Film of the Day
It wasn’t a particularly memorable day for films, but the best of a mediocre bunch was Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s The Wind Journeys. Now, I get a little skeptical about films with ‘wind’ in the title, especially foreign films, especially Latin American films. It all sounds a bit portentous and metaphorical – it speaks to me of a certain kind of ‘indigenous’ cinema that plays well to the polite middle-brow crowds in Europe who get to chatter around the dinner table about the exotic Other. It’s becoming its own aesthetic form, a homogenised brand of cultural cinema that’s increasingly stripped of both meaning and identity.
The Wind Journeys is indeed familiar to plenty of other films that share this pseudo-ethnographic style, but for all that it lacks the X-factor, it’s clear that Guerra’s got talent. His film follows an old man on a kind of peasant’s road trip across the country to return an accordion that he believes is cursed. A young boy, looking for a connection to a father figure but also for a sense of his own place in the world, tags along – and the two eventually develop a strong bond. There are the requisite studied silences and long, meaningful looks, but Guerra also keeps it moving at a good clip, developing a series of vignettes that reflect the wildly differing backdrops of the country. But the real key to the film is rhythm. Not just in the haunting music sequences when the old man breaks his vow never to play the accordion again, but the rhythm of the world through which the old man and the young boy move – the ebb and flow of fate and hope and life and death.
Both performances are terrific, and the old man – Marciano Martínez – was at the screening to give a little performance on the accordion beforehand. Which was nice.
Honourable mention: The Vincent Cassel starring Adrift (directed by Heitor Dhalia) played in the evening. With brilliant camerawork, stunning photography and a gorgeous piano refrain, this story about a young girl whose summer on the beach is a time of both sexual awakening and familial dysfunction had all the ingredients to be a smash – and the crowd certainly seemed to like it. It hints at sexual transgression and the tortured confusion of adolescence. Laura Leto is an amazing find as the young girl, Filipa, giving it the full Brook Shields as a budding siren. The way in which she comes to understand the power of her beauty, and the way she explores the limits of that power (not just in terms of her sexuality but morally as well) is intriguing stuff. So too the subtext about the hypocrisy of childhood. When Filipa tells her adulterous father “I’ll never understand you!” she fails to see that she’s already repeating these grown-up patterns of behaviour among her own friends. But where a film like A Brand New Life is about the exquisite agony of childhood, Adrift is simply the story of a spoiled girl learning a few life lessons. And where films like La Zona, Deficit and A Week Alone interrogate the divisions in Latin America’s social strata through the eyes of youth, Adrift is, at heart, a sumptuously produced, feature length episode of The OC.
Crazy Cannes Experience of the Day
It had to be getting into the catch-up screening of Inglourious Basterds. I decided to check it out even though the response from the day before was lukewarm (at best) – too long, too talky, too boring. So I rocked up an hour and a half before the film started only to find the queue already snaking half way back to Nice. It turned out that I was among the last 20 or so people to be allowed in. So we waited and waited and baked in the sun before the inevitable stampede for seats. Being at the back (and English – the French are mercenary queue-jumpers) I didn’t stand a chance. Every seat in the house was taken and I took my place sitting on the steps in the aisle. Every single step on both aisles was taken up with at least three people. The place was rammed. Nearly three hours later, unable to feel my arse cheeks, I left totally unimpressed. There’s not much more to add to the general opinions. This is a film that simply hasn’t been edited. Some scenes go on 15 minutes for a five-second pay off. The characters are wafer thin. The dialogue feels as tired as ever. And most of all – there’s no action. In two hours and 40 minutes you see the Basterds at work maybe a couple of time, and even then it’s only snap shots. There’s not one single sustained action scene of the Basterds in action. Rubbish. At this point Tarantino looks increasingly like an over-indulged bore. Even with a decent editor, there probably isn’t a great film in all this. But cut an hour out and at least it won’t be boring.
Disaster of the Day
There are two contenders here, but I’m not sure that my story of being charged four Euros for two Mars Bars is of sufficient general interest. (But seriously though – four fucking Euros.) No, it has to be the horror-show screening of Emmanuel Laurent’s The Two of the New Wave in the Cannes Classics strands. This potentially brilliant documentary about the friendship between Jean-Luc Godart and Francois Truffaut was ruined by a stuttering projector and, for 40 minutes, English subtitles that were 20 seconds ahead of the onscreen images. People left in droves. In front of the director. Harsh. After 40 minutes it got sorted out, which left us to focus on the film. Oh dear. The Two… has absolutely nothing to add to the story of these legendary figures. There’s plenty of nice footage from the 1959 and 1968 Cannes festivals, but no new insights or revelations. It’s like watching a Wikipedia page unfold in front of you.
Typical Cannes Experience of the Day
Standing outside the White Ribbon party with a ticket to get in but going absolutely nowhere because it’s total mayhem and you’re surrounded by women with fake tits. Cue giving up and going to another bar to mutter about how rubbish the party probably is. Then realising that the only difference between you and the people in the party is that they’re not using the word ‘probably’.
