An American in Cannes

Day 9: Synecdoche, New York

2008-05-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

[A much shorter version of this should soon appear at The House Next Door. This is the expanded version I wrote for my class here in Cannes. It may be a little muddled, but I think it better gets at what makes the film at once so challenging and so rewarding.]

A struggling puppeteer finds a portal in an office building that leads into the mind of actor John Malkovich. A screenwriter is hired to adapt a non-fiction book but suffers crippling writer’s block and decides to write a movie about himself attempting to adapt the book but instead writing a movie about himself. Two ex-lovers experiment with a scientific process to erase their memories of each other. Such are the concepts behind the strange and brilliant cinema of Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Yet no matter how extreme these ideas are, no matter how inventive and ambitious, they have now, against all odds, been topped.

It doesn’t matter what you’ve read or heard about Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s directorial debut, because nothing could possibly prepare you for the experience of actually sitting through the film. It is easily Kaufman’s most ambitious project, which also means that it is one of the most ambitious films I’ve ever seen. The role of the artist in society; coming to terms with death, God and fate; and the importance of escaping from the trap of solipsism in order to connect with others are among the most prominent themes, but they are far from the only ones. The sheer depth and complexity of the ideas Kaufman is out to explore here is mind-boggling.

Obviously, Synecdoche, New York is not an easy film, or a clean one. The first twenty minutes or so are relatively straightforward, as they detail the day-to-day lives of a theatre director named Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a performance of incredible range and emotion) and his wife Adele living in Schenectady, New York. When Caden’s health begins to deteriorate in strange and grotesque ways, Adele (Catherine Keener) takes his daughter to Berlin for a week-long trip. They never come home, and as the film becomes increasingly focused on Caden’s mental state, things like temporal and narrative cohesion start to fall to the wayside.

It quickly becomes clear that everything that happens in Synecdoche, New York must be seen as filtered through Caden’s psyche. When Adele leaves, he makes an abortive attempt at a relationship with Hazel (Samantha Morton), the box-office worker at his theater, before marrying Lucy (Michelle Williams), the lead actress from his Death of a Salesman production. He then receives a MacArthur genius grant and sets out to create the most “true” theatre piece of all time. He commissions the construction of a model of Schenectady in a huge warehouse and hires actors to portray the everyday activities of the city’s inhabitants.

The idea is to reproduce real life as theatre, but Caden’s life soon begins to invade the production. Actors are hired to play Hazel, Lucy, and even Caden himself. Events that occur in the real world, such as Lucy leaving Caden or two of the actors falling in love, are recreated for the play. For Caden, the play is less an artistic statement and more an opportunity for him to escape from the real world into his own mind. The play allows Caden to infinitely repeat the events of his life, in an attempt to analyze where he may have gone wrong. Furthermore, it seems that Caden hopes that, by receding into himself, he may be able to avoid death.

Death is a prominent issue in Synecdoche, New York from the very beginning. The opening credit sequence plays over a song sung by a young girl about how she will “live and die in Schenectady” (the song is repeated over the end credits, only this time sung by an adult, emphasizing the cycles of life at play throughout the film). The play Caden is directing as the film begins is a restaging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman with the two leads played by young actors. “The tragedy,” Caden says to his lead actor, “is that you, as a young actor, think you can escape your character’s death. But the audience knows you cannot.” Signals of Caden’s fear of his own mortality begin to appear everywhere; his various illnesses seem to be manifestations of this fear more than actual infirmities (they disappear and change from scene to scene and never have any impact on Caden beyond the mental). An animated program Caden’s daughter watches begins playing songs about viruses and mad cow disease, and on several occasions an animated facsimile of Caden appears on the program.

As the film continues, all sense of structured time begins to fall apart. Years pass over the course of several scenes. Caden begins the film in middle-age and ends it an old man. And all the while, his play grows more and more circular and self-consuming. The execution of the play itself becomes part of the play. Actors are hired to play other actors. They quit the play and they die, and all the while Caden stands behind the scenes as a self-absorbed God, too consumed by his product to realize that he has lost all connection with the outside world.

In this sense, Synecdoche, New York functions as an examination of the artist’s role in society. Although this is his first film as director, Kaufman has long been treated by the film community as an auteur. Films like Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are referred to as “Charlie Kaufman films” rather than as the property of their directors. This is a testament to Kaufman’s wholly unique sensibility, but it also explains how Caden can be seen as a representation of Kaufman the artist, and how Synecdoche, New York can be seen as Kaufman dealing with his own doubts about his job. It took eight films before Frederico Fellini examined himself as auteur with 8 ½; Bob Fosse only took two before All That Jazz. Kaufman has done it his first time at bat.

For this reason, Synecdoche, New York can be a self-involved film, but it also an intensely self-critical one. Caden, although our only point of entry into the film, is frequently a tragic and pathetic character. On several occasions, Kaufman has characters call Caden out on his solipsism, most importantly the actor Caden hires to play himself. A scene where a funeral is recreated for the play features an impassioned plea from a priest to pay attention to the stories every person has to tell. At these moments, the sincerity and broad humanism of Kaufman’s vision is almost unbearably moving. They have an effect on Caden, as well. Eventually, he hands off his role as director to another actor and takes on the role of an elderly female maid. He lives awhile as this woman, seeing her fears, doubts and regrets—her story—and in this knowledge at last finds happiness and transcendence.

In its narrative structure, based as it is around repetition, dream logic, circularity, questions of identity and the importance of art, Synecdoche, New York at times recalls David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Like Lynch’s brilliant fever-dream, Kaufman’s film seems destined for heavily mixed responses. Many will hate it. Those who love it will do so fully, passionately. Several days ago, I myself was unsure of my own reaction to the film, except to say that, out of all the films I saw at the Cannes Film Festival, none felt this immediate, this involved in exploring all the complexities of life, this, for lack of a better word, important. I now feel comfortable proclaiming it a work of messy genius and of great artistic scope. It is much too complex a film to fully grasp after a single viewing, but right now, with the hustle and bustle of the festival behind me, I think it’s some sort of masterpiece.

Days 7 & 8

2008-05-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

Changeling (Clint Eastwood)
Few things over the past week have been more baffling to me than when the solid but deeply flawed Changeling began racking up the most positive reviews of the fest. I’m not sure whether it’s the international press’ tendency to praise Eastwood for anything he does, or whether I was simply too exhausted to recognize that it is, in fact, a near-masterpiece, but there has yet to be another film on which my opinion and the reviews have differed so strongly.

In the first line of his Variety review, Todd McCarthy favorably compares the film to the overwrought Mystic River, which might, despite my inability to see what the hell thematic similarities the films have, help to explain my reservations. Because despite his typically graceful and lovely directorial hand, Eastwood seems, with Changeling, to have embraced his melodramatic side whole-heartedly. Some of the film is beautiful and moving. The rest tends toward the unbelievable and shrill.

The reason for this may be that Changeling is one of Eastwood’s angriest films. The target here is institutional corruption, embodied by the Los Angeles Police Department. Based on actual events, Changeling recounts the story of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a 1920s housewife whose child, Walter, is abducted from their home while Collins is at work. After a five-month search, the L.A.P.D. return a child to Collins who they claim to be Walter. Problem is, the child is clearly not her son, and when she complains, the cops send her to an insane asylum in order to get rid of her.

Eastwood is a masterful director, but he loses control of his picture’s tone. For about an hour, he seems to be in top form, but Changeling goes off the rails once Collins is committed. The scenes in the asylum are straight out of a bad horror movie or Girl, Interrupted. Once Collins is released, the film turns into, alternately, a crime procedural and a courtroom drama. Eastwood has proven his adeptness at genre deconstruction before in his anti-western masterpiece Unforgiven, so it is possible that he is executing a similar experiment with melodrama in Changeling. But his overwrought excesses don’t cohere into anything like satire or analysis; they seem instead like the work of a man too passionate about his material to realize that so much of it feels so very false.

***

Delta (Kornel Mundruczo)
I hit a festival wall during the screening of Delta, a Hungarian drama about two long-separated siblings who start an incestuous relationship, dozing off repeatedly throughout its running time. I was awake for enough to get the gist of the narrative trajectory and themes, but certainly not enough to write any sort of real review. So I’ll just say that it’s lovely but very, very slow, and that the relationship between the brother and sister, which draws the ire of their fellow townspeople, seems to function as some sort of allegory for the downtroddens' resentment of the wealthy. Make of that what you will.

***

La Mujer sin Cabeza (Lucrecia Martel)
The spare, emotionally distant style that defined Martel’s previous films is stretched to the breaking point in La Mujer sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman), which is visually striking but almost entirely unaffecting. Martel’s presentation of her story, about a woman who seems to suffer from some sort of amnesia after striking something or someone in her car, is so bare-bones that the audience is left with hardly any idea what the protagonist’s relationship to the other characters is.

Martel’s rigorous formalism remains sharp, but the emotional cohesion of The Holy Girl is all but gone, as is any sense of narrative momentum. It’s hard to care about a character when you know nothing about her, and when nearly every scene of the movie focuses on that character, the result is stifling. La Mujer sin Cabeza is a look into the psyche of a cipher. What, exactly, is the point of that?

***

Che (Steven Soderbergh)
Quite possibly the most anticipated premiere at the festival, Soderbergh’s 268-minute epic biopic is, whatever its flaws, one of the most ambitious and important films from an American director of the past several years. As much an event as a single movie, the still-unfinished version of Che that screened at Cannes was made up of the two individual films that will be released separately in the States.

The first film, The Argentine, covers the successful Cuban rebellion led by Fidel Castro, for whom Che Guevara was a crucial lieutenant. The film cuts between the battle for Cuba and Che’s time as an important member of the Castro government. Controversially, Soderbergh neglects to include—or at least ends before—Che’s work as Fidel’s prosecutor and executor, but the film has little interest in political messages. Rather, it is a rigorous, if somewhat dramatically shapeless document of a social movement and its impact. After a while, the seemingly endless string of similar battle sequences gets repetitive, but Soderbergh’s formal mastery—his preternatural sense of composition, his experimentation with film stocks and other optical tricks—keeps things interesting through the siege of Santa Clara, one of the most thrilling war sequences of recent cinema.

As an account of a successful war effort, The Argentine is structured, both narratively and formally, as a traditional war movie. The images are bright and clear and the presentation of Che the military leader borders on the heroic; it feels like a Hollywood movie, albeit an uncommonly formally accomplished one. On the other hand, Guerrilla, the second film in the diptych, which focuses on the failed Bolivian revolutionary campaign that ended in Che’s death, has its own unique formal qualities. Shot mainly on trembling hand-held camera with a poetic sense for the natural world, it feels at times like a Malickian tone-poem, a depressive funereal dirge for its fallen protagonist. Where The Argentine’s camera is often gods-eye and triumphant, Guerrilla’s is more subjective, more inclined to get up close with the characters as they trudge slowly toward inevitable failure. At Che’s death, we get the first point-of-view shot of the film, as the camera falls to the floor and fades to white.

I’m not sure what I think of that choice, but at least it is one. Che is a messy, challenging, sometimes unfocused work of popular art. It has and will continue to provoke argument, discussion, thought. I’m not sure it’s a great film—for one, I saw both pieces together, where each part reflects and strengthens the other; individually, Guerrilla is the more successful work—but it is a crucial one, from an artist I wasn’t sure would ever do work like this again. Welcome home, Steve. It’s good to have you back.

Day 4: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

2008-05-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

“This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, my brother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken.' And the doctor says, 'Well, why don't you turn him in?' And the guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but I guess we keep going through it, because... most of us need the eggs.”

—Woody Allen, Annie Hall

Woody Allen ended his Oscar-winning Annie Hall with that joke, one of the most unconventional yet appropriate odes to love to ever be committed to film. Since then, he has spent nearly 30 years trying to recapture the mix of humor and pathos that have helped make Annie Hall such an enduring classic, and, with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, he has finally found it again. If not quite up to the level of Annie Hall or his masterpiece Manhattan, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is nonetheless Allen’s strongest, most philosophically and morally profound film since 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.

If Allen’s last near-great work, 2005’s Match Point, was the result of a shift in location to London from his beloved New York, then Vicky Cristina Barcelona’s success may be partially attributable to yet another move, this one to Barcelona, Spain. While the gloomy English landscape brought out Allen’s pessimistic side in the atheistic Match Point and existential Cassandra’s Dream, Barcelona seems to have rekindled his inner romantic.

Of course, even romantic Woody Allen comes with a heaping side-order of questions and doubt. The film seems to be intended as a parable on human restlessness and the paradoxes inherent in the desire for both stability and romantic love. It is at times a happy film, but it is also often an uncertain and sad one. It is told through an omniscient third-person narrator who recounts the actions and thoughts of the protagonists in the deadpan monotone of an author at a book reading. It’s a technique that I usually find insufferable, but it works here, functioning as a representation of the story’s status as a universal moral tale.

Vicky and Cristina, played by Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson, are two college friends who take an extended vacation to Barcelona in order to unwind. Vicky is a straight-laced graduate student writing her dissertation on Catalan culture. She is engaged to Doug (Chris Messina), a wealthy lawyer from Manhattan (his goofy name and Messina’s performance make clear that he is intended as a decent but fundamentally unimpressive man). Cristina is the free spirit, the aspiring photographer attracted to the artistic, the romantic, the tragic. She has no real desires or long-term goals; she only knows that stability isn’t part of the plan.

The women’s roles in Allen’s fable seem clear. Vicky represents the desire for stability, to have a predictable life, to know that when you wake up your pillows are still stuffed with the softest goose down and that your dull but loving spouse is still sleeping comfortably beside you. Cristina is the desire for excitement, for constant surprise, for passionate romance and tours through the artistic hotspots of Spain. Such excitement comes in the form of Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a handsome and charming painter who invites the two girls on a private trip to his home town. Cristina is excited, Vicky is unimpressed, and by the end of the trip both have been successfully seduced by Juan Antonio.

Back in Barcelona, Cristina and Juan Antonio begin a love affair. Doug comes to visit Vicky, who has begun having romantic feelings toward Juan Antonio and doubts about her engagement. Vicky’s fears are confirmed by the relationship between her married friends Mark (Kevin Dunn) and Judy (Patricia Clarkson). Judy confides to Vicky that she has not loved Mark for many years and is cheating on him with his work associate.

The relationship between Mark and Judy is a secondary but crucial aspect of the story. It is Allen’s way of showing the possible end result of sacrificing one’s happiness to stability: a comfortably but unsatisfying life from which their may be no escape. There is no such representation of the long-term results of Cristina’s lifestyle, because it is defined by the lack of a predicted destination.

Instead, Allen introduces a new ingredient into Cristina’s life. When Juan Antonio’s passionate but unstable wife Maria (Penelope Cruz) attempts suicide, she comes to live with him and Cristina and soon becomes an equal romantic partner in the relationship. Allen presents the unorthodox relationship as a pleasant and exciting but refuses to resort to explicit representations of sex. A sexual encounter between Cristina and Maria would pass for tame on primetime television, and the heavily-touted menage-a-trois amounts to nothing more than a three-way kiss in a red-tinted darkroom.

Ultimately, the point seems to be that no amount of happiness is ever enough for someone like Cristina, who eventually grows restless in her relationship and moves out. She is happy in her decision, but Allen is not so sure. People like Cristina will always be looking for new and more stimulating experiences, and Allen seems to suggest that their lives are no more fulfilling than the alternative.

Despite this heady thematic material, the film is frequently very funny and ranks close to Allen’s most successful romantic comedies. Cruz, especially, emerges as true star, harnessing a fiery temper and rapid-fire Spanish dialogue to maximum comedic effect. Among the stars, Hall makes a bigger impression than the effective but uneven Johansson, if only because her character is allowed more complexity, by necessity, than Johansson’s.

As in Annie Hall, however, the humor is always in service of the material, resulting in the most moving film Allen has made in some time. The message, to extend the metaphor, seems to be that although we do need the eggs, once we get them we’re not always satisfied with what we find. It’s a sad truth of human relationships, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona’s great strength is in bringing it to light.

Days 5 & 6

2008-05-25T05:49:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted blah blah blah.]

Serbis (Brillante Mendoza)

I pulled my first D’Angelo of the festival by walking out of this miserable slog, which has been racking up the most universally vicious reviews of the festival. Set in a family-run porno theater in the Philippines, the film wants to be a chronicle of the difficulty of living in the run-down alleys and backstreets of Asia. But instead of creating any sort of social or political context, Mendoza instead resorts to self-consciously shocking imagery and pointless, unremitting ugliness. I bailed soon after an explicit sex scene that culminated with the man changing positions so as to not irritate the giant, pus-filled boil on his ass. Reportedly, the timing of my exodus allowed me to just barely miss the first of several extended scenes of unsimulated fellatio between two of the male hustlers that frequent the theater. Lucky break, I think.

Le Silence de Lorna (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

The Dardenne brothers continue their remarkable streak of films with their follow-up to 2005’s Palme d’Or winner L’Enfant. Reviews for the new film have so far been somewhat lukewarm, which does not strike me as surprising; when you follow a near-masterpiece with a film that’s “only” really good, there will inevitably be some backlash.

It is true, admittedly, that Le Silence de Lorna is not as strong as L’Enfant (or La Promesse or The Son, for that matter; I haven’t seen Rosetta). The reason may be that Le Silence de Lorna is the brothers’ most plot-driven film to date. The simplistic narratives of their previous films allowed for spare, spiritually pure examinations of various moral issues. Le Silence de Lorna has a more contrived narrative trajectory; Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), an Albanian immigrant to Belgium, marries a heroin addict named Claudy (Jérémie Renier) in order to gain citizenship. The plan is to eventually murder the junkie by faking an overdose so that Lorna can then marry a wealthy Russian man who seeks citizenship. When Lorna attempts to avoid murdering Claudy by procuring a hasty divorce, the Russian’s associates are not pleased, and Lorna feels so much guilt over the result that she suffers a sort of mental break.

The first hour of Le Silence de Lorna follows in the same naturalistic footsteps of the brothers’ previous works, as it observes the day-to-day life of Lorna and Claudy and Lorna’s attempts to help Claudy get clean. The turn that the narrative eventually takes, while subtly and gracefully executed, yanks the film out of the realm of real life and into that of movie-world fiction. It’s not a disastrous move, but L’Enfant and The Son were so unbearably moving precisely because their stories of guilt and redemption were so grounded in reality. With Le Silence de Lorna, the Dardennes have become victims of their own greatness. For any other directors, this would be a triumph; for them, it’s a slight step back.

Two Lovers (James Gray)

I am in the distinct minority on this one, Gray’s followup to last year’s We Own the Night, a standard-issue crime melodrama made interesting by Gray’s stunning visual sense and emotional sincerity. The same goes for Two Lovers, a melodramatic relationship drama that succeeds on the strength of Gray’s images and romantic earnestness.

The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Leonard, a troubled man living with his parents after another failed suicide attempt. Phoenix plays Leonard as a good-hearted but possibly slightly autistic romantic, a photographer torn between relationships with the unexciting but loving Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of his father’s business partner, and his unpredictable but emotionally damaged neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow). Gray explores these two relationships with obvious and over-heated dialogue, but his images are anything but standard.

Gray shoots night-time in the city as well as any director this side of Michael Mann, and his glittering, forceful compositions carry a great deal of emotional heft. One scene between Phoenix and Paltrow is shot on the roof of an apartment building, with the doorways of a roof-top shed framing the actors as Gray moves his camera gracefully around the building. Gray has some antiquated ideas about romance, but he means them, and his narrative’s ultimate trajectory gets at some fundamental issues surrounding human love. The film’s final scene, which has been grossly misinterpreted by some as falsely sunny, is a near-devastating balance between happiness and uncertainty.

Two Lovers is not a great film; it’s not even close. But it confirms Gray as, I think, one of the most exciting new directors to come out of Hollywood. He’s not making movies quite like anyone else around, but whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on who you ask. If you ask me, it’s a very good thing indeed.

Days 2 & 3

2008-05-23T03:44:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted from The House Next Door.]

Day 2

After the disappointment of Blindness on day one, I enter day two ready to make the most of my time here in Cannes. I wake up early and work out a plan that will result in me seeing four movies during the day: the Un Certain Regard film Tokyo!, the competition entries Waltz with Bashir and Leonera, and a beach-side screening of Arthur Penn’s seminal 1967 film Bonnie & Clyde. I debate over whether to count Penn’s film in my tally and eventually decide that I will, because four films in one day sounds way more hardcore than three.

Once again, the day starts in a line. This time it’s me, alone, waiting to get into Tokyo! I’m alone because as soon as my roommate and I walked up to the Debussy Theatre, where the Un Certain Regard premieres are held, an exiting patron handed him a ticket to the screening. Lucky bastard. If I don’t get in, I’m gonna be pissed.

I do get in, but I’m still pissed, because while there may not be a bad seat in the Lumiere, the same can’t be said of the Debussy. By the time the guards let the Cinephiles into the theater, the only seats left unfilled are those in the extreme wings, and the design of the theater results in the viewers in these seats being able to see only half of the screen. I’m not about to watch an entire movie with only half of the required visual information, so I’ve got two options. I can either leave and try to get into the Director’s Fortnight repertory screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, or I can sit on the floor by the entrance and watch from there. Since I’m already seeing one older movie today, I side for the latter.

***

The recent surge in the number of omnibus films, especially at festivals, is a trend I find baffling. It isn’t because I don’t understand the appeal behind them; the chance to see how different auteurs’ sensibilities affect their approaches to a single subject sounds fascinating. In theory. The problem is, these movies just don’t tend to be very good. At best they’re uneven, with a strong miss-to-hit ratio, and the hits are rarely strong enough to justify sitting through the misses. Tokyo!, an omnibus film featuring submissions from Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho, fits the trend perfectly.

The film kicks off with Gondry’s segment, a chronicle of a couple’s attempts to find work in the city. The boyfriend is a struggling director working in a gift-wrapping store; the girlfriend is unemployed, and her feelings of uselessness form the emotional core of the segment. Gondry displays a surprising understanding of the resentment that can form in relationships, but the way in which he resolves the conflict is pure Gondrian whimsy. How you respond probably depends on how well you can handle his unfiltered sensibility. I was torn between annoyance and awe, just as I was during The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind.

There was no such conflict in my response to Leos Carax’s segment, the appropriately-titled Merde (“shit” in French, for those who don’t know), one of the most unbearably shrill, unfunny things I’ve ever seen. It deals with a sewer-dwelling beast known only as Mr. Merde (Denis Lavant) who emerges from underneath Tokyo to terrorize its citizens. Eventually he is captured and put on trial, where he explains his motivations, which involve both religion and misanthropy. The film is packed with broad, irritating jokes and performances, none of which show even a hint of nuance or intelligence. Carax clearly intends the film as an allegory for terrorism, but he has nothing new or interesting to say on the topic. Did you know that it’s widespread and terrifying, that it’s based on blind and illogical faith, and that killing one terrorist does not stop the entire movement? No? Then you are the ideal audience for this film. You are also, not coincidentally, an idiot.

I would have bolted for the exit during Carax’s segment were it not for the knowledge that the final one was directed by Bong Joon-ho, the man responsible for the terrific Memories of Murder and The Host. I’m glad I stuck around, because his segment ranks as one of the best things I’ve seen at the festival. The story of a hermit drawn out of his shell by a beautiful pizza delivery girl, it is by far the most formally accomplished segment of the three, filled with striking, lovely images. It is also the most emotionally nuanced, staking out a moving plea for engagement with the outside world and connections with other people. It would’ve taken a masterpiece to completely wash the sour taste of Carax’s film out of my mouth; Bong’s didn’t do that, but it came close, which is pretty extraordinary in itself.

***

Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, the second Competition release to screen at the festival, has received some of the most passionate responses of any film thus far. And although it is unquestionably an interesting work, especially in its often-stunning visual style, I’m afraid that I can’t quite join in the chorus.

The only animated film in Competition this year, Waltz with Bashir deals with Folman’s attempts to remember his role in the 1982 massacres at the Sabra and Shantila refugee camps in Lebanon. It is structured as a series of interviews between Folman and other soldiers broken up by subjective presentations of what occurred during the war. It is a daring structure but one that Folman doesn’t quite have the skill to pull off; the film frequently feels rough and disjointed in its narrative thrust.

The recreations of events are the finest moments in the film. In the interview scenes, the animation style, which was accomplished through a mix of flash animation and both 2-D and 3-D rendering, can appear unpolished and sloppy. In the recreations, it is bold and gorgeous, like a graphic novel come to life. The visuals in these moments are so striking that they seem to have blinded many critics and viewers to the film’s shortcomings.

Like Blindness before it, Waltz with Bashir suffers from a lack of subtlety. The film is little more than a straight-forward condemnation of the horrors of war, made slightly more powerful by the self-critique at the heart of Folman’s project. But Folman too often resorts to obvious statements of theme, and a late-film shift to live-action footage of the massacres is especially blunt and ill-advised. It is difficult, in this day an age, to make an anti-war statement seem essential or even fresh. It takes more than simply telling, saying, or even showing the devastation it causes, and for awhile I thought that Folman had found a way to add a fresh voice to the discussion. When he shifted to live-action, he told me that he did not. Waltz with Bashir doesn’t look quite like anything else around, but there’s still nothing new here.

***

“Come on, you asshole,” I can hear you saying. “You’re at the Cannes Film Festival. Do you have to be so grouchy all the time?” Good question, anonymous commentator, and by way of response I say this: Martina Gusman’s lead performance in Pablo Trapero’s Leonera, around which the film is built, is the kind of acting that breaks hearts, drops jaws and wins awards. With her work in this film, Gusman becomes the early front-runner for Cannes’ Best Actress prize, and if I see a better performance all festival I will be very surprised.

With that out of the way, I do feel obligated to report that nothing else in Leonera stands out as much more than solid. The title, which is Spanish for “lion’s den," refers to a prison for women with children, a sort of jail/daycare, where the pregnant Julia (Gusman, also Trapero’s wife) ends up after being charged with murdering her boyfriend and assaulting his male lover (Rodrigo Santoro, also quite strong). It’s a unique approach to the women-in-prison film, but that doesn’t prevent Trapero from lazily utilizing some of the genre’s more outrageous conventions, from horny lesbians to frequent catfights.

Julia’s evolving relationship with her son provides the film with an emotional focus as it goes through the motions detailing the circumstances surrounding her trial (Trapero never explicitly reveals whether or not Julia is guilty of the crimes of which she is accused, although there is no question where our sympathies are meant to lie), and Gusman wrenchingly balances Julia’s strength and dignity with her desperation to maintain custody of her child. At the end of the screening, the film and the filmmakers received a standing ovation. I was clapping too, but my applause was directed at only one person.

***

Then I watched Bonnie & Clyde on the beach. Maybe you’ve seen it. It’s pretty good.

***

Day 3

[Note: Since I’m already pretty behind and Internet access is so scarce here, I’ve decided to dump the journal format and just stick with short reviews of the movies I’ve seen. If it’s good enough for Glenn Kenny, it’s good enough for me.]

***

Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
After a somewhat lukewarm day two, filmwise, day three got started off with a bang. Actually, “bang” may not be the correct word, because Three Monkeys, like Ceylan’s previous films Distant and Climates, is slow and methodical, and filled to the brim with emotionally-charged pauses and long silences. But “day three got started off with a lot of emotionally-charged pauses and long silences” just doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Still, compared to the gorgeous but emotionally dry Climates, Three Monkeys seems almost conventional, at least from a narrative point of view. It deals with a family, the father of which goes to jail after being paid to take the fall for a hit-and-run accident committed by his employer, a prominent Turkish politician. While in jail, the man’s son begins hanging out with a street gang, and his wife carries out an affair with the politician. Once he is released, he must deal with the consequences of these events, which gets even harder once the politician turns up murdered.

It sounds like the stuff of a pulp novel, but Ceylan’s style never allows for straight-forward narrative process. The title refers to seeing, hearing and speaking no evil, a metaphor for how the family deals with its situation and provides Ceylan with the basis of his formal strategy. None of the tragedies that occur throughout the film are presented on screen; instead, we are shown the characters’ reactions to them. Ceylan is interested in exploring the nature of truth and denial, and he repeatedly is able to craft the perfect images to fit his themes. Characters are often isolated in the frame, either in long shots or extreme close-ups, and the stylized, grim color scheme results in some absolutely stunning images. Among the most beautiful recent films I’ve seen, Three Monkeys is my favorite of the fest so far.

***

Un conte de Noël (Arnaud Desplechin)
For many people, the favorite seems to be Desplechin’s new film, a sprawling, character-driven fable of healing and forgiveness. Like Desplechin’s last feature, the terrific Kings and Queen, Un conte de Noël runs for well over two hours and still manages to pack in enough emotions, character relationships and formal experimentation for a film two hours longer. It’s exciting cinema, but it can just as easily be seen as unfocused as thrilling. Still, even if Un conte de Noël sometimes (okay, frequently) seems more than a little messy, there’s enough life on display here that it’s hard to begrudge Desplechin his excesses.

Un conte de Noël focuses on a family that comes together at Christmas when matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) is diagnosed with cancer. Junon’s husband Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) wants everyone to get along, but his children’s complicated relationships make that unlikely. Henri (Mathieu Amalric, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is the black sheep, removed from contact with the family by his sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny, also from Diving Bell). The youngest brother, Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) is in town with cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto), who is still in love with Ivan’s wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni).

There are too many complications within these relationships to detail within the course of one review. Un conte de Noël is a complex film, but it can’t decide whether it wants to be a realistic one or not. Many of Desplechin’s characters behave illogically or react to situations in ways that occasionally stretch belief. It is a slight step back from Kings and Queen, which had the emotional core to support its experimentations. Despite a number of terrific performances (Amalric is especially good) and an undeniably moving finale, Un conte de Noël never quite reaches those heights.

Day 1: Badges and Blindness

2008-05-17T04:44:00.000-07:00

[Note: This post should soon be appearing at The House Next Door, where it may or may not be edited down somewhat. I'm cross-posting it here, as I plan to do with all of my reports, so that you can compare between the two and see how the House's fantastic editor turns my long meandering nonsense into pure gold. Enjoy.]

My first day at the Cannes Film Festival begins in a line. Me and my fellow students, twenty-five deep, wading in a sea of tiny old French women, waiting to get our badges. Right now my expectations are at once tempered and sky-high. On one hand: My door to the Cannes Film Festival is about to be opened. On the other: From what I’ve heard about how Cinephiles are treated, I would not be surprised if our badges were printed on graham crackers and written with ball-point pen. And the food here is so expensive, the time may come when a graham cracker sounds delicious.

Thankfully, our badges are pretty legit, if not as nice as the Market and Press badges. I won’t look like an idiot with it on, and hopefully I won’t ever be struck by the urge to eat it. With that out of the way, it’s time to check out the movies. I open up the film schedule, and—what? The official Cannes films don’t start until the 7 p.m. premiere of Blindness. The rest of the films playing today are Market screenings, which means that a distributor paid the festival to let the film be shown in local Cannes theaters. There are no restrictions on quality, and as awesome as Zombie: The Beginning sounds, I decide to spend the day napping until it’s time to beg for Blindness tickets.

At 4 p.m., I head back into Cannes, decked out in my tuxedo, wielding every Cinephile’s most treasured possession: a sign, written in Sharpie marker on printer paper, reading “Invitations S.V.P.” I strut up next to the Lumiere Theatre feeling remarkably confident. I’m well-rested, I’m looking good, and I’ve got a sign. France ain’t gonna know what hit it.

Needless to say, I don’t get a ticket to the red-carpet premiere. My date with Julianne Moore will have to wait. I do, however, get a ticket to the follow-up screening at 11pm, which I’m psyched about but have to wait four hours to see. Luckily, some of the students I’ve gotten close to so far have also failed in their mission, so we’ll at least be bored together. And hungry. It’s time for dinner. As highly-cultured film students trying to get the full French experience, we pick McDonald’s.

At 10:30, we return to the Lumiere, flash our tickets to the guards and walk onto the red carpet. There are no gorgeous celebrities to ogle, but standing here, staring up at the theater, I am quite certain that this is the single greatest moment of my life. We step inside, and it gets even better; Femme Fatale exaggerated the interior of the Lumiere slightly, but not by very much. We’re not even inside the actual screening area yet, and it’s already beautiful. The theater itself, we soon find, is huge, like a sports stadium without the stench of stale beer. There’s not a bad seat in the house, and the screen is absolutely gigantic. I’m so high on the experience right now that I don’t think it would even matter what the film we’re about to watch is. Which, it turns out, is a good thing, because the film we’re about to watch is Blindness.

***

By most accounts, Jose Saramago’s Blindness, which I have not read, is a stunning novel, and I believe it. There’s clearly a great movie to be made from this material, but Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation is not it. Cursed with a constant need to over-enunciate its themes, Blindness is a clear case of a director being, quite simply, out of his league.

This should come as no surprise; Blindness would be a tough assignment even for a really smart director, and Meirelles has always been a fundamentally shallow one. Gifted with a formidable visual sense but little else, he has made his name creating striking but intellectually hollow films. His breakthrough hit, City of God, is a derivative but viscerally exciting Scorsese rip-off, and The Constant Gardener, one of the first of the many recent “white guy in Africa” films, is a prime example of undeniable formal chops used in the service of wrong-headed and offensive ideas.

Blindness is smarter than either of those films, but not thanks to Meirelles. The original story—that of an unnamed country whose citizens are stricken with an infectious disease that causes blindness—is rich with moral and allegorical implications, but Meirelles seems ill-equipped to fully understand or explore them. Instead, he narrows in on a handful of the more obvious themes and then spends two hours hammering them into the ground.

The problems are apparent immediately. The film begins with a voice-over from Danny Glover, in the role of the wise black man (I guess Morgan Freeman was busy). “I don’t think we went blind,” Glover intones, “I think we always were,” which, I mean, ugh. Apparently, the film’s conceit isn’t extreme enough to already be a clear metaphor; we need to be told right away. The voice-over returns periodically throughout the film, popping up any time Meirelles feels the need to explain a character's emotions or emphasize an especially important thematic note

If you still don't get it, don’t worry; Meirelles has your back. One of the key motifs of Blindness is the surfeit of stimuli that dominates our lives: traffic, television, radio, white noise. A point is made to distinguish between regular blindness, which results in darkness, and the “white blindness” of the film. The difference is clear: rather than the emptiness that darkness implies, the film’s citizens are driven blind by the buildup of these stimuli; white is, after all, the result of combining every color of the spectrum. Like many of Blindness’ ideas, it’s an interesting one executed poorly. Whereas a work like Don DeLillo’s White Noise approaches this theme with subtlety and tact, Meirelles does so by framing seemingly every shot in as unnatural and cluttered a way as possible. Objects protrude into every corner of the frame, dominating the characters’ environments. It’s a rigorous strategy that results in a few striking images, but it mostly just comes off as showy, as does Meirelles’ tendency to end scenes with a blinding fade to white, an obvious and irritating tactic designed to imitate the characters’ condition, as if we didn’t already have a pretty good idea what that would be like.

These techniques also distance the audience from the characters, who remain nameless throughout. This would be fine if Meirelles had the balls to embrace keeping his audience at arm’s length. But once the protagonists—led by Mark Ruffalo’s doctor and his wife (Julianne Moore), one of the few not stricken by the disease—are shipped off to an asylum for quarantine, Meirelles attempts to draw pathos from their increasingly desperate circumstances. The victims descend into chaos, fighting over food and shelter. A vicious despot (Gael Garcia Bernal) emerges, taking charge of the asylum and hoarding food, exchanging it for valuables and sex.

The idea is, I suppose, to structure the story as an allegory for the creation of civilization, of blindness and chaos eventually leading to knowledge and control. It’s another interesting idea, likely handled exceptionally well in the novel, but Meirelles presents the madness of the asylum in such an obvious way that it’s almost laughable. Many of the events are truly disturbing, but it’s cheap and easy to elicit emotional response through horrifying images. It's much harder to do so through character and tone. Audience reaction should be earned, not forced, and Meirelles consistently comes down on the wrong side of this line.

The one exception is Moore, who stands out brilliantly among an uneven cast (Ruffalo is wasted, and Bernal is effective but seems to be performing in a different movie). It’s perhaps not a shock that Moore can pull off the role of a suffering housewife, but there’s more to it than that; as she attempts to lead her followers through the tragedy, her face and body gradually register increasing measures of horror, exhaustion, and strength. It’s deep, layered acting, powerful but never showy; Meirelles could learn a thing or two from her.

Celebrity citings

2008-05-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

On the first night here in Cannes, about half of our group got into the red-carpet premiere of Fernando Meirelles' Blindness, where they came within feet of Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal and Cate Blanchett. After the screening, three students stumbled into the Blindness after-party and had coversations with Moore and Bernal.

Yesterday, a number of students got into the Kung-Fu Panda premiere and stood near Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Jack Black and Lucy Liu. One of my friends got ogled by Sean Penn outside of the Majestic Hotel, and another walked directly behind Natalie Portman and her entourage for several feet.

Today, one student made eye contact with Harrison Ford, who nodded and smiled at him. Several have gotten tickets to the premiere of Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte de Noel, where they will see Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Almaric and various other French actors.

Me? I've seen the side of Tilda Swinton's head.

(Actually, that's not entirely true. While I was in the Majestic Hotel today, Natalie Portman walked right by me. At the time, I was reading a magazine; when I lifted my head, she was gone. My roommate, who walked out of the bathroom just as Portman was entering, had to tell me about it. C'est la vie.)

I'm kind of a big deal

2008-05-08T18:41:00.000-07:00

Turns out I'll be covering Cannes over at ~~Matt Zoller Seitz's~~ Keith Uhlich's The House Next Door. I'll still try to post some more personal or journal-type writing here, but much of my critical coverage from the festival will be cross-posted here from there. But honestly, you should probably just read it over there; they deserve the traffic way more than I do.

Coverage should start with a pre-lim article a day or two before the festival starts.

2008-04-23T18:19:00.000-07:00

With finals looming, leave it up to the festival honchos to make me care even less about school than I already do. After today's announcement of the Cannes line-up, I want nothing more than to be in France as soon as possible, and to just sleep through the time remaining before I get to leave.

The most anticipated release for me is the one film I was already pretty sure was going to be in competition: Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, which I suspect needs very little introduction. Early reviews of the script described it as predictably ambitious and brilliant, so the only remaining question is whether Kaufman the neophyte director has the formal chops to pull off the translation. Let's hope he was paying close attention when on set with Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry.

Joining Synecdoche, New York as American submissions to the fest are Steven Soderbergh's epic biopic Che and Clint Eastwood's The Changeling. Set for release in two parts (entitled Guerilla and The Argentine) later this year, Che will premiere at Cannes in its full 4-hour form. And although the idea of a 4-hour long biopic about every annoying college kid's favorite terrorist doesn't exactly get my heart a-pounding, I'm interested to see what Soderbergh does with his first real prestige film since Traffic. I don't know anything about The Changeling beyond what's in all the press reports - it's a period kidnapping movie starring Angelina Jolie - but Clint's been on quite a tear as of late.

Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are returning to Cannes with Le Silence de Lorna, and although they are probably pretty much out of the running for the Palme d'Or (they've already won it twice recently, in 1999 for Rosetta and 2005 for L'enfant), the brothers are responsible for some of the most consistently stunning films of the decade. I don't know what the film is about, but I bet it involves an economically downtrodden protagonist, a deep sense of humanist Christian morality and lots and lots of handheld camera work.

Two French films were announced today, with a third to come later. Arnaud Desplechin, responsible for 2004's great Kings and Queen, is in with A Christmas Story, starring Mathieu Almaric as a man who wants nothing more for Christmas than a shiny Red Ryder BB gun. And Philippe Garrel, ignored by Cannes in the past and a critical favorite for 2005's Regular Lovers, has La Frontiere de l'aube, starring Louis Garrel as a man haunted by his ex-girlfriend's ghost.

Other name directors at the fest include Atom Egoyan, whose critical cache has fallen significantly since his back-to-back masterpieces in the 90s (Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter), is in with Adoration, which is apparently about how the internet affects teens' since of identity. Should be interesting, and there's no three-way sex-scene involving Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth, which is always a plus. Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns for the third time with Three Monkeys (or, depending on who you ask, Daydreams). I haven't seen Ceylan's debut, Distant, and I found his Climates formally stunning but emotionally flat. Looking forward to seeing what he has in store this time out.

Jia Zhangke has 24 City, one of only three Asian films in the fest. Wim Wenders is in with The Palermo Shooting, starring Dennis Hopper and, according to the always-reliable IMDb, Milla Jovovich, Patti Smith and Lou Reed as themselves. Walter Salles has Linha De Passe, a road movie of some sort, and Lucrecia Martel, who was responsible for the terrific The Holy Girl a few years back, has La Mujer Sin Cabeza. Martel is the lone female director with a film in competition for the Palme.

The other competition films, all of which I know very little to nothing about:
Delta (dir. Kornel Mundruczo)
Il Divo (dir. Paolo Sorrentino)
Gomorra (dir. Matteo Garrone)
Leonera (dir. Pablo Trapero)
My Magic (dir. Eric Khoo)
Serbis (dir. Brillante Mendoza)
Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman) [This one's animated.]

Premiering out of competition are, as expected, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (dir. Steven Spielberg), which is apparently a Harrison Ford vehicle of some kind; Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, starring Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson; The Good, the Bad, the Weird (dir. Ji-Woon Kim) and, um, Kung Fu Panda (dir. Who Cares?).

Special screenings will be offered of: Marina Zenovich's Sundance fave Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Wong Kar-wai's re-working of his Ashes of Time, Terence Davies's documentary Of Time and the City, Abel Ferrara's documentary about the Chelsea Hotel, C'Est Dur D'être Aimé Par Des Cons (dir. Daniel Leconte) and Sangue passo (dir. Marco Tullio Giordana). Premiering in Cannes' midnight screenings are Surveillance (dir. Jennifer Lynch, daughter of the greatest living American director), Emir Kusturica's soccer documentary Maradona and The Chaser (dir. Hong-Jin Na).

Bring it on. Only 20 days, 4 hours, 9 minutes and 30 seconds left. But who's counting?