his actors (including Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, and Emily Mortimer) less mannered, his plotting superb (one ingenious twist actually provoked a round of spontaneous applause). I'm so impressed, and relieved, that I'll even forego the obligatory tennis simile. This one is worth seeing, and while it doesn't have a U.S. distributor at this writing, that's sure to change in a hurry.
DIRECTOR'S FORTNIGHT
Technically, this is a completely separate festival, similar to Slamdance, that just happens to take place concurrently with the Festival de Cannes, right down the Croisette in the basement of the Noga Hilton hotel. But in fact everybody thinks of it as another Cannes sidebar, and this year the Fortnight and the festival proper are actually co-presenting one film, The Buried Forest, which had been offered a slot in UCR. (Its director, offended despite Fremaux's "not the minor leagues" spiel, said Thanks but no thanks.) The Fortnight opened just a few hours ago, and I bailed on the first film, Eric Khoo's Be With Me, after two reels—long enough to work out the structure (various takes on love—puppy love, unrequited love, enduring love) and to confirm that Khoo had no intention of doing anything very interesting with it. I occasionally catch some flack for walking out of movies (always at the end of the second reel, or about 35-40 minutes in), but the truth is that you can usually tell whether a movie's got it going on within the first few shots. That Match Point was operating on a higher plane than Allen's other recent films, for example, was apparent literally from the very first shot. I'm fairly confident that Be With Me is saccharine, uninspired drivel, but I'll check out the reviews in the trades tomorrow, just to be sure.
CRITICS WEEK Another parallel festival. I don't really know what this is, to be honest; in three years I have yet to see anything they've shown, largely because the theater they use is way the hell somewhere else. This year they've got Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know, which I saw and quite liked at Sundance. But I probably won't mention them again.
THE MARKET The seedy underbelly of Cannes, pimping everything imaginable, from Sundance prizewinners to direct-to-video (if they're lucky) exploitation knockoffs. Hundreds of films are screened daily, all over the city; there are dozens of tiny screening rooms within the Palais (the main festival complex) devoted solely to the Market. And, as is often the case, it's coughed up the best film I've seen so far: Tsai Ming-liang's unbelievably audacious The Wayward Cloud, a sort-of sequel to 2001's What Time Is It There?. Critics who saw this sucker at Berlin were flummoxed, and now I see why: While it's familiar in many respects—bearing as much resemblance to Tsai's The Hole as to its ostensible forebear, with lip-synched musical numbers erupting every few minutes and Taipei plagued by a mysterious drought—it's also Tsai's bleakest and most despairing film to date, with a mindblower of an ending that sends you staggering into the sunlight. If I see even two or three movies in Competition as bold and intense as this one, I'll be ecstatic. It's precisely the sort of movie Cannes ought to be about.
CINEFONDATION/SHORT FILMS
Who cares about these, except for one thing: This section has its own separate jury, and on that jury this year is the French actress Sylvie Testud, who just happens to be my all-time #1 movie-star crush. I can't explain this to you; you're just going to have to accept it. Seven years ago I was watching this well-intentioned and eventually Oscar-nominated movie called Beyond Silence, about a girl with deaf parents who wants to be a musician, and halfway through the movie the narrative jumped forward a bunch of years, and the little girl playing the lead role was suddenly replaced by Ms. Testud, and I believe 15 minutes later I may have finally remembered to breathe again. I don't know what it is about her, really—she's immensely talented (last year's deserving winner of the César for Best Actress, for a film called Fear and Trembling, throughout most of which she speaks what sounds like flawless phonetic Japanese), and to my taste incredibly beautiful (though the French call her type "jolie-laid," or "pretty-ugly"), but there are plenty of other talented, beautiful women onscreen, and they don't have the power to dissolve me into a puddle of goo. In any case, just knowing that she and I are occupying the same buildings for the next couple of weeks is enough to keep me constantly a-quiver. No sign of her yet, but if she doesn't turn up within the next couple of days, I reserve the right to engage in a little low-key stalking. Maybe I'll even endure some of the shorts.
Like most institutions dedicated primarily to high art, Cannes occasionally likes to demonstrate that its egghead priorities don't preclude indulging in a little good old-fashioned entertainment. Both of today's Competition entries are straightforward genre efforts—unfortunately, with more emphasis on "old-fashioned" than on "good."
I bow to nobody in my admiration of Canadian director Atom Egoyan, whose 1994 film Exotica I'd include on my personal list of the 10 or 20 greatest movies ever made. But he's been in a bit of a slump since The Sweet Hereafter, and Where the Truth Lies, adapted from a novel by Rupert Holmes—yes, the dude who sang "Escape (The Pina Colada Song")—isn't the comeback I'd been hoping for. Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth are in top form as a Martin & Lewis-esque comedy duo who split up after a young woman is found dead in their hotel suite; Alison Lohman is still a bit ingenue-perky as a reporter investigating the murder some 15 years later. But the material is airport/beach schlock, and no amount of aesthetic dexterity on Egoyan's part can disguise the fact. It didn't help that I guessed the titular Truth early on—not the whodunnit aspect, but what tediously fashionable secret the girl was killed to protect. But the real problem is simply that the film is all convoluted plot and kinky divertissements, absent the emotional undercurrent of Egoyan's great films from the '80s and '90s. It's beneath him.
Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To, on the other hand, has never impressed me much, and his latest, Election, boasts all the excitement of a city council runoff. Internecine squabbling amongst a Triad leads to prolonged civil war, with defeated kingpin Big D (Tony Leung Ka Fai) vowing to unthrone hated rival Lok (Simon Yam). Just about all To is good for are elaborate action set pieces, but Election doesn't even offer that fleeting pleasure—it's just a protracted, monotonous essay on the lust for power. What either of these films is doing in Competition, other than making the festival's selection committee look moderately hip, I have no idea.
There's a certain anxiety to being among the first people in the world to see these films—you can hear a telltale "I'm not crazy, am I?" undertone in critics' voices as they conduct exit polls with colleagues about the day's movies. As I was typing this entry, Nathan Lee of the New York Sun wandered over to say hello, except we never even got to "hello."
Lee: Hey.
Me: Hey, how's it going?
Lee: Blogging up a storm?
Me: [gestures at computer screen]
Lee: Was the Egoyan atrocious or what the fuck?
Me (incredibly relieved): Oh my god.
And so forth. The thing is, I didn't even think Where the Truth Lies was all that terrible—it held my attention, and that in itself is an achievement in a festival context, when you're seeing four or five movies a day on four or five hours of sleep a night. But I hadn't actually had a chance to talk to anybody about the film yet, and the trade reviews won't be published until tomorrow, so I was just grateful that he didn't declare it a masterpiece and rattle off the names of half a dozen key tastemakers who feel likewise. (This sometimes happens; it's a queasy feeling, no matter how secure you are in your own judgment. And sometimes it works the other way—three years ago I told A.O. Scott of the New York Times that my favorite film at that year's fest was Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, and I'll never forget the aghast look on his face: "Oh don't say that.")
Still no sign of my beloved Sylvie. I did see juror Salma Hayek climbing the steps to the Debussy Theatre on the way into Election, looking very glam indeed, but she's a poor substitute at best.
Also, Nerve gave me a digital camera that I really need to figure out how to use pretty soon. Especially since the security monkeys keep finding it with their Wands of Doom and forcing me to check it.
Not a lot of time tonight, I'm afraid. The press office closes in an hour, and I only just got out of Marco Tullio Giordana's painfully didactic refugee drama, which feels nearly as long as its Italian title (rough translation: Once You're Born You Can No Longer Hide). Remember that annoying Genesis single that repeatedly chirped, "It's no fun/Being an illegal alien"? Same message, only three minutes long! By way of attenuation, Giordana tosses in a brief sequel to Open Water (minus the sharks, alas); he also borrows one of Michael Nyman's poignant cues from The Piano for a near-drowning sequence, apparently hoping its Palme d'Or magic will rub off.
Thankfully, today's offering included one film that richly deserved its Competition slot: Michael Haneke's harrowing Hidden, starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche as a married couple whose lives are turned upside down when they begin receiving placidly threatening videocassette footage of their home, accompanied by cryptic sketches in a child's hand. Haneke, whose previous films include such masterworks of sustained tension as Funny Games and Code Unknown, pulls off a truly remarkable formal coup in this film, transforming cinema's most mundane trope—the simple establishing shot—into a harbinger of terror. (The film also includes an act of violence so sudden and gruesome that the audience audibly recoiled as one.) Open-ended to the point of being maddening, Hidden concludes with a shot that's at once baffling and richly suggestive; I have yet to hear two identical theories about what it's supposed to mean. The film itself, I fear, is ultimately intended as a rather heavy-handed political allegory, but I can't say more without ruining what ought to be a nervewracking journey. In any case, it's the first Competition film this year that's remotely challenging, and for that alone I'm exceedingly grateful.
Even better, albeit far more conventional, is Down in the Valley, playing in Un Certain Regard, with the ever-reliable (both as an actor and as a judge of material) Edward Norton in the role of...well, this is another movie you're better off not knowing too much about in advance. Let's just say he fancies himself an urban cowboy and leave it at that. If you're a connoisseur of American screen acting, you wouldn't dream of missing a film featuring Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, Rory Culkin and Bruce Dern under any circumstances. But the writing and direction here are strong enough to make me sorry that I missed David Jacobson's previous film, Dahmer, an apparent exploitation flick that got strong reviews from a small handful of respectable sources a couple years ago.
Tomorrow I get to sleep in for a change, since the 8:30am screening* is the new Star Wars movie, which it would be a bit hypocritical of me to see given that I wrote a long Esquire column urging the American populace not to see it. Unfortunately, my assumption that it would be as dire as its two predecessors appears to have been mistaken. But I'd still rather get a decent night's rest for once. I suspect it'll still be playing when I get back to the States.
I have now taken three digital photos: one of my bed (to provide a sense of the glamorous life we journalists lead here), one of the queue outside the Debussy Theater (likewise), and one of Sideways director Alexander Payne standing on the sidewalk in a tux (because, hey, it's Alexander Payne standing on the sidewalk in a tux). And as soon as I figure out how to upload the "drivers" (or whatever the hell), I'll share them with you. Maybe tomorrow, after the new Cronenberg. If I can still think straight.
* This is unconscionable, incidentally. Nobody becomes a professional writer unless it's vitally important to them to be able to sleep past noon every day of the year. Movies should not be projected until McDonald's starts serving fries. Thank you.
Press screenings in New York City always conclude in stony silence, no matter what effect the film may have had. Different story at Cannes. When the audience loves a film, they'll applaud and cheer throughout the entire closing credits sequence. When they hate it, you can barely hear the exit music over the chorus of "Boo!"s. (Yes, they actually yell the word "Boo!") I hadn't heard more than a few scattered boos until today, but both of today's Competition screenings raised serious hackles. I hated one of them myself, but was content just to sit there quietly waiting for the bile to dissipate. The other, which prompted everything from applause to boos to derisive laughter, threw me for such a loop that I still don't really know which side I agree with.
Carlos Reygadas' Battle in Heaven opens and closes with an unsimulated blowjob, so expect plenty of comparisons to 2003's designated disaster, The Brown Bunny, especially from detractors. In fact, Vincent Gallo's forthright sincerity is the exact opposite of Reygadas' grandiose pretensions. I was no fan of Reygadas' feature debut, Japón, but friends of mine who admired it claimed that I'd missed the point, that what I'd taken for a overwrought drama was in fact a wry comedy. I didn't buy this argument at the time, and I'm even more skeptical after suffering through the suffocating self-importance of Battle in Heaven, which extends all the way to that godawful title. Still, the film features all the elements likely to endear it to a certain kind of cinephile. Physically repulsive actors engaging in strenuously unerotic sex? Check. Long takes in which the camera self-consciously retreats from its ostensible subject to take in a panoramic view of the surrounding world? But of course. Pointless, climactic act of sudden violence? Hey, it wouldn't be a pretentious art film without one. I dunno, I guess I'm just not the target audience for this kind of thing—seems to me that Reygadas cares less about making a connection with the (admittedly hypothetical) viewer than about creating/maintaining a certain kind of aesthetic self-image.
On the flip side, I have absolutely no idea what David Cronenberg's intentions are with his new film, A History of Violence. Tonally, this is one of the strangest movies I've seen in a long while; for a long time I wasn't sure whether I was looking at a po-faced parody or merely garden-variety ineptitude, and half an hour after the film ended I'm still struggling with various (and dubious) rationalizations. Adapted from a graphic novel, it stars Viggo Mortensen as a small-town family man whose life radically changes after he kills a couple of psychopaths who invade his coffee shop; as an essay on American atavism—the frontier ruthlessness lurking beneath our veneer of civility—it's smart, pointed and thought-provoking. But right from the opening scene, things feel...off—and not off in a deliberately heightened, Lynchian kind of way. More like an unintentionally clumsy, Ed Wood kind of way. Given the direction the film ultimately takes (which I shouldn't reveal), a lot of this phoniness can be retroactively justified. But some of it just seems like bad filmmaking. At tonight's press screening, there was so much giggling going on during ostensibly serious moments that somebody eventually felt compelled to upbraid the audience at the top of his voice. I wasn't among the titterers, but I must confess that I was flummoxed pretty much from start to finish—never less than thoroughly engaged, but unsure of what was being asked of me, in terms of an emotional investment. If that makes any sense. It's an exceedingly odd film, and one I probably need to see again before I can feel very confident about my opinion.
SYLVIE TESTUD UPDATE: You know, I don't even think she's here yet. Now that I look, all of the screenings for the section she's judging are late next week. Why would she be in Cannes now? Still, if I keep mentioning her name in this blog, maybe word of my ardor will reach her in advance, and she'll come looking for me. Also, maybe I'll grow four inches and lose 20 pounds by tomorrow morning.
For some reason, the festival has Darth Vader's labored breathing running on a continuous loop somewhere within earshot of the press office—wouldn't surprise me if it were out on the Croisette. HUHHH...HUHHH. HUHHH...HUHHH. HUHHH...HUHHH. SHUUUT...UUUUP.
Sometime in the mid-to-late '80s, back when Peter Gabriel was still considered cool, a friend of a friend went to see him in concert and unexpectedly found himself face to sweaty face with his idol when Gabriel crowd-surfed his way over. For just a few seconds, their eyes met, and all this awestruck fan could think of to say, by way of expressing gratitude, appreciation and all-around genuflection, was as follows: "Dude! Dude, you're hot!"
That phrase has haunted me for years. "Dude! Dude, you're hot!" It's part of the reason I refused to conduct celebrity interviews when I worked at Time Out New York, and it's also part of the reason I passed on an opportunity to meet Sylvie Testud this morning. She was doing some kind of script reading at the Hotel Majestic, to which I was formally invited, and while I would have been about 20 minutes late getting there from the Broken Flowers press screening, I doubt that would have been a problem. But I laid awake for half an hour last night trying to think of something to say to her that wouldn't be embarrassing, offensive, or just completely moronic, and came up empty. Maybe if I didn't know that she'd given birth to her first child just a couple of months ago. Or maybe if one of my ex-girlfriends hadn't exhibited starfucking tendencies, and if I hadn't found them kind of creepy and sad. If I knew for sure which screenings Sylvie will be at, I'd happily go and indulge in some high-octane in-person ogling. But I don't, and so I may choose to let her remain a fantasy figure, merely hypothetical. She's probably more enticing that way.
Speaking of fortuitous segues...
Trilogies invariably sound intriguing in theory, but they rarely work very well in practice. Lars von Trier's Dogville is my favorite film of roughly the last five years, and so I had ridiculously high hopes for the sequel, Manderlay, in which Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) happens upon an Alabama plantation and is horrified to discover that the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has yet to be enforced within its walls. Alas, it suffers from massive deficiencies in both form and content. Dogville's neo-Brechtian use of a massive bare soundstage, augmented with chalk outlines and a few simple props, served a crucial purpose, underlining the tale's allegorical nature; here, employed again, it's merely a distracting gimmick, since whatever the allegorical potential of slavery (and it's pretty easy to read Manderlay as an anti-Shrub screed), it's not a subject that's very well suited to abstraction. And Von Trier's ideas regarding slavery and cultural imperialism are really pretty dumb, especially when it comes to Grace's shameful lust for the haughtiest and hunkiest of her new black friends (Isaach de Bankolé). Worst of all, the film is dull—40 minutes shorter than Dogville, it feels a good hour longer. A few days ago, Von Trier announced that he plans to shoot an unrelated Dogme 95 flick before proceeding to the projected third installment, Wasington (sic); frankly, I now rather hope that he forgets all about it in the interim.
Also disappointing, albeit less so, is the latest from Jim Jarmusch, entitled Broken Flowers. (I have the feeling somebody in marketing talked him out of Dead Flowers.) This film, I fear, demonstrates the hazard of repeatedly telling Bill Murray that he's a Serious Actor; as an emotionally distant former Don Juan who sets out on a road trip to visit various old flames (he's received an anonymous letter telling him that he fathered a child 20 years previously), he goes way past somber, within snoring distance of somnabulance. This forces Jeffrey Wright, as his enthusiastic amateur-sleuth neighbor, to ham it up a bit by way of compensation, though the pair have a number of priceless moments, including the funniest cell-phone conversation since David Lynch's Lost Highway. By Jarmusch's standards, though, Broken Flowers is almost alarmingly cozy, with uncharacteristic emotional and narrative signposting—a cynic might wonder whether he decided he might like some of the mainstream attention Sofia Coppola managed with Lost in Translation. It's amiable, but harmless.
Does this curmudgeon like anything at all, you may reasonably be wondering? Thankfully, yes: He's pretty wild about The Child, from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who won the Palme d'Or here six years ago for Rosetta. If you've seen the Dardennes' previous films, which also include La Promesse and The Son, you know what to expect from this one: relentless naturalism, urgent handheld camerawork, moral equivocation, simple yet ferocious performances, Olivier Gourmet (in a tiny role this time). Jérémie Renier, who played the lead role in La Promesse, returns, older and harder-looking, as a petty thief whose girlfriend has just given birth to their infant son. Without getting into detail, it quickly becomes apparent that this ruthlessly pragmatic boy isn't quite ready for the responsibilities of fatherhood. (It's an open question to whom the film's title refers.) After a couple of sharply observational reels, the Dardennes abruptly kick the movie into high gear, at which point breathing becomes a luxury. I'd tell you the plot except that it changes about every five minutes, along with our perception of the protagonist. I'm not crazy about the last few minutes, which seem insufficient in the context of the emotional rollercoaster we've just disembarked from. Still, this is the best film to screen in the Competition thus far, and another ace effort from Jean-Pierre & Luc. Dudes! Dudes, you're hot!
Still getting the hang of this blogging thing, it seems. Yesterday's entry, which included a fleeting and not very complimentary reference to an ex-girlfriend, prompted an angry and wounded e-mail from the lady in question, with whom I'd only recently negotiated a tentative rapprochement some four years after a rather ugly falling out. To be honest, I'm not sure why she was so offended—I didn't use her name, nor did I say anything about her that I didn't tell her to her face the last time I saw her. (I was probably a tad more diplomatic in person, but I know for sure that the word "creepy" was invoked.) But I did hesitate a moment before including it, and I now regret that pretensions of "journalistic integrity" allowed me to rationalize writing a frivolous remark that I knew might cause pain to someone I care about. How the various personal bloggers on this site avoid crippling each and every one of their personal relationships, I have no idea. In any case, whatever her romantic failings in my own mind, this woman is one of the kindest and most generous people I've ever been privileged to know, and I'd like to tell her publicly that I'm sorry.
But enough of my personal bullshit. On to the personal bullshit of the French bourgeoisie, represented at Cannes this year by To Paint or Make Love, courtesy of world cinema's umpteenth set of filmmaking brothers, Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu. Early word seems to be mostly negative, but I rather enjoyed it—partly due to its superb quartet of actors (Sabine Azema, Daniel Auteuil, Amira Casar, and Sergi Lopez), but mostly because of its oddly matter-of-fact tone, which dilutes potentially salacious material via mundane domesticity—it's like an episode of Red Shoe Diaries as conceived by Louis Malle or Eric Rohmer. An American movie about a middle-aged couple who discover a latent appetite for swinging would almost certainly wind up looking ludicrous, given our country's bizarre mix of prurience and puritanism; here, nobody so much as flinches. Indeed, it's possible that this movie could only have been made in France. By Competition standards, it's admittedly a bit lightweight, but it made for a nice break from all the angst.
I'll tell you what nobody likes, regardless of national origin: Opera. Well, not nobody, obviously. Somebody helps various governments subsidize those productions of La Traviata. But it's a taste relatively few have acquired, as the flood of people (including yours truly) fleeing the Debussy Theatre midway through Johanna attests. Produced by noted Hungarian director Béla Tarr and directed by Kornél Mundruczó, the film tranposes the Joan of Arc story to a dingy subterranean hospital, with doctors and patients alike trilling their hearts out. Visually, it looks spectacular (albeit in a grotesque, jaundiced sort of way), and the notion of Joan as a nurse who heals the sick by humping them has twisted promise. But it's an opera, and there's just no sitting through opera if you can't stomach the medium's grandiose emotions and endless vowels. After 40 minutes spent waiting patiently for Bugs Bunny to show up dressed as a Valkyrie, I bolted.
I can't recall offhand whether it's Richard Dawkins (in The Blind Watchmaker) or Daniel Dennett (in Darwin's Dangerous Idea) who speaks of a phenomenon that one might call the ecology of selfishness. Trees in a forest, you may have noticed, tend to be rather tall. This is because trees need sunlight to remain healthy and bountiful and sap-yielding and whatever else it is that trees aspire, in their dormant way, to be. Of course, all that really matters is that a given tree is the same relative height as all the other trees around it, those competing for the same life-giving rays. If the trees were all two feet tall, that would be fine. Trouble is, as soon as one tree grows to be three feet tall, it casts a shadow on nearby trees, "forcing" (in evolutionary terms—too dicey to get into here) its neighbors to grow an additional foot as well. And so a sort of biological arms race begins, with all the trees squandering valuable resources to ensure that they don't wind up dwarfed by other trees, and eventually Scotty and Madeleine have something grand and imposing to wander around in midway through Vertigo. How the above relates to the queue for those of us stuck with blue press badges, which this year began forming earlier and earlier each day, eventually some 90 minutes before the film's scheduled start time, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
******
Technically, the Festival de Cannes continues through Sunday— or at least through the awards ceremony on Saturday evening (local time), which I believe gets a live simulcast on the Independent Film Channel. For the press, however, the excitement effectively concluded this morning, when we were shown the last of the Competition titles, Hou Hsiao-hsien's initially bewitching but ultimately enervating triptych, Three Times. There are still a handful of smaller movies I hope to catch over the next few days—most notably Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon, starring Zhang Ziyi—but the big guns have all been fired. And while Roger Ebert and a few others are wildly enthusiastic about what they've seen, my own feeling, shared by most of the colleagues with whom I've spoken, is that the 2005 edition will be filed in the archives under "solid." Meaning there were plenty of films in the range encompassing "pretty good" to "quite good," but few, if any, that people are likely to still be talking about ten years from now. Most people seem to like the Jarmusch movie more than I did, for example, but I guarantee that the cinephiles of 2015 will regard it with roughly the same degree of interest and passion that we feel for Night on Earth today. It's no Dead Man. And I don't even like Dead Man that much.
Still, they have to award the prizes to something. If it were strictly up to me, here's how I'd vote.
Palme d'Or: Frank Miller's Sin City
Ironically, my favorite film in Competition this year turned out to be the one that had already been commercially released in the U.S. I've never been much of a fan of Robert Rodriguez, who's always struck me as blessed with far more gumption than talent, and I actively resisted seeing Sin City, which looked from a distance like the kind of fanboy wankfest I generally can't abide. But the film's stark, shimmering look grabbed me instantly, and the third of the film adapted from Miller's The Hard Goodbye, with a prosthetically-enhanced Mickey Rourke as the murderous lug Marv, is simply the most giddily astonishing stretch of cinema I've seen so far this year. (I'm less keen on the logy middle section, with Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro.) For sheer formal bravado, nothing else in Competition could match it.
Will probably win: Michael Haneke's Hidden, which was picked up for U.S release yesterday by Sony Pictures Classics.
Grand Prix: The Child
Despite its apparently superlative moniker, this is the festival's equivalent of second prize. I wrote about the Dardennes' naturalistic knucklebiter a few days ago, and don't have much to add—this is observational drama at its most urgent, uncompromising and humane. A few critics have semi-dismissed it on the grounds that it's too similar to the directors' previous films, which is like sending back a delicious steak because it tastes like it came from the same cow as the last delicious steak you ate. Shut up and savor it, you dolt.
Will probably win: Actually, The Child has a decent shot at the Grand Prix. Otherwise, I'd guess it'll go to either Cronenberg's A History of Violence or Jarmusch's Broken Flowers. Maybe Battle in Heaven if the jury's in a particularly perverse mood during deliberations.
Best Actress: Sylvie Testud
Oh, wait, she wasn't in anything this year. Drat. If I were judging strictly from the magnificent first third of Three Times, I'd be inclined to go with Shu Qi; unfortunately, the rest of the film gives her nothing to do but pose and pout. Otherwise, strong female performances were distressingly thin on the ground. I guess I'll go with Hanna Laslo, who provides most of the energy in Amos Gitai's didactic Israeli-Jordanian travelogue, Free Zone. (Natalie Portman is also quite good in the film—let nobody say she can't summon copious tears on command—but her character recedes too quickly to make a lasting impression.)
Will probably win: Fusako Urabe, Bashing. Everybody agrees that the film, which dispassionately depicts the abuse heaped on a young Japanese woman who volunteered in Iraq and was taken hostage, fails to contextualize the country's bewildering (to the rest of the world) ire. I found Urabe's performance equally one-note, but it was the one element of the movie that most critics chose not to bash.
Best Actor: Viggo Mortensen, A History of Violence
While I still have various equivocations about this film (see my previous entry), they don't extend to Mortensen's creepily opaque depiction of an upstanding family man who finds himself wrestling with his inner Marv (see Sin City). Mortensen's deliberate lack of affect makes the film's early scenes strangely jarring; it's only near the end that you recognize that he's managed a tour de force almost as impressive as the one Cronenberg coaxed from Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers. Man, do I need to see this film again. Maybe on Sunday, when they repeat the Official Selection.
Will probably win: Mortensen. He damn well better.
Best Director: Michael Haneke, Hidden
Bear in mind that I'm following the traditional Cannes practice of deliberately spreading the major awards around among several different films. (Here, unlike in the Oscars, the prizes for Picture and Director virtually never coincide.) Many consider Haneke the best pure filmmaker currently working, and Hidden certainly offers no evidence to the contrary. I don't know that there's another director alive who could invest a simple, medium shot of an apartment building with such foreboding.
Will probably win: Since I'm guessing that Hidden will get the enchilada grande, I suspect the Dardennes or Cronenberg will win this prize—whichever one doesn't get the Grand Prix.
Best Screenplay: Hong Sangsoo, Tale of Cinema
This is the first opportunity I've had to talk about Hong's new film, which had just one screening late yesterday afternoon. (Most films are screened several times; Tale of Cinema, however, was added over a week after the lineup was first announced.) Like most of Hong's films, it's structured in two discrete parts, with the connection between the two emerging only gradually. True to its title, it's a study in the way we construct narratives from our own lives, as well as the influence movies have on our behavior—but most of this is apparent only in retrospect. More interesting to think about afterwards than to watch, it's not the breakthrough that some had hoped for from this director—arguably the greatest filmmaker who's never had his work distributed in the U.S. (though his previous film, the comparatively weak Woman Is the Future of Man, is apparently coming out later this year). But it's an intelligent, provocative and rather unsettling work all the same.
Will probably win: Jarmusch. Actually, forget what I said above about Broken Flowers as a possible Grand Prix contender. This is the obvious award for that film.
Jury Prize(s): Beats me This is sort of a catch-all category for anything else the jury feels like recognizing—last year they gave one to the best film in Competition, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady (somehow deemed inferior to Fahrenheit 9/11—remember that?), and another to Irma P. Hall for her boisterous performance in The Ladykillers. I wouldn't be surprised if Carlos Reygadas received some special Achievement in Masturbatory Pretension citation hereabouts. Otherwise, nary a clue.
Nobody wants to hear film critics bitch about how wiped out they feel at the end of a festival. Nor should they—however grueling the experience (and trust me, it's not easy maintaining your concentration during four movies a day for two weeks straight), it definitely beats the hell out of actually working. So apart from that parenthetical dash of self-pity, I'll spare you the spiel. Just understand that there's a reason this final entry is so much shorter and more declarative than all the others.
In an unexpected spasm of good taste, the jury, led this year by director Emir Kusturica (Underground), awarded the Palme d'Or to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Child, the best Competition film I saw here this year. Despite the movie's obvious excellence, this result came as something of a shock, since the Dardennes won the grand prize just six years and two films ago for Rosetta. Here in the press office, from which I watched the ceremony on television (my other option was to sit in the huge Debussy Theatre and watch it televised on that screen), the announcement was met with considerable applause. If nothing else, this greatly increases the likelihood that The Child will eventually turn up at a theater reasonably near you.
With a couple of notable exceptions, the other awards went more or less as expected. Jim Jarmusch's well-liked Broken Flowers got the Grand Jury Prize (second place), while the other consensus favorite, Michael Haneke's Hidden, had to settle for Best Director (and a juicy distribution deal). A smaller Jury Prize, which I tend to think of as Honorable Mention, went to the earnest but rather tepid period Chinese melodrama Shanghai Dreams, which had been completely buzz-free. The jury agreed with me about Hanna Laslo's fine work in Free Zone, but also took a left-field liking to Tommy Lee Jones' weirdly sadistic The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, citing Jones himself as Best Actor, in honor of his numerous variations on "ornery," and giving the Screenplay award to Guillermo Arriaga, who indulges the same arbitrary achronology that sunk his script for 21 Grams. And Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know) added the Camera d'Or (best first film) to the mountain of accolades she's received since premiering her movie at Sundance.
Me, I saw a number of good movies (though no great ones—at least on first viewing); hung out with colleagues I see only three times a year; developed an addiction to the croque monsieur that I suspect I'll find difficult to satisfy at home; bought an electrical adaptor at FNAC that appears to have been deliberately constructed so as to frustrate iPod users; permanently alienated an ex-girlfriend for what I believe is the third and most likely final time; and abjectly failed, mostly from lack of (ahem) Nerve, to catch so much as a fleeting glimpse of Ms. Sylvie Testud.
Which just gives me one more reason to come back next year.