When you’re bustling around Cannes with your nose stuck in a schedule and one eye on the time, it’s easy to miss just how beautiful the city, or at least the seafront, is. Stunning old hotels litter the way. The sky is a deep blue. Filing out of the Soixantieme, the harbour opens up in front of you – all sparkling water and bobbing boats. Beautiful people promenade up and down the Croisette, the thoroughfare on which all this opulence is located. In the evening, everything gets blocked off as the big premiere has its moment. Armies of police watch over an even larger army of tuxedoed Yahoos swanning down the strip and onto the red carpet of the Palais.
The Palais dominates the Croisette even more than the hotels. It’s like a giant, modernist Cathedral of cinema – an enormous place that houses two huge theatres (the Grand, where the major action happens – I haven’t been there yet; and the Debussy, where the Un Certain Regard screenings take place – that’s where I’m living); two smaller theatres (the Bazin and the Bunuel. I think – I’m still exploring); and access to the smaller Soixantieme, which I love and which houses the invaluable catch-up screenings. It means that oiks like me (I’m a lowly Yellow Card badge holder. I can barely show my face among polite festival society) have a chance at watching the competition films, albeit the day after everyone else. The Palais also holds the press office, which has a swanky terrace overlooking the Croisette.
Anyway, my first full day in Cannes was a learning experience. Learning where things are, how to plan my time, and the informal ‘rules’ of the festival. Rule number one: be an animal. It is literally a taboo here to go to bed before 4am and get up after 7. This presents a challenge to me, because the only thing I worship as much as film is sleep. You can see the guys who’ve been here for a week now operating in a kind of permanent daze. They’ve got this glazed expression – like survivors of some major trauma, like soldiers. It’s Vietnam with canapés. I think this actually accounts for why you often can’t really trust the reviews that come out of Cannes (or any festival, for that matter): after a week of film and boozing and parties, your judgment is as shot and shattered as your liver, which magnifies either the hostility (see: Marie-Antoinette) or the love (see: Bright Star) to crazy proportions.
Lesson two: no conversation between two or more festival goers after 6pm is allowed to proceed unless dominated by discussion of which party or parties you’re going to. People talk about parties all the time, mainly because there are so many of them, they’re really good, and the question of who’s been invited to what – and whether they can get you in – is a constantly shifting network of opportunity. Also, on a more prosaic level, they feed you at these things, which can slice a major load off your daily budget – essential when a beer costs €7 in any non-party venue.
Lesson three: timing is everything. Let’s say you want to fit in four films a day – well, you’re only going to do that if you get your scheduling right. Planning a daily schedule is a bit like doing a seating plan at a wedding; a series of agonising decisions, painful compromises, steely-eyed pragmatism and the occasional inspired piece of lateral thinking. The problem is that you can never be sure how long you’ll need to queue, or which big time Charlie is going to swan in front of you with his pink press pass when there’s only one more seat in the house. Get it right, though, and there are rich rewards on offer.
I caught three films on my first day (I sacrificed one for a free drinks reception. I’m either learning or letting myself down; not sure which.). My very first Cannes film was an authentic art turn from Filippino director Raya Martin. Independencia (trailer) is stunningly shot in black and white (I haven’t got my programme so I’m not sure what film stock was used, but it looked like a kind of weird super-8 almost). Though set in the jungle, it’s been filmed in a studio with artificial painted backdrops. This, combined with the film stock, gives Martin’s picture a kind of folkloric quality fitting to the title. It’s about a mother and son who flee the advance of American troops. They take to the jungle while the towns are occupied, rescuing a girl who, it’s suggested, gives birth after being raped. The family live out their days in harmony with the land, until the soldiers eventually find them. Deliberately theatrical and old-fashioned, Independencia is a richly metaphorical, allusive collision of history, mythology and cultural memory. Full of long takes and stylized close ups, but sizzling beneath with raw-knuckled sexuality, it’s occasionally hard work but is hugely rewarding. Before the screening, Martin took to the stage to dedicate the film to his nephews (or cousins, maybe), declaring that one day he hoped people would be able to die ‘for their country, and for cinema!’ This vaguely psychotic death wish got a few embarrassed chuckles, but good on Martin for believing in something so boldly.
Next up was Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (pictured), starring Rachel Weisz as Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia, a woman way ahead of her time whose work on the cosmos was set against the backdrop of religious fanaticism that brought the fourth-century city to its knees. Handsomely realized, the film’s big idea is to set the ‘perfection’ of the stars against the imperfection down here on earth. Cue jaw-dropping cuts from outer space down into the streets of the city, and a kind of musing, dialectical vibe. Unfortunately, Agora suffers from poor acting across the board (Max Minghella is no movie star), while its Euclidean sense of space asserts itself in a circular narrative that spends an age going nowhere. In essence, Agora is about a bunch of religious fanatics acting like c*nts. Who’d have though it, eh?
Finally came a late screening of Dogtooth, a Greek film from Giorgos Lanthimos balls deep in madness. I mean real, heroic levels of insanity. If you ever watched the family dinner scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and found yourself thinking, ‘I wonder how they got so fucked up…’, Dogtooth offers some answers. It’s about an absolutely mental mum and dad who’ve kept their kids indoors their whole lives and taught them that the planes that fly overhead are toys; zombies are yellow plants; and cats are the most dangerous animals known to man (after a brilliantly funny slaughter scene). They’ve made up a brother who lives on the outside but dies, and bus in a security guard each week to service the son. Crazy shit. Eventually, the eldest daughter gets wind that something’s up (or, in truth, her natural instincts begin to win their war with perceived reality) and all hell breaks lose. Blackly funny and lightly horrific, Dogtooth keeps you enthralled with the sheer brutal lunacy of the parents’ behaviour, which gradually and brilliantly tips over from the hilarious to the bizarre to the shocking to the sickening. Great stuff.
There’ll be more to come tomorrow.
