Author name: Blake Williams

Tender Son – The Frankenstein Project (Competition), What starts promisingly enough eventually relishes in style over substance, serving as a demo reel for Mundruczó’s talent with the camera more than any ability to craft interesting characters or engaging drama. The film introduces us to a filmmaker who is holding an audition for a few roles in an upcoming film, and a young man shows up for an audition who seems completely uninterested in acting. After the director has deployed his usual tactics for squeezing performances out of non-actors, the boy loses his cool on fellow auditionee, igniting a witch hunt. It’s easy to get absorbed into the set-up, but after the first half-hour, it never delivers beyond, like I said, the occasional bravura cinematography. Some violent scenes littered throughout the running time have an ‘oh damn’ factor, and the filmmaker who was holding the auditions makes a late return to restore hope that we might get to see every character die.

Route Irish (Competition), I’ve had a grudge against Loach ever since the utterly mediocre Wind That Shakes the Barley took home the Palme four years ago, but that cannot be used as an explanation for how completely bored I was by this generic political thriller. Not a single sympathetic character can be found in this shouting match between Mark Womack and everyone else. Having no real drama or catharsis at all, this is just another failed Iraq film that ends up celebrating violence in its misguided ‘critique’ of war.

More Cannes Coverage:

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11

Lily Sometimes (Directors’ Fortnight), While this comes a bit too close to The Other Sister territory to be more than a guilty pleasure, Berthaud’s style and direction, as well as the lovely Diane Kruger, are just as potent as in their previous meet-up in Frankie. Two sisters, whose mother dies in the opening scene, struggle to get by, mainly because Lily, the obnoxiously compulsive younger sister, seems borderline mentally unstable. While Lily scurries through the wild in skimpy gowns with frazzled hair, having orgies with random boys in the woods, her uptight, married sister, Clara, chases her around, trying to maintain her behavior while pleasing her even more humorless beau. The film’s best scene shows Clara getting fed up with Lily and nearly offing her; the outcome of this is just as much a relief as it is a disappointment. Not to fear, though, Lily shows big sis the ways of the wild, forging a promiscuous liberation that is as feel-good as it is repugnant and contrived. Strange that this won the sidebar.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Competition), ended up being (just about) what I’ve been waiting all week for. First things first, this was not as immediately satisfying as Syndromes and a Century, and in the first half I was finding myself getting frequently annoyed that Weerasethakul was doing things which were alarmingly predictable coming from him (illness, ghosts, folklore, cheesy Thai pop songs). Not that any of it is any less enrapturing than in his previous films, but the familiarity was a bit of a let-down, and almost enough to make me uneasy. But, this is also, notably, the first time I’ve gone into a Weerasethakul film with the kind of astronomical expectations that are always impossible to satiate. I saw Tropical Malady before Syndromes, and while I was certainly, by that time, a fan of the former film, there was still an unknown as to what he was capable of, allowing the latter film to blow my mind without any foreshadowing of what was coming. By the end of Uncle Boonmee, though, this was more or less put to rest.

Boonmee further develops what seems like it will always and forever be Weerasethakul’s primary theme in his oeuvre: reincarnation; not just in the Buddhist and spiritual sense, but also in cinematic and political ones. His previous films have had bifurcated structures that emphasize a repetition/evolution/deviation in the roles and scenarios which reflect and distort one half from the other. Often, though, this aspect of uncanny repetition is also exhibited from film to film, not just limited to the two halves of a single film. One of the accompanying shorts in the ‘Primitive’ project, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, makes this almost explicit, when the wandering camera settles on a water buffalo right next to the tree from the climatic scene of Tropical Malady, in which nature and ideas are reincarnated in a completely different context. Another illustration of cinematic reincarnation is seen when the same actors appear from one film to the next – Sakda Kaewbuadee playing the young soldier and tiger in Tropical Malady, then a monk in Syndromes, now a monk again in Boonmee – evoking similar mannerisms and character traits from past films (lives). The same applies to Jenjira Pongpas, who first appeared in Blissfully Yours before reappearing in Syndromes and now Boonmee, carrying her limp from film to film. Of course, her limp and Pongpas’ monasticism (as well as his military service from Malady) borrow from their real lives (or, at least, their current lives) in which these scenarios are actualities. Reincarnation, actually, is perhaps the most apt metaphor for the phenomenon of role-changing in which actors engage.

Also notable here is that politics have come further into the fore than in the past. I got less of a visceral jolt from Boonmee than its two predecessors, but certain moments and themes – the monologues of cultural extinction, ‘beasts’ in captivity, and news-watching gone sci-fi – clearly relevant to the present political climate of Bangkok (and, unfortunately, many other places) left a lingering eeriness and mystery that Weerasethakul has become an expert at suspending. Leaving ample room to mix and match character/animal/insect relations, as well as timelines, Uncle Boonmee is a singular cinematic puzzle.

Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs) (Un Certain Regard), Speaking of cinematic puzzles, not a soul in Cannes knows what the hell Kerrigan was thinking of with this baffling project. Reading like an aborted biopic on Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick that was assembled anyway, the film combines aimless scenes of Géraldine Pailhas walking, scene rehearsals, on and off-set drama with Kerrigan himself, allusions to a pregnancy, and pretty cool footage of Pailhas trying to imitate Slick’s singing voice for the film (or whatever it is). As would be expected from something like this, there is an iciness in the air that makes the filmmaking process look like a dive into hell (not far removed from the tone of INLAND EMPIRE). I like the stream-of-consciousness of it all, but if I’m going to look at a dissection of the working process and interior ramblings of a filmmaker, I would hope for a better subject than Lodge Kerrigan.

The Tiger Factory (Directors’ Fortnight), I’m less inclined to post much of anything on this film because for about twenty minutes in the middle of the screening the English subtitles went out of sync by about a minute (this was at the official premiere, and the producer had to leap out of his chair to get the projectionists to fix the problem), but this happened over an hour into this dire, miserable mess; the only film that I contemplated walking out on. The film is about a girl, who makes a living jerking off pigs and shooting the cum into mama pigs, who is pregnant herself. She has her baby, which is immediately pronounced dead and carried away. A whole lot of ‘not much’ happens before a late twist gives the film a hint of purpose, but it was a serious case of too little, too late.

Ha Ha Ha (Un Certain Regard), I’ve only seen four of Hong’s films now, but I totally ‘ha ha ha’ed at this one more than any of the others. My lack of exposure to the filmmaker is probably fortunate, based on the claims that his films are all basically remakes of the previous ones, because everything felt very fresh for me. Apart from being just a really sharp rom-com, the film is structured around an intriguing set-up (two friends meet up after not seeing each other for a while and talk about their girl troubles) that gives the film some tension (the audience quickly learns, through the fact that we get images to accompany the conversation, that the two friends’ girl troubles, unbeknown to them, involve the same girl). Though this scenario doesn’t lead to the anticipated epiphany that one would expect, the film has so many turns and developments (probably too many, actually) that I wasn’t left feeling like anything was missing. Not much to say to say more than it’s a really well-observed relationship study with hilarious, often dense characters.

More Cannes Coverage:

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11

Poetry (Competition), surprisingly reminiscent of last year’s Bong Joon-ho film Mother, Lee’s elegant film never lives up to the promise of its set-up. The film takes a look at a grandmother who, upon learning that she has Alzheimer’s disease, which is making her forget certain words, decides to take up learning how to write poetry. In a parallel plot, her grandson, who lives with her, has been named as one of six possible perpetrators of an unspeakable crime. The film is drawn-out with a leisurely pace that suits the proceedings rather well, but my main problem is that the two plots can’t find a way to wrap themselves together in any sort of meaningful or satisfactory way, remaining separate until a last-minute effort to tie the film together is as poorly written as it is extraneous and, ultimately, unnecessary. The poetry-writing, which could have been shown in any number of interesting ways given the protagonist’s disability, is rarely looked at with more than a 101 looking glass, and is not even noticeably hindered by the fact that the woman who is learning it is losing more and more words from her vocabulary every day. Perhaps I was too influenced, and thus disappointed, by my own hopes for how the intriguing scenario would materialize, but I have to say that, even with the deviation from my expectations, it offers little chew on after the credits start rolling.

Lights Out (Un Certain Regard), The name Agnes Godard showing up in the credits is the only reason I can come up with as to why something like this could end up in Cannes rather than living out a two or three-week run at the multiplex before gracefully disappearing into crap-movie oblivion. The movie centers around the disappearance of a high school student named Simon Werner (the French title for the film translates to the much more evocative title Simon Werner is Missing…), and focuses on 4 or 5 characters who were affiliated with Simon in some way. One by one, we follow each character leading up to Simon’s disappearance, and the climatic hunt for him one night during a party. Even though this vaguely intriguing premise has been done before, most recently in Elephant, the real trouble is that every character in the film is only a generic and superficial representation of a different high school stereotype. Pompous jock, check. Popular pretty girl, check. Artsy girl with dyed hair, Nerd with glasses and eccentric father, Submissive best friends to jocks, check, check, check. Not to mention that the supposed emotional pay-off for the film centers around a character who we only see briefly, being an asshole, and his five or so friends who also lead unsympathetic existences. Not far off from Dawson’s Creek.

The Joy (Directors’ Fortnight), This indescribable film got one of the worst receptions of the festival, which is too bad, because for all of its flaws, it was one of the more risk-taking and intriguingly experimental narratives that I’ve seen this year. I was often reminded of the Larrieu Bros.’ awesome Les Derniers jours du monde from last year’s Directors’ Fortnight, with its anarchic and viscerally dizzying portrayal of society on the brink of apocalypse. Much of the running time follows a handful of teenagers who run around an empty Brazil in animal or jungle costumes, or naked, sometimes acting like zombies, avoiding unseen armed forces who could shoot anything, at anytime. Because nothing very definitive ever actually happens, it’s clear that what is going on at any given moment is not as important as just absorbing the dystopian lives and carefree rhythms on display, which is often enough to satisfy. This is apparently the middle film in a trilogy, which is pretty annoying.

Picco (Directors’ Fortnight), The most provocative film I saw at Cannes this year, I wish this had been placed in Competition, if only to spice things up a bit over there. The film is a brutal representation of supposedly true events that took place in a German youth prison some years ago, in which two tough guys force one of their two cellmates to help them torture the other cellmate in an attempt to get him to commit suicide. While the first half of the film is a casual examination of life in the prison, complete with cigarette trading, chores, and rapings, the latter half sees the slow meltdown in this particular cell with the main four cellmates that is extremely difficult to watch at times. The film is painfully real and claustrophobic, but in the end, the more and more recurrent question with this kind of violent film is the lingering thought: How much is too much? With rapings, beatings, torturing become more and more common and gruesome in the cinema, can anything be justified? There is very little joy in watching something like this play out beyond technically admiration, and while I can’t say for sure that it brings something new to the discussion of violence in the cinema, I can vouch for a compelling and memorable viewing experience that is impossible to be indifferent toward.

More Cannes Coverage:

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11

You All Are Captains (Directors’ Fortnight), the film opens with a young man and his partner, presumably both filmmakers, detailing the mechanics of a camera apparatus – how the device inhales reality, flips and inverts it, to record an image on emulsion. This demonstration is being done for a room full of what appears to be school children around age 10. Shot entirely in black and white, the directed pedagogy and presumed naivety of the children make one immediately think of early Kiarostami work, especially shorts like Two Solutions For One Problem. This demo is taking place, we find, because the kids are going to be given cameras to go around town to film the troubled lives they lead. After learning that the kids aren’t ‘ordinary’ school children, but ‘underprivileged’ ones, the uneasiness that we feel in this poorly-thought out, exploitative experiment is also felt by the children, who rebel against Laxe, the director. From this point on, the project only falls further apart, because the kids will not cooperate with this man who they do not trust – a man who shows, on camera, that he doesn’t know how to win over the trust of, much less direct, children. I imagine that many will find interest in this as a study on the pitfalls and difficulties of working with children, but when the documented man who cannot work with his actors is the same man who is making the film that I am watching, I very quickly wish I was just watching a film by someone who does know how to direct child actors (like, for instance, Kiarostami). It’s no secret that children are difficult to work with, nor that they will reject someone who disrespects them; this also applies to your film’s audience.

All Good Children (Directors’ Fortnight), A momentarily lovely film about adolescent loss and lust – beautifully filmed by Duffy, and warmly acted by the young cast – has too shallow a focus to avoid spiraling completely out of control into an absurd and laughable thriller. My memory of this one has become pretty hazy pretty quickly, but think The Secret Garden meets The Good Son for an idea of what Duffy brings to the table here.

Certified Copy (Competition), ***Knowing anything about this film is a spoiler. While I’ll keep this capsule Spoiler-Free, I think that reading a basic synopsis, or even viewer reactions, before viewing this minor masterpiece is a bit of a party-pooper.***   I ended up seeing this again today, after attending the public screening yesterday, because of a scheduling mix up (I actually thought I was in line for Of Gods & Men, oops!), but it ended up being a very happy accident, as I got to see my favorite film of the festival a much-needed second time.

Within the opening minutes, I was already catching things that were making me completely re-evaluate the roles of the major characters in the film (and these roles are still anything but nailed down for me, even after seeing it twice). The film has a strikingly similar set-up to (and will often be compared with) Before Sunset: a book release brings together two people who then spend the rest of the movie talking about art, philosophy, and relationships. But there is a very interesting twist that happens, one that kind of eases its way into the dialogue in a way that it is, at first, almost imperceptible; one that forces the viewer to question all of the conversations and mannerisms and meetings that took place before. The role-playing games really take off from here, and the results are, perhaps misleadingly, occasionally off-putting, even if they are always fascinating. The acting styles from both Binoche and Shimell are in a constant state of flux between naturalism and excessive Romanticism and cringe-inducing hamminess, to the point where, during the first screening, I actually reconsidered Binoche’s acting abilities altogether (“maybe she’s only effective when masked behind French dialogue?”, I thought). And this isn’t even touching the levels that Shimell approaches, with an awfully performed scene in an Italian restaurant in which he loses his cool and goes on a rant about wine-drinkers, newly-weds, and Elle (Binoche), all of which is so over-the-top and poorly written that I was, on both screenings, starting to lose faith in Kiarostami’s vision.

But, these few bits that I would call ‘low points’ have enough of a hint of intentionality that it never get derailed. Certain questionable moments are left open enough that they will likely be points of debate for years to come. This is especially supported by the fact that a ‘terrible scene’ will often be followed by a gut-wrenching, spot on one that nails everything; I chuckled at how effortlessly Kiarostami was having his way with me. And above all, like the best of his work, this film has a Heart, even if it isn’t always felt. This is clearest when the film’s final moments come, which are as mystifying as they are heartbreaking as they are beautiful, ending with a closing line – once again throwing me off of a previous scene in the film that I thought I had nailed down – which is still ringing in my ears, choking me up, while I struggle to figure it out.

October (Un Certain Regard), If you like films where a grumpy misanthrope is forced to care for a baby, struggles with caring for the baby, tries his damnedest to get rid of it, then finally warms up to the baby and realizes that it only took one innocent soul to show him that life is not so bad, then this is the film for you, and may our paths never cross. (though to be fair, the film has a scene that works, in which a roomful of the guy’s ‘friends’ sardonically sing him Happy Birthday and then blow out his candles for him)

Udaan (Un Certain Regard), While I can’t say that I welcome this year’s Slumdog Millionaire with open arms, at least this tale of a down-and-out boy finally rising above a lifetime of trials, tribulations, and a bastard father doesn’t have a clear-cut route in its manipulative plot, and doesn’t drag its audience through blood, shit, and piss in order to convince us that this guy deserves a break. I think there would have to be a major break-through or revolution in Bollywood cinema for the industry to actually produce something that I would want to see more than once, and that certainly still applies to Udaan, which is over-long, one-dimensional, and trite. But it is quite a bit of fun, and, in some parts, surprisingly ‘gritty’ and realistic, suggesting genuine dangers for our hero. That said, it won’t win Best Picture, and will therefore live on, just as Slumdog should have, as a slightly-more-entertaining-than-usual blip on the radar.

More Cannes Coverage:

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11

Two Gates of Sleep (Directors’ Fortnight), Five minutes in, it crossed my mind that I might be watching the beginning moments in the career of a very gifted student of the schools of Malick and Tarkovsky; Griffin certainly lets it known, both in interviews and in his styling, who his heroes are. That Gates doesn’t live up to the promise of these opening minutes is both unsurprising and disappointing, mainly because, very intermittently, the ability seems to be there. This project’s ultimate downfall – which is common for films with this kind of ambitious search for an epic, quiet, nature-dwelling godliness – is that it becomes so precious, and so desperate for poeticism, that it auto-asphyxiates, blocking out any and all emotion or life. The sound design and photography are aces, and I think that Griffin and I would have a lot of overlap in our DVD collections, but, like Dolan, it is apparent that he wants to be his idols, rather than showing a reason to be amongst them. At least for now.

Certified Copy (Competition), see Day 7 write-up, in which I saw this a second time.

The Lips (Un Certain Regard), I like the flow and, forgive me, ‘focused aimlessness’ of Lips, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what in the world this film was trying to do, nor if it is completely fiction, completely doc, or both. My confusion is probably not entirely unintentional, nor completely the film’s fault, and I do not have a displeasurable memory of it (I actually had a similar, dazzlingly frustrated feeling while watching Our Beloved Month of August, for what it’s worth). Are these women acting out real interviews with real people, but in character? And what about the men who ogle them when they are all dolled up in their off hours? The press notes could tell me, but I’d prefer another look.

Young Girls in Black (Directors’ Fortnight), As one-dimensionally angsty as this film about two suicidal goth stereotypes often is, it somehow manages to be quite relaxing and enjoyable to watch. Like Civeyrac’s previous Through the Forest, it has a brooding dreaminess, that is not far off from how I remember feeling when I was a teenager watching The Virgin Suicides for the first time, that somehow connects to the nostalgia of being young without forgetting that it is often a scary and alienating mess. While the girls, obnoxiously, are typical Hot Topic anti-social butterfiles that everyone in high school always suspects will take their own lives, the film wins major points in the way it depicts the family life that they live in, which is cautiously jovial and kinetic, fully aware of the girls’ fragile states, while also being genuinely loving to the point where it is both baffling and understandable how they might have developed into these kinds of girls, who aspire to the heroic aspects of suicide. The film, which isn’t as ironic as the title might suggest, takes an interesting turn at the 2/3 point that unfortunately doesn’t really know where to go, but the last impression is still one of a breath of fresh air in a genre that is very often drowned in too-serious, pointless murk.

Blue Valentine (Un Certain Regard), I’m a little embarrassed to say, I guess because it has such a Sundance-y, Amerindie vibe to it (including a damn (and damn gorgeous) Grizzly Bear score), that I got more out of this than I did from Maren Ade’s, also affecting, recent break-up movie. But, alas, the inevitable second half of this (debut(!)) film was absolutely crushing. However, I do wish, for both this and Everyone Else, that the deterioration of their respective couplings were less black & white in their presentations (Valentine mixes the first few months with the last few days of its relationship, which of course will be only the most insanely blissful moments juxtaposed with cringeworthy ugliness, while Everyone Else‘s pair goes from seemingly fine to immature assholes almost at the flip of a switch). And while Valentine doesn’t seem to do much more than state the obvious – a relationship that is held together by, and whose raison d’être is, mutual physical attraction, is a ticking time bomb as middle age takes over, unfairly hitting one partner before the other – the performances by Gosling and Williams make the disintegration of a completely average and banal pair of individuals feel unrelentingly tragic.

More Cannes Coverage:

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11

Film Socialism (Un Certain Regard), as much as I would love to be one of those guys that can support anything Godard makes, I’m just not one of those guys. I don’t like having a finger wagged at me for only speaking English, which is exactly what this version of this film did, giving me a handicapped cut that is just as indecipherable as, well, any unsubtitled film will be if you do not speak the language. Strong visuals don’t make up for this. Many will defend the decision for ‘allowing’ us to watch the film for body language and its unique visual look, but there really isn’t much going on in that department that Godard hasn’t already been exploring for well over a decade: the plasticity of the video palette – a palette of over-saturated, sometimes crystal-clear, other times hyper-pixelated, imagery – and, of course, a soundtrack that drops out and swells awkwardly to underline that we’re watching a product that is synched and polished in post-production gimmicks. But how can I not feel short-changed when I am being deprived of language, when I know how key word-play is in Godard’s work? Would anglophone cinephiles be ok if there weren’t English subtitles for theatrical screenings of Breathless? One’s answer to that question will go a long way in determining how much one will like Film Socialism, a Godard film that, once again, tells me more in its plot synopsis than in my viewing of it. No Comment.

Carancho (Un Certain Regard), see the thumbnail of this film’s poster up top? Carancho is a really well-made version of exactly the type of film that that poster suggests it is. If you like really good episodes of prime-time crime dramas, with a twist of Crash (I would specify which one, but, for what it’s worth, it really could be both), this will satisfy.

The Wanderer (Directors’ Fortnight), Slow-burning and engaging enough to be mildly rewarding, but that it all culminates in the button-pushing scene that it does makes the entire film feel too calculated to provoke. Certain circumstances had every male in the audience squirming, feeling a bit of a ghost pain slightly below the waist, which are really the film’s most effective bits. It is here where the sensibilty is that ‘everyone would hate to be this kid’ before we end feeling that ‘everyone hates this kid.’

Everything Will Be Fine (Directors’ Fortnight), Everything is fine, at least for the first act, where the film has a pretty damn well-crafted sense of paranoia and dread draped over every minor decision that every character makes. The government can be scary when they really want you to keep your mouth shut. Add in strange developments about the protag’s looming deadline for a script that he’s writing, and his trouble with remembering to sign some papers to adopt a kid, and you have me pretty damn intriqued. Shame on me, because what it all adds up to is unimaginably lame, it truly is something (I’m sorry, but I’m just going to have to tell you: the whole film is the screenplay he’s writing (duh), which is being channeled through the fact that, I’m not kidding, his wife DIED because she was furious that he made a mistake on their adoption application that would have resulted in an, omigod, 2-week delay in finalizing their adoption a kid). But who am I kidding, I strongly recommend everyone see this film, and then come talk to me.

A Screaming Man (Competition), Did you hear! there’s a movie from Chad in the Competition line-up this year! I know right!? Chad, of all places! (but really, this was as dull as my cub scout pocket knife. A film from a country that we don’t often see films from does not make the film any more inherently interesting than any other films. Not only can this father/son feud’s outcome be seen by at least the halfway mark, but I couldn’t care less for anyone, nor comprehend many of the bizarre decisions that they made. I hear Dry Season is good, though.)

More Cannes Coverage:

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11

Le Quattro Volte (Directors’ Fortnight), while this is really just a refined take on what Frammartino was doing with his previous film The Gift, it is nonetheless a stronger, tighter film that is often an utterly riveting viewing experience. Frammartino’s camera grazes a rural Italian village, first following an old sheep herder around, capturing his chores and mannerisms. While much of the ‘action’ and camera framing feels like it was well-thought out and precisely placed (staged, even), the stronger moments that appear in the film are serendipitous in nature, like the spontaneous approach of a wild animal or the brakes of a parked car giving out, triggering an environmental domino effect that is so well-timed you would think that what is happening on the screen is impossible. That most of these serendipitous moments somehow fit into the loose narrative structure of the film – a Hukkle-esque circle-of-life outlook on the purpose of all persons, animals, and manufactured objects – feels so fresh that it invites a new cinematic genre for itself, a kind of ‘nature-fiction’ (nat-fi?). I was initially put off by Le Quattro Volte‘s proximity in sensibiility and themes to Pálfi’s debut, but it eclipses that film in perhaps every way, if only because it doesn’t fake it with actors and CGI. I still wish it had a more complex statement than it ends up with, but its monolithic simplicity is too compelling and original to shrug off.

Adrienn Pál (Un Certain Regard), this would make an appropriate, if tonally redundant, double-bill with last year’s Lourdes. Both films feature near-catatonic female leads in sterile environments, progressing through their sedated lives, searching for something to uplift them. While Jessica Hausner’s film details the search for a miracle, Ágnes Kocsis’ protagonist searches for a friend. Not just any friend, but a childhood best friend named Adrienn Pál, who she’d all but forgotten until a deceased woman showed up at her ward (she is a nurse in a ward for the terminally ill) with the exact same name. This kicks off an investigation with past teachers, friends, and bullies to see if someone knows where this Adrienn girl is. The film develops quite a bit of intrigue when almost every person we meet has conflicting memories of this girl, casting doubt in our protags’ memories (sorry, again, for not knowing the character’s name), eluding to the possibility that this girl might not even exist. The manipulability of memory, and the severe importance of having a close companion in one’s life, are big ideas that the film handles reasonably well, though it draws them out so long that it can’t help but finally explicitly state, and then debunk, most of them. There is also a superfluous thread of the film which involves the rather significant obesity of the lead, who takes breaks to seclude herself in closed quarters to indulge in excessive portions of delicious looking sweets. This never really goes anywhere, and is only drawn with uninteresting cliches. In the end, Adrienn Pál doesn’t satisfy or sustain the paranoia that it so successfully spends over an hour building up, which was too bad, but there is obvious talent involved.

R U There? (Un Certain Regard), for a movie about a video game expert who has a crisis of reality, this was a surprisingly calm and stable viewing experience, although it is still mostly ridiculous and meanders hopelessly away from comprehension or purpose. The leader of a team of first-person shooter gamers, who are assembled for an important international competition, threatens his team’s chances when he unknowingly injures his arm in his sleep. He is forced to take a break from the team’s contests after he has a lapse in concentration during play, and uses his time off to fall in love with a prostitute who gives him massages (a lot of massages), and shows him the ways of the virtual reality sim world, “Second Life.” Most of the film from this point is saturated in computer graphics and fairies, disappearing into non-sensical dream worlds that progress neither the guys’ take on video game violence, his relationship with this prostitute, nor its central theme of the blending of realities. If Verbeek was actually trying to lull the audience into a trance so that we’d ignore that his film wasn’t going anywhere, he almost pulled it off (or maybe he did?).

I Wish I Knew (Un Certain Regard), grand, epic, and, after the dust has settled, quite a hollow experience, I was initially pulled in by Jia’s mega tribute to Shanghai. Composed mostly of interviews, some with filmmakers and actors I recognize (including Hou Hsaio-hsien), but mostly with people unfamiliar to me, it’s 24 City without boundaries, and editing. The subjects talk about whatever comes to mind, it seems, when they are asked to think about Shanghai. Naturally, Jia inserts a fictional element, in which a young woman walks around pensively, awkwardly, perhaps visiting/re-enacting bits that correspond with what the interviewees are talking about. Also relaying back to the interviews are clips from older films that relate to the locale, many, if not all, are made by the interviewees. The film looks spectacular, feels almost encyclopedic, and there is this epic, growling anthem that plays several times throughout the film that is really stirring and moving in itself. Like most of Jia’s films, for me, the end result is too aimless for me, or I can’t sense anything to grab onto and think about after the film is over. Most of the viewing is enrapturing, though, because the filmmaking is so assured.

The Silent House (Directors’ Fortnight), despite the Bazinian orgasm of a premise – a haunted house film done in a single take via the technological allowances of digital filmmaking – this obnoxious film is devoid of even a single interesting or original contribution to the genre, save for a promisingly drawn out opening few minutes in which the lead female walks to the house. Any cliche of mainstream horror films from the last 15 years (excluding torture) are applied here: creepy little girl w/ long hair appearing out of nowhere, polaroid sounds, good guy saves the day then revealed to be psycho, et al. Also, I don’t think it is enough to claim that your film is done in one take; you have to prove it. That means that long stretches in total darkness break the illusion, and instill doubt into the very gimmick that is the film’s raison d’être. Though, to be fair, no heightened sense of space, meaningful passages of time, nor any other illusions of ‘realism’ would benefit the content of this film anyway. Lame, overused ideas are bad, no matter how they are filmed.

More Cannes Coverage:

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Shit Year (Directors’ Fortnight), Cam Archer (who I’d always assumed was a woman, for whatever that’s worth) makes well-produced, indie, lowercase-‘a’ art films about people who are confronting getting older. His Wild Tigers I Have Known was an angst-filled, cliche-ridden look at a little gay boy who’s hot for a dim-witted douche bag, using wild tigers as metaphor for the ‘scary’ adult world. In that film and this new one, Archer never shies away from indulgent, textured, psychadelic flourishes that take our focus away from his lame script and directing abilities toward some insubstantial mega-style. Where Shit Year wins over his previous film, though, is in his casting of Ellen Barkin, who really owns this role. She’s often either completely great and hilarious as a bitter retiring actress, or struggling to elevate poorly written material. A filmmaker not so focused on making the Coolest and Best Art Movie Ever would have made a really great film with this topic and actress. In fact, if I say that there are significant similarities to early, awful Jim Jarmusch films, it will do a pretty good job of illustrating what this film is like.

The City Below (Un Certain Regard), one of the least classifiable films of the festival, Christoph Hochhäusler’s film always feels like just a generic feuding corporations thriller, and yet it also gives an impression that there is something deeper and more chilling than that going on. The plot of two merging banks is hardly important, nor, I think, is the extramarital affair between a new employee’s wife and a bank CEO. One of these two plot points may or may not trigger some kind of societal meltdown or apocalypse, fitting right in with the icy blues and silvers of the commercial buildings and monochrome suits that construct the business world. Hochhäusler has the film edited to never really let viewers know what is going on, plot-wise nor with the characters’ psyches. Striking images and moments appear and disappear without explanation, though, to the filmmaker’s credit, these moments don’t come across as pointless or random just for the sake of it. One senses a potent and important commentary on banks, and the broader financial and corporate world in general, but any clear thesis is almost impossible to discern from a single viewing. This, of course, is hardly a complaint.

Heartbeats (Un Certain Regard), I’m assuming that the official English title ‘Heartbeats,’ replacing the superior ‘Imaginary Loves,’ was chosen because it is the title of a Knife song; one that doesn’t appear in this film, although two of the most memorable sequences are set to ‘Pass This On’ and ‘Keep the Streets Empty.’ Memorable, though, does not equal good, and especially not original, in these instances. Unfortunately, Dolan’s film is stripped of the engaging plot that his I Killed My Mother had, which supported his stylistic flourishes, masking the derivative style with some substance. Dolan reportedly wrote the screenplay for this film on the 5 hour train ride from Montreal to Toronto for his debut’s screening at TIFF last September. Not Shocking. Heartbeats is a thin and translucent film that is infuriating because of the obvious talent and ambition that is required to make something like it, but which was under-utilized and altogether wasted for pretty pictures of pretty people set to pretty music, broken up with a tired story. Good imitations of Wong Kar-wai and Almodóvar do not make a good film, even if the result is entirely watchable. The plot of this film is inexcusably lame, with two ‘best friends’ going gaga over the same androgynous, ambiguously gay young man who they befriend. When the two first lay eyes on the guy, right off the bat, they are backstabbing each other to spend time alone with him, getting pouty and going into jealous rages when the other wins some time with him. In-between these melodramatic fits, we get plenty of *poetic* and *sleek* moments of our three leads walking, talking, and dancing in slow motion, all set to hip, Pitchfork-approved grooves. Also important to not forget the attempts at depth, such as the two friends’ stares at ‘the desired one,’ montaged with flashes of Greek statues and childrens drawing that he apparently resembles. It’s all shamelessly narcissistic for all three actors, and exactly the type of film a 21-year old filmmaker with an overpraised debut would make. So why all of the messianic praise? I think it is good that Dolan seems to be so prolific in his younger years so that he can get these hipster and derivative obsessions out of his system and start making some films with more thought, and, more importantly, with his own voice. He’s obviously willing to make films about themes and characters that are personal to him, so I still have faith that he’ll develop into someone who is actually worth following.

The Light Thief (Directors’ Fortnight), programmers bestowing such high praise on a filmmaker right before his film’s screening, such as, in this case, “Tati-esque,” is setting some pretty lofty expectations, all of which are not at all met in this overly silly film about a kind-hearted electrician who tries his hardest to protect his small town from the imposing leaders who want to sell off the town. The protagonist – the electrician nicknamed Mr. Light who is always trying to develop and provide means of cheaper and more efficient electricity – is, on paper, both topically relevant and charming, but the tone and performances are too haphazardly shaped and presented to give the proceedings any drama or genuine humor. A disappointment.

We Are What We Are (Directors’ Fortnight), a family of cannibals loses its patriarch – who was their sole means of acquiring food – to a freak poisoning accident while he was out ‘hunting,’ and now must fend for themselves. It’s an intriguing premise that is very refreshing among recent horror films, but, in the end, ties itself too closely to the zombie genre to fully leapfrog the pitfalls that it inevitably stumbles into. The surviving family, consisting of a neurotic mother, two sons, and a daughter, realizes their doomed fate the moment the dad is confirmed dead, but the two sons won’t have it, and set out to get some grub. While the film never attempts to explain why this family can only eat human flesh (nor does it need to, for the sake of maintaining its intriguing metaphors), it doesn’t do a very good job of addressing the inherent themes and questions that this scenario would seem to do well in exploring. Instead, the second half of the film is basically chase scene after chase scene, failed attempt after failed attempt to get some food, with bizarre, conservative humor stemming from the sons’ meal selections. Catchy premise and late startling moments aside, it’s just another Romero imitator.

More Cannes Coverage:

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11

Aurora (Un Certain Regard), If there were two films that I would have swapped into the Competition, it would be this one and Picco from the Directors’ Fortnight, which I’ll get to later. I have significant issues with both films, but these were the two most provocative films I saw in Cannes, a trait that was missed in the Competition films this year (maybe the Godard would fit that category, too, but I think that one was too baffling to make anyone angry). Aurora, while still very realistic, simple, and in the end grounded in a familial crisis, stands out from most of the Romanian trend in its bleakness, austerity, and (implied) violence. For the vast majority of its three hours, we watch a man doing something. He trades who-knows-what with shady people, collects what appears to be gun parts, and glares vehemently at his co-workers and housemates. A sense of methodical evil and misanthropy is prevalent, but it’s rarely engaging, and often supremely tedious, not only because Puiu is intentionally never letting the viewer in on what the hell this guy is up to, but because this slow-paced rampage is not as chilling or seductive as I felt it aspired to be. It reminded me quite a bit of Haneke in its approach to cinematic violence, and the viewers’ roles as spectators, inquisitors, and investigators, yearning for the motivations and explanations for what drives the character to commit these crimes. Alas, in a scene that formally recalls the ending of Police, Adjective, we get a glimpse, albeit a very, very brief one, of an answer to the question we have been seeking for the last three, grueling hours: Why? The problem, though, is that by the time we’d arrived to this finger-wagging conclusion, I’d long stopped caring. I love that Puiu went all out in attempting to make a film like this, and I have no doubt that it is exactly as it was intended to be, perhaps even how it ought to be. I just wish I felt a reason to see it again, or wouldn’t feel like an asshole for recommending it to someone.

Little Baby Jesus of Flandr (Directors’ Fortnight), one of the big disappointments for me this year (which, really, considering it was a debut student film that took Birdsong and made the wise men three guys with Down syndrome (as well as pretty much every other member of the cast), is pretty inexplicable, I know). The thing is that this kind of twisted religious allegory thing, if done well, is really appealing to me, for the same reason that Birdsong was really appealing to me. Unfortunately, all of the ways that this could have been bad are very much present. The script seems to be improvised by the ‘actors’ on the spot, or were they just dicking around while Van den Berghe filmed them unknowingly? Van den Berghe seems to have spent most of his time behind the camera trying to ape the look and feel of Tarkovsky and Jodorowsky. The film is in black and white except for a non-sequitous, college-level-understanding version of Mulholland Dr.‘s Club Silencio scene that is ‘strangely’ in color. This is the only film of the festival that I was actively embarrassed for during most of the screening, knowing that the filmmaker and his exploited cast were in attendance to hear and feel their project fall flat.

The Housemaid (Competition), it’s difficult to know what to to do with it, especially since I have not seen the original 60s version. I do not know the manner in which Im’s film ‘inverts’ the original scenario (nor how the scenario in Im’s film could be inverted). I can say that its a fun genre film that doesn’t focus too much on big ideas, and goes absolutely bizerk in the final minutes, to the point where I thought I was watching a Sam Raimi film. This is in Cinemax territory in the sex department; and light on dramatic or erotic tension, but it’s amusing and insubstantially fluffy, and something I actually ENJOYED watching (see above…).

More Cannes Coverage:

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11

Chongqing Blues (Competition), a sappy, poorly directed Competition entry that was bumped up from Un Certain Regard late in the game, proving that quality is not the sole criterion for admittance into the Cannes spotlight. The premise – in which an absent father returns home to find out why his son took a grocery store hostage, resulting in his death – has enough of a hook that it sustained my interest through the melodrama and unpleasantness of all of the characters, namely the dead son’s mother, who makes it very well known that she is not happy, ever. When, late in the film, the father (sorry, I won’t remember most of the characters’ names for any of these films, and I’m too lazy to look them all up right now) interrogates the police officer who shot and killed his son; the point of it all, and this is the best I could do, is that sons need their fathers, and being away from one’s family for too long makes one despondent, irrational, and generally submissive. Unfortunately, for these characters, I didn’t give a damn.

The Strange Case of Angelica (Un Certain Regard), Manoel de Oliveira will never make an uninteresting film, if only because of how much depth they gain just from one’s knowledge of his age, lending each progressive film a complexity that they perhaps wouldn’t inherently have. What the film does have, though: lush, deep focus photography; peculiar detached acting and speech patterns of the characters; and strange scenarios that only get stranger as the film progresses. de Oliveira has always made, and will make, solid films. But I often have trouble with them in the same way that I have trouble with most filmmakers with his level of prolificacy; the work feels like well-made sketches rather than fully formed, genuinely complex ideas. The set-up for Angelica is certainly intriguing. Accompanied by gorgeous long-takes and a sensuous piano score, there is a magic realist occurrence that sets the plot into play, and gives the film its title. There are wonderful scenes of artists at work, nature at play, and grand, celestial discussions. In fact, I love most things about the content of this film, but have a hard time recommending it based off of one viewing, where it leaves me with small moments rather than the operatic whole like Benilde did. It will be one of a very small handful that I’ll probably check out again in Toronto, as I anticipate the pieces coming together on repeat viewings.

Tuesday, After Christmas (Un Certain Regard), a pleasant early surprise. Somehow Radu Muntean has stayed in the background of the Romanian wave, or is simply just a late-comer. Continuing the Romanian tradition of drawing out a mundane set of events in an extremely compelling and well-drawn realism, Tuesday has perhaps the most banal premise yet: a married man has an affair. While it is completely riveting, this banality initially had me dismissing the film as a minor entry from a group of filmmakers who know how to make compelling naturalism, but few films at the festival stayed with me the way this one did. While the description, “an extramartial affair, Romanian style,” will actually give someone a remarkably accurate description of what this film looks like and how the events unfold, it’s the unexpected gestures and emotional discoveries that make it a must-see. (possibly minor spoilers) The three central characters – the cheating father, his wife and his mistress – are refreshingly dynamic and multi-dimensional for the roles they have: the father manages to remain sympathetic despite ‘ruining’ the life of a seemingly nice and put-together wife, who herself maintains an iciness before and after the revelation of the affair. When she is taken completely by surprise, recalling earlier moments that are actually quite fucked up in retrospect, there is still a balance in the scenario that can only be attributed to how human they feel to the viewer. Similarly, the woman who the father has fallen in love with is neither portrayed as the beast who tore the loving family apart, nor the seductive savior for an unhappy man; she is, while younger, just another woman who makes this guy happy, not mature-for-her-age, nor obviously more compatible. The drama in the film almost stems from this kind of surreal ordinariness, its lack of an unusual situation (this is not to say that extramarital affairs are a ‘usual situation,’ just that among the ways that this type of affair can manifest itself, it doesn’t get any more straight-forward than this). The closing scene is likely the exception to this, in which the couple try to preserve the final moments of their daughter’s fantasy world of happy families and Santa Claus. It’s a stellar finale, simultaneously graceful and heartbreakingly pessimistic.

It’s also notable the way that the current Romanian big shots use their titles as a type of mapping. 4 Months…, 12:08, and Tuesday suggest intriguing temporal charts that, while simple, strip the drama away from the key events that takes place at their specific moments in time, and stress the time both before and after the titular moments (this is certainly also true of Lazarescu, whose death is always inevitable, and the least dramatic moment of that film).

Benda Bilili! (Directors’ Fortnight), essentially the same film as this directing duo’s previous doc Jupiter’s Dance, only with a more interesting and more talented group of musicians as the subject. The film finds a nice balance between harsh politicial criticism, depressing slum life, vibrant jam sessions, and DIY creative processes. It’s certainly a feel-good movie, one that I didn’t object to feeling good for. But, given that this film took 5 years to make, I would have hoped for a more thorough and balanced look at this disabled musical collective, as well as something that amounted to more than a triumph-over-poverty message that films like this so typically settle on. Whatever, though, I had a good time with it.

More Cannes Coverage:

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11