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user Doug Cummings - Cannes Film Festival, Entry 2 blueArrow
5/27/2007; 6:45:55 PM (reads: 115, responses: 0)
mourningpic:
The Mourning Forest
By Robert Koehler
First, a bit of housekeeping.....The challenges--and near-impossibilities (technical, logistical, and otherwise)--of regularly posting from Cannes have proven nearly insurmountable during the first year that we're attempting this. I hope that the following postings will help fill in the gap of time since the previous post. Given that I was reporting on Cannes for the Christian Science Monitor, reviewing films for Variety, and prepping material for upcoming writing in Cinema Scope magazine, the blogging thing got a bit overshadowed. I'll try to manage this better next year, for Cannes' 61st edition.
Speaking of my previous post: if a whiff of dejection could be gleaned from it, that was because too many films in the first days of the festival were either poor or disappointing or a little bit of both. I can't say that matters improved over the following days and on to the end of the competition. On this, I have to say that I'm parting company with a number of my friends and colleagues here (such as Tony Scott in the New York Times) who have declared the 60th edition one of the best of recent years. I would argue that this is wrong on a few counts:
NO COLOSSAL YOUTH
There was no film in the competition that approached the heights of Pedro Costa's masterpiece in last year's competition, Colossal Youth. Only Naomi Kawase's highly controversial The Mourning Forest strove to do something new with cinema, while Silent Light showed Carlos Reygadas being yet again a man who follows his own rules and precepts, this time training his expansive eyes on a love triangle in a Mennonite community in Mexico. Just as the Kawase marked a stark departure from her previous feature, Shara, (but don't tell this to some of my Cannes buddies, who fled for the exits long before a stunning ending that suggested Taste of Cherry remade by a Buddhist), so the Reygadas contained a rhythm and visual language that was hugely different from his last film, Battle in Heaven. In fact, the only thing that conjured up Colossal Youth was a short by Costa, made for the omnibus film in Directors Fortnight, O Estado do mundo, titled Tarrafal. Ventura, the star of Youth, is back, surrounded by other emigres from Cape Verde-- ghosts one and all. There's even a sighting of a rabbit hunter, whom Ventura and his ghost pals think has no chance of making a kill; this, in turn, points to Costa's other new short film, titled naturally The Rabbit Hunters, shown recently in the Jeonju film festival.
PROMISES WEREN'T KEPT
Where or where do we start with the disappointments? As if My Blueberry Nights wasn't enough to kick off the party with a crushingly minor doodle of a movie--even the hardest of hardcore Wong Kar-wai-ites couldn't stir a defense--the previously noted The Banishment and Psalms/Tehilim kept the disappointment train rolling. Tarantino's expanded Death Proof was surely no improvement on his shorter form edition for Grindhouse.....it was just longer, but with that where'd-it--go? lap dance reinserted.
For admirers of Fatih Akin's Head-On, his new The Edge of Heaven exposed a director who has little-to-no idea how to create an interesting shot, and whose tortured manner of storytelling (the death of not one but two characters is foretold in title cards) was one of Cannes '07's major embarrassments. In ways even more depressing, the great Bela Tarr returned to Cannes seven years after his masterpiece,Werckmeister Harmonies, with a misbegotten adaptation of an obscure George Simenon novel, The Man From London, that never found visual or thematic traction, and revealed once and for all that Tarr is an artist who finds fullest expression when he liberates himself from plot.
Marjane Satrapi's charming and bracing autobiographical graphic novels, Persepolis 1 and 2, have been faithfully adapted by her and co-director Vincent Paronaud into an animated film version, but the emotional impact has been significantly diminished by the narrative compression, and the books' chapter-based episodes make for an awfully episodic movie. In this all-French film, people in Tehran and Vienna alike speak in Francais; I await the English- language version (care of Sony Classics) with a certain horror, given that Catherine Deneuve reprises her role as Satrapi's mom--this even though Deneuve's Engljsh is notoriously impenetrable.
TOO MANY BAD MOVIES BY BAD DIRECTORS
The Competition lineup alone was stuffed with 'em. There's our old bugaboo, Kim Ki-duk (see my Buenos Aires postings for the full Kim hoe-down), who surprised no one--except perhaps Derek Elley--with Breath, which was screened and mercifully forgotten. Christophe Honore is clearly mad, having shifted from his unwatchable Bataille workout, Ma Mere, to the dreadful Dans Paris, and now to Love Songs. I avoided this like the plague; having seen how he butchered the French chanson tradition at the end of Dans Paris, a feature full of chansons a la Honore sounded like a long night in Hell. From nearly every account (except many French critics), it was.
Julian Schnabel, who should stick to painting, is credited with "directing" The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (based on Jean- Dominique Bauby's autobiographical account of his own debilitating stroke, written with a code system to spell words in which he blinked his one operable eye for his therapist), but the film is really made by his genius cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski. It is a purely Hollywood account (which will be the official French film this year lapped up by Hollywood) of an arrogant man made humble and thoughtful by infirmity, and reduces the great French actor Mathieu Almaric (whose real performance of the festival was in the fascinating and brave Nicolas Klotz Fortnight film, La question humaine) to a few expressions and voice-over narration. James Gray, who continues to spin his wheels about New York Russians on both sides of the law in the ultra-straight and stupefyingly boring We Own the Night--those watching who think they're in some kind of Little Odessa/The Yards timeloop-cum-flashback will be forgiven--has lost all artistic credibility.
Denys Arcand, who hasn't made a good film since Jesus of Montreal, closed Cannes with L'age des tenebres, furthering Cannes' tradition of concluding with a film with no comers. (Nobody, I mean, nobody, had the slightest urge to see it.) And taking up the rear with an odorous work that many were comparing to the worst Cannes titles ever screened--and in which the Ontario Cinematheque's James Quandt left during opening credits when the film's broad, grotesque acting was already amply in evidence--Emir Kusturica's Promise Me This did as much to permanently destroy any remaining shreds of a filmmaker's reputation as any film could. If no film was as good this year as Colossal Youth, no film in last year's lineup was as unendurable as Promise Me This.
Even after the Palmares (just handed out during this posting, and which I will write about in the next post), I continued to hear praise for this year's lineup. This Pollyannish view reached the point of extreme absurdity in the bar of the Gray d'Albion Hotel (where I saw best actress winner Jeon Do-yeon, for Lee Chang-dong's exceptionally rich and risk-taking drama Secret Sunshine, arrive triumphantly from her press conference and tearfully hug a proud and moved Lee) when Dutch critic Peter van Buren claimed this to be the best Cannes in 25 years, even though he had seen only four films.
Next--the Palmares, good, bad and ugly. Plus, the worthy films.
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