I’ve got a couple of hours to go before I see my last film of the festival – my seventeenth in five days – (Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell (pictured) in case you’re wondering – I need to see something in English before my head explodes) and I’m starting to feel the fatigue setting in. At this point, so confused are all the films, actors and images knocking around my head, I feel like I’ve seen one continuous 32-hour movie in eight different languages.
Unfortunately, I’ve ended the festival on a bum note, with one admirable film that didn’t quite do it for me, and one that was out-and-out awful.
The better of the two was João Pedro Rodrigues’ To Die Like A Man. Not knowing a damn thing about it before I went in, I was half hoping it might be some sort of gormless gangster epic I could lose myself in for a bit, and as the film began with a close-up of a soldier all decked out in camo paint, leading to a slow, silent scene in a forest as an army crept stealthily through, I began to get excited. By the time two of the soldiers had started back-door humping against a tree, I realised we were going somewhere slightly different.
Rodrigues’ film takes us deep into the scurrilous world of jaded, faded Lisbon drag queen Tonia (Fernando Santos). Saddled with a junkie lover, a homicidal son, a younger rival and painful tits, life for Tonia is spiraling slowly out of control. Kind hearted, but numbed by regret, we follow her as she struggles to regain the pieces of her past and juggle the harsh realities of her present. Though clearly influenced by Almodovar, Rodrigues has an altogether bleaker outlook. This is a strange, stagey film, full of overt cinematic devices (a blood moon turns the screen red while the cast sit out a keening song about the death of Jesus on the cross), but one underpinned by a swamp of Catholic repression that occasionally breaks rank as a kind of serene beauty, especially in the film’s key musical parts. I wasn’t really feeling it though, until a brilliant digression to the jungle home of glamorous old queen Maria, played by Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida with scene-chomping relish. It feels to me like the kind of film Almodovar could only make if he lost his zest and passion for life; but then again, it’s a bold and inventive attempt to deal with some serious subjects.
Which can’t be said of Jean van de Velde’s The Silent Army. Despite being the story of a Dutch cook who sets out to find a kidnapped child inducted into the rebel army of an unnamed African country, this is neither bold nor inventive, or even serious (from a filmmaking perspective). Poorly conceived and executed from script to performances, it’s a worthy, hackneyed waste of celluloid that makes Blood Diamond look like insightful cinema. I actually felt a bit embarrassed for van de Velde by the end of the screening. Cannes is the premier league of film festivals, but he’s a Coca-Cola league director.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be on a flight back to the UK; looking forward to some drizzle and trying to remember how to use a knife and fork. But we’re not quite done: we’ll be running our very own LWLies Cannes Awards early in the week, so check back in for that. Au revoir.
