Not quite brain dead
Preston Wilder on the ‘solid’ films of the Cannes Film Festival, that were occasionally inspiring
It’s now exactly a week since the curtain came down on the Cannes Film Festival, with the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) going to director Ken Loach’s tale of the Irish Troubles The Wind that Shakes the Barley, the first British film to take the top prize since Secrets and Lies in 1996. As so often at Cannes, the Jury’s decision came as a surprise, both because the Loach didn’t seem to have any strong partisans among assembled critics and because it was the first Competition film on the screening schedule, shown at the beginning of Day 1 – which is also why I missed it, having arrived a few hours late to the party.
A week later, with Cannes historians busily researching the last time the Palme went to a film in the opening slot (a clear disadvantage, since it has to stand firm in the Jury’s memory against the assault of 20 later films), a consensus is slowly forming about this year’s slate. Not a great year, say pundits – as they seem to conclude every year – but a solid one; almost every film in Competition had its champions, even Southland Tales, 31-year-old director Richard Kelly’s follow-up to indie cult movie Donnie Darko. Clocking in at two-and-a-half hours, with a cast that includes The Rock (now credited as Dwayne Johnson) and Sarah Michelle Gellar, this is an incoherent car-wreck of a movie – what might result if a party-addled student tried to write a Thomas Pynchon novel, with song numbers and weird character names (Baron von Westphalen, Simon Theory) and a grand satirical plan to skewer America Today even though Kelly’s sensibility doesn’t go far beyond vomit jokes and Star Wars references. The film’s reach so exceeds its grasp it becomes embarrassing, but some highbrow critics thought it Relevant – which it might be, but only in being so stupid, reflecting the stupidity of the culture-at-large. A pair of LA film students standing in line behind me approvingly called it “way mental”, their only problem being that it could’ve been more futuristic: “[The setting] was only, like, 2008. They could’ve done, like, 2012.” I rest my case.
From the ridiculous to the sublime – at least if you believe the many who adored Volver, Pedro Almodovar’s latest and the undisputed critical favourite at this year’s Festival. Already a big hit in Spain, Volver (the title means ‘To Return’) is like a Greatest Hits album for the country’s leading filmmaker, pushing his familiar themes of the past few years – women’s resilience and self-sacrifice (especially if they’re mothers, and this is closest to his 1999 hit All About My Mother), nostalgic nods to traditional Spain and movies of the 50s, melodrama wrapped in faint ironic scare-quotes. Maybe that’s why it feels under-dramatised, as though (like Woody Allen) Almodovar now depends on his Almodovar-tude to patch up the gaps – or maybe Penelope Cruz isn’t a strong enough actress to carry a movie. ‘Time to move on!’ I cried inwardly as the film kept ‘volver’-ing to past glories – but almost everyone loved it, and most were shocked when it ‘only’ got Best Screenplay, plus a joint Best Actress award for its leading ladies.
It often seemed like the Jury had watched a different Festival to the rest of us, not just giving Loach the Palme but awarding the Grand Prize (runner-up) to Flanders, a film received with very tepid applause at the screening I attended. It’s actually excellent, one of several war movies in Competition (a sign of the times, no doubt), made in the trademark stripped-down style of director Bruno Dumont; he has a rugged eye for Nature and a view of people best described as animalistic – and it’s no surprise that he makes War a near-constant procession of killing and rutting. Not exactly a film to pack the multiplexes, though eclipsed in the highbrow-pretentiousness stakes by Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth, a 154-minute behemoth consisting mostly of poverty-stricken Portuguese having 10-minute monologues in artfully underlit rooms (the title actually translates as ‘Youth on the March’, which is vaguely hilarious since the characters are mostly middle-aged and barely have the energy to move, let alone march). I actually semi-liked it – some of the visuals are sublime – but it’s not really a film you can imagine people paying to see.
Yet the main undercurrent at this year’s “solid” Cannes was the narrowing of the gap between arthouse and commercial: the Festival began with ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and also included ‘X-Men 3’ (neither actually in Competition), but many of the films were closer – at least in intention – to those brash crowd-pleasers than the rarefied aestheticism of the Pedro Costa.
Again and again, filmmakers tried to grapple with real-world problems. Richard Linklater got a fine cast together – including Ethan Hawke and Bruce Willis – for Fast Food Nation, based on Eric Schlosser’s bestselling expos? of junk-food horrors (did you know your Big Mac could include beef from 10 different cows? You do now). The film is slow to start, coming off rote and didactic, but improves mightily as it expands from an attack on things McDonalds to a general call for activism against “the Machine”, the mechanisation not just of food but the world in general. “Don’t just hope; DO something!” we’re enjoined – which might also be Nanni Moretti’s rallying-cry in The Caiman, though he also (poignantly) knows how difficult it is to do anything. Moretti, an Italian filmmaker, wants to make a film about Silvio Berlusconi, the dangerous-buffoon Prime Minister who’s dominated both Italy’s politics and its popular culture through his trash-TV channels. But what kind of film? A straight biography isn’t enough – “Everyone knows that already!” protests one of the characters – nor does he want the kind of rabble-rousing satire Michael Moore made in Fahrenheit 9/11, poking fun at Berlusconi’s gaffes: “That’s what the left-wing audience wants to hear”. The film becomes a study of failure, suggesting something truly heretical about Cinema – that it may in fact be useless before truly important subjects, as impotent as its well-meaning hero, a hapless producer of B-movies and a dreamer in a dreamers’ profession. The result was one of the best films in Competition.
Caiman probably won’t travel much outside Italy; certainly, it’ll have trouble crossing the Atlantic. Yet there’s no reason why a film like Indigenes shouldn’t appeal, if people only weren’t so brainwashed against ‘foreign’ films. This one’s French, set in WW2, following the exploits of four Algerian soldiers (the cast won a joint Best Actor prize) fighting for the “motherland” only to endure constant racism. It’s a lot like Glory, the 1989 film that won Denzel Washington an Oscar, only with the opposite Message: the trouble with Glory was the way it viewed War as a sign of hope, black and white corpses lying next to each other on the battlefield presaging the later equality of civil rights. Here, on the other hand, WW2 is the last flicker of hope (the English title is ‘Days of Glory’), the last days when Arabs believed the lie of equality; “If I free a country, it’s my country,” says one of the Algerians, speaking of liberated France – and the audience (especially a French audience) knows the exact same words could’ve been applied to Algeria a decade later.
Indigenes is also a thrilling war movie with a great action climax – though not as thrilling as The Host, the big revelation of this year’s Cannes. There were better films at the Festival (my favourite in Competition was Lucas Belvaux’s superb The Right of the Weakest) and ones that were more talked-about. A day after 50 per cent of Namibians polled by a radio station said they’d like the birth-date of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby to be declared a national ho
liday (!), there was Brad himself in Babel, an excitingly-made drama if not quite the masterpiece proclaimed by some. Kirsten Dunst was Marie Antoinette, and many critics cheered though others booed lustily (vociferous audience reaction is a Cannes trademark). But nothing quite matched the ripple of excitement caused by The Host, a Korean monster movie that wasn’t even in Competition, playing in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar.
Why is the film so exciting? Because it knocks down barriers. This is an action film that makes X-Men look tired; the monster’s first appearance is so imaginatively staged and shot it transcends its slightly dodgy special effects (the film cost $11 million, massive by Korean standards but only a tenth of the usual blockbuster budget). It’s a film that can appeal to intellectuals and film buffs – metaphors swim below the surface, with sharp satire of government bureaucracy and anti-terror hysteria – while aimed squarely at the mass audience. The Wind that Shakes the Barley probed the past but The Host showed a possible future, where ‘commercial’ doesn’t have to mean brain-dead. For a few moments, Cannes 2006 was more than “solid”. It was inspirational.
