On my first day here, I posted a few thoughts about what the Cannes film festival looks like to a movie lover on the outside. I think a slight change of heart might be in order.
After spending somewhere in the region of 10 hours or so sitting in theatres around the Croisette, it’s obvious to me that to suggest the Cannes film festival doesn’t care about film is ridiculous. One of the most pleasurable aspects of the screenings is the sense of history that swirls around the air. There is a palpable sense of pride in and seriousness about the legacy of this festival, which has played host to (and discovered) so many of the key names in world cinema over the last 62 years. Every time the Cannes logo unfolds on the screen (to music that sounds an awful lot like the intro to Harry Potter, which is a bit weird), a frisson electrifies the audience because you know that the film you are about to see has been selected by people who take their job as arbiters of cinema very seriously indeed.
At least, most of the time. And that’s why it’s so painful when they get it wrong. The screenings of The Da Vinci Code and Indiana Jones at this festival in years gone by were two of the most colossal acts of selling-out imaginable (whereas, for instance, the decision to go with Up this year is at least defensible on the grounds that Pixar are an important creative voice in cinema right now). The thing is, Cannes doesn’t – or certainly shouldn’t – either need or want to be influenced by Hollywood. It’s not like Hollywood lacks for other opportunities to spread its avaricious message. Let Cannes be reserved for the true greats, not the truly famous, let it have the boldness to say, ‘No, our vision of the greatness of cinema, of its place in world culture, leaves no room for your tawdry spectacles.’
The fact that this won’t happen is down to two things. The first is pragmatism – festivals are commercial enterprises (mostly) – they have bills to pay and funding to attract. The way you attract that funding – which takes us to point two – is to ensure bums on seats, and nothing ensures bums on seats in this moronic culture more than a dash of celebrity. Cannes has simply changed with the times – and as the people (critics included; critics especially) who come here seem genuinely more excited by the beauty pageant aspect of the competition, and a Top Trumps style assessment of who’s up and who’s down, individuals and their star-wattage begin to eclipse a serious analysis of how Cannes reflects the landscape of modern film.
I’m guilty too. The blog I wrote yesterday about the Palme d’Or is only really talking about personality, not the quality of films, which is the trap you fall into when you’re out here. Surrounded by gossip, opinions and who-might-win chit chat, that narrow picture really does begin to feel more important than the broader view.
But anyway, I’ve seen a bunch more films, and I’ve got screenings to get to, so here’s some quick reviews.
First up is Tales From The Golden Age, a portmanteau film (no wait – it’s good!) from Romanian directors Crisian Mungiu, Hanno Hofer, Razvan Marculescu, Constantin Popescu and Ioana Uricaru. Each filmmaker has directed an episode based on an urban legend from the age of Nicolae Ceausescu, the diminutive communist dictator. So we have the story of the official visit that ended in an impromptu all night circus ride; the photographer whose picture skills left a little to be desired; a chicken driver in over his head; the greedy policeman and the pig he wanted for Christmas; and the two kids who made money by bottling air. All of them share a sweet comic sensibility and, perhaps more unlikely, a sense of nostalgia for the period. What shines through all these tales is the character of the Romanian people. However grim things were, however absurd and corrupt and illogical the nature of the system that governed them, communism really did bring people together. In the tiny apartment blocks, the schools, the stores with nothing on the shelves, the people are always pulling together, trading a complex social network of favours and friendships to find a way – any way – to express their humanity and need for love in a loveless, often inhumane country. The stand out for me was probably the policeman and his pig – which built to a hands-over-the-eyes denouement featuring a gassed pig, a blowtorch and the inevitable waiting to happen. Cristian Mungiu’s section (at least, I think it was his, judging by the number of people who left straight after, as if that was all they came to see) – the story of a chicken driver whose descent into criminality stands as a metaphor for the corruption and depression of the whole country – was the longest but also the least funny.
Speaking of hands-over-the-eyes, next up was Antichrist (pictured) by Lars Von Trier, a film by turns hilariously pretentious, grippingly dramatic and unwatchably horrific. The trick is working out which bit is which. This is not a film that lends itself to knee jerk reaction – although it’s absolutely going to provoke it anyway. It’s about a middle class couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) whose son dies while they’re having sex (in a jaw dropping prologue that looks like an art school graduate’s joke about what an art school film should look like). Dafoe is a therapist who takes his wife into a cabin in the woods to deal with her grief – but gets a shit barrel full of trouble instead. Quite what he expected when taking her to a CABIN IN THE WOODS FOR FUCK’S SAKE is not entirely clear to me. Von Trier has been accused of misogyny many times and this film, which deals explicitly with the nature of the feminine, feels like both a provocation and a riposte to anybody who has dared criticise him in the past. ‘You think that was misogynist? You haven’t seen anything yet…’ There’s some stunning compositions and photography here, but also an over reliance on the doomy soundtrack to ratchet up the tension. But more than that, this is Von Trier, and what becomes truly terrifying is the sense that there simply aren’t boundaries – moral, physical or sexual. Quite how he persuaded Charlotte Gainsbourg to put this much trust in him is something I’d love to know, because she goes all the way in the service of this film, which can’t always reward her courage. Still, richly metaphorical and absolutely stuffed full of Deeper Meaning to unravel, it’s one that deserves and needs to be chewed over. And that’s before you get to the talking fox…
Von Trier has said that Antichrist came from a period in his life when he was depressed and considering suicide, which is something that Henri-Georges Clouzot would have recognised. Clouzot was the genius director of Quai des Orfèvres and Manon, one of the giants of world cinema. In 1964, suffering from insomnia and depression, and desperate to find a new cinematic language to express his pathologies, he wrote a script – L’Enfer’ – about a jealous husband driven to madness by his wife’s presumed affairs. Despite starring sensationally gorgeous megastar Romy Schneider, the production was a disaster as Clouzot disappeared into his own dreams and nightmares, forever looking for something that remained out of his grasp. He shot hours and hours of weird, psychedelic tests, experimenting with new effects and mind warping imagery. Eventually, after a tortuous period on set in which he clashed with the actors and the crew, Clouzot suffered a heart attack and the film was abandoned. This is the story that his widow, Ines, told to director Serge Bromberg before giving him access to the surviving cans of footage. Bromberg has used the material to piece together an enthralling documentary, The Hell of Henri-Georges Clouzot, interspersed with staged reconstructions where no material exists, to take us on a journey into the darkest depths of the creative process. What’s clear is that the film really does look like a lost masterpiece, a synthesis of Hitchcockian psychosis and pure ‘60s style. It’s an overtly sexual story, with Schneider and her female co-stars shot with what must, for the time, have looked like pornographic frankness. Though re-made (or made, really) by Claude Chabrol in 1994, Bromberg’s film deserves to be the last word on an enigmatic film.
What felt like the first ‘regular’ film I saw all day was also the last, Denis Dercourt’s sumptuous Tomorrow at Dawn. It begins with a rousing prologue that sees Jeremie Renier engaged in a duel to defend the honour of the Second Hussars. It’s a deft piece of misdirection, because this is actually a modern, middle-class tale of Renier’s brother, a pianist played by Vincent Perez who is having a mid-life crisis. He leaves his wife and kid to live in his sick mother’s house, where his brother pulls him in to a world of role play that gets frighteningly real. Chicly photographed and well performed, it shares a theme common to several of the films I’ve seen here – about the way in which the true horror and madness of the human condition can show itself in the unlikeliest places. It all leads to a terrific pay off, which was greeted with sustained applause (though not by me – I’m too English to start clapping in a cinema. It’s not a circus. Or, hang on, is it?).
Got to run to my next screening now, but will check back in soon.
