Film Socialism, 6PM (saw it in Cannes and was, as predicted, baffled by it. I do not speak any French, and got caught up on trying to understand what people were saying, or trying to say, which is apparently the wrong way to watch it. I half hope that this will not be subtitled in Navajo English, but the regular kind, though I think I would be more prepared for the broken, basically unsubbed version, too. This is the opening night of the festival (Film Socialism, hilariously, screens before even the official Opening Night film), which is notoriously sparse, so I can guiltlessly pencil this in.)

9/10

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, 12PM (somehow, the second day of the festival is being treated like another Opening Day, so chalk this one up to the incomprehensible scheduling structure for this year; this is the only film playing today before 2PM; I have zero interest in it, but I am allotted 5 tickets a day, so what the hell, I can always sleep through it; sure I’d rather be seeing Black Venus, but…)

Cirkus Columbia, 3PM (This is the best-looking of the few playing at this time; in an ideal world I’d be watching Katell Quillévéré’s Love Like Poison in this slot, which I accidentally missed at Cannes)

Brownian Movement, 6:15PM (The Visions sidebar is up there as perhaps the most interesting sidebar in TIFF; I have not heard of the filmmaker, but there are only a handful of Visions this year, so I might just see them all)

Wavelengths 1: Soul of the City, 9PM (The most eclectic sidebar of the festival, I try to see all 6, and will only miss one if it conflicts with my only opportunity to see a film I am greatly anticipating)

9/11

Erotic Man, 9:45AM (my only knowledge of Leth comes from von Trier’s obstructions film)

Le quattro volte (The Four Times), 12:15PM (another film I caught in Cannes, and another one I’m seeing purely because nothing else is playing that’s remotely interesting at this time (or if there is, I’ve got it down for another day; not that I mind, it is one of the best films of the year.)

What I Most Want, 2:15PM (the filmmaker worked on some Lisandro Alonso films)

Wavelengths 2: Plein Air, 4:30PM

Wavelengths 3: Ruhr, 9:15PM (Saw this on my laptop almost a year ago, been dying to see it on a big screen; amazing what Benning did for video in his first try)

9/12

Route 132, 9AM (best of its time slot; sure wish I could see Marian Crisan’s Morgen instead; his lovely Palme D’Or-winning short Megatron proved that Crisan is ready for prime time Romanian New Waving, and word out of Locarno on this, his first feature, was stellar.) (EDIT: Saw Morgen last weekend, and it’s a dud; Also, my excitement has grown on Route 132 with some strong reviews showing up)

! Women Art Revolution – A Secret History, 12:15PM (I love women artists and all, but I’m only seeing this to fill the slot)

The Illusionist, 2:30PM (My guilty pleasure of the festival, in the sense that I should be seeing Boxing Gym in this slot, but I am too woozy over the idea of this one to skip it)

Wavelengths 4: Pastourelle, 7PM

Wavelengths 5: Blue Mantle, 9:15PM

9/13

Mamma Gógó, 9AM (great publicity still, and I’m not familiar enough with Icelandic cinema)

The Trip, 12PM (either this or the City to City film; Winterbottom has never impressed me, though I never saw Tristram Shandy, which is related to this one somehow; I might check Shandy out if I have time before the festival starts.)

Nostalgia for the Light, 7PM (I love light as a vehicle for looking at history; I missed it at Cannes, and apparently Guzman is a ‘Master’ (really?))

Wavelengths 6: Coming Attractions, 9PM

9/14

Miral, 9AM (the trailer doesn’t do anything for me, neither does Schnabel, but when it’s the only thing playing…)

ANPO, 12:15PM (Nothing in the slot really calls out to me, but the ‘collage-like’ assemblage of this gets it the edge)

Norwegian Wood, 3:30PM (Murakami)

The Sleeping Beauty, 6:30PM (I couldn’t care less about Breillat…until Bluebeard happened; hopefully the fairytale conceit works out again)

Curling, 9:15PM (my reaction to Côté’s Carcasses was lukewarm, but there was enough there to anticipate his future work, at least for the time being)

9/15

Buried, 12:30PM (my Criticism And Theory class is going to have to let out about an hour early if I will have any chance of making this; good word on it, even if it stars Ryan Reynolds)

How to Start Your Own Country, 2:30PM (this sounds and looks completely bizarre; directed by Guy Maddin’s cinematographer)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 5PM (last year I skipped both Herzogs, and I still haven’t had an opportunity to see My Son, My Son…; I won’t have that problem this year)

The Ditch, 8PM (Wang Bing’s first fictional feature)

Promises Written in Water, 10:45PM (Gallo is 2 for 2, and I’m convinced he cannot make an uninteresting film)

9/16

Sensation, 9:30PM (best option for this slot)

Dirty Girl, 12PM (this is the best looking 2010 film playing at this time slot. Seriously.)

Meek’s Cutoff, 3PM (ok, decided to ditch the Santa Claus movie for this one; the reviews are stellar, and it’s shot in 4:3!)

A Horrible Way to Die, 6PM (apparently people like this guy; worth a shot; is it just me or are there a lot of getting out of/going to prison movies this year?)

Outbound, 9:15PM (I love the style of the new wave of Romanian films that are tearing up the festival circuit year after year, but I would really love to see a Romanian film outside of that style that I can support just as much; this looks like a candidate)

9/17

Anything You Want, 9:30AM (a father must fill the void left by his deceased wife for his daughter; he seems to take the challenge obscenely literally, or at least it seems that way in the synopsis)

Home For Christmas, 12PM (I got some good chuckles out of O Horten)

Oki’s Movie, 2PM (HaHaHa (which has somehow vanished from the festival circuit) was my favorite Hong so far; kind of amazing that he already has a follow-up)

Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, 5PM (raves from Cannes, and Romanian: the only two reasons I am interested, should be good.)

Cold Fish, 8:30PM (I’ve not seen anything by Sono, and the synopsis for this one sounds a bit unpleasant; this would have been the perfect slot to take another look at Christoph Hochhäusler’s The City Below, which confused and exhilarated me at Cannes)

9/18

Silent Souls, 9:30AM (Raves from Venice; this filmmaker’s previous mockumentary First on the Moon looks too cool to pass on this one, which incidentally looks completely different in style and topic; oh well.)

Kaboom, 12:15PM (there was a bit too much angst and melodrama in Mysterious Skin for my taste, but this sounds like a whole lot of fun)

Guest, 3PM (my most anticipated film of the year ever since it was announced a few weeks ago)

A Useful Life, 7:30PM (looks lovely)

At Ellen’s Age, 9:15PM (*shrug*; I might try for Black Swan if I get the impulse or opportunity)

9/19

Summer of Goliath, 9:45AM (has a nice publicity still; looks like an Alamar-esque ‘sleeper hit’.)

Attenberg, 12PM (heard some solid recommendations on this one)

k.364 Journey by Train, 2:30PM (the still on the description page is hideous, but Zidane was interesting enough)

You Are Here, 4:15PM (the best-looking of the Canada First sidebar; comparisons to Kaufman, and a glowing review from Variety, sealed the deal)

Mysteries of Lisbon, 6:30PM (Ruiz is always interesting, and, really, I’m never going to get to see this monster again; ending the festival with a bang)

Lav Diaz/Wang Bing/Rivette/Warhol’s rotting corpse – go get ‘em.

“For Flaherty, what is important about Nanook hunting a seal is his relationship with the animal, the real extent of his wait. The length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, its true subject. In the film, this episode is thus composed in only one shot. Can anyone deny that it is much more moving as a result than montage of attractions would have been?”¹
- André Bazin

As cinema continues to finalize its transition from a medium composed of celluloid grain into one composed of digital pixels, it is important to take a closer look at some differences between these two means of producing a moving image. As D.N. Rodowick notes in a chronological outline of this transition, cinema has been under the influence of digital technology since digital image processing and synthesis was introduced in the 1980s², though this development merely allowed for special effects work to be done on films shot on celluloid. The real game-changing shift comes not only with post-production digital editing advancements, but also with the advent and ubiquity of digital capturing devices. ‘Films’ are being shot on hour-long digital tapes or with cameras rigged up to hard drives rather than 11-minute-capacity reels housing a thousand feet of celluloid. But for digital filmmaking to take possession of its “area of competence,” as Greenberg would say, it must determine and utilize that which is exclusive to itself as a medium.³ Of all that is unique to this new medium of cinema, I cannot see a more significant trait than its drastically extended allowance in shot length.

Additionally, if one wishes to look at just how varied our perception of the cinematic image is by this development, one would find a strong model in the genre of ‘structural’ filmmaking. P. Adams Sitney, who first named and outlined the characteristics of the genre, defines this avant-garde niche as one “wherein the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film.”⁴ With a film that is about shape, and the deconstruction and minimizing of that shape, the work acts as an exposé of the formal paradigms that construct the narrative cinema. Michael Snow’s canonical structural film Wavelength is practically the example of this commentary. In “Toward Snow,” Annette Michelson’s seminal piece on Wavelength, she outlines the film’s deconstruction of narrative form. She writes, “The film is the projection of a grand reduction; its ‘plot’ is the tracing of spatiotemporal données, its ‘action’ the movement of the camera as the movement of consciousness.”⁵ She then adds, “Voiding the film of the metaphoric proclivity of montage, Snow created a grand metaphor for narrative form.” Given that he has taken on digital recording methods with some of his recent moving image work, there is not a more appropriate artist than Michael Snow to look at the shifts in perception that have been born from digital filmmaking’s extended long takes.

Snow’s 2002 video piece Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) is a worthy candidate for this examination, both for its formal make-up (it is a single, static shot that lasts for 62 minutes), and for its primary subject (a pair of windows), which has a striking resemblance to the aesthetics of Wavelength. Throughout Solar Breath’s running time, the drapes hanging on the viewer’s side of the windows dangle, whip, and react to the wind that flows in and out of the space through one of the windows that has been left open. Though this window is open, there is still a screen that stops the drape from exiting the space. The drape, therefore, smacks lazily against the screen as the wind attempts to suck the undulating fabric out of our space and into the outdoors. On a small number of occasions, the drape will blow forward far enough to give the viewer a glimpse of the outside, where a solar panel sits on a table in the lawn, soaking in the sun, generating the energy that is potentially allowing the video camera to operate and record that which we are seeing. While all of this takes place – seemingly in real time without any breaks in the action – non-diegetic sound of someone eating fills the soundtrack.

That Solar Breath is a single shot of a set of windows steers it directly into dialogue with Wavelength (never mind that they were both made by Michael Snow). While Solar Breath genuinely has the appearance of being a single shot, Wavelength is very much a different story. In his original statement written for the release of the film, Snow purports Wavelength to be “a continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field,”⁶ even though the material nature of celluloid, as well as the jumpy visual appearance, reveals this to not be the case. Michelson skimps around this claim, hazily mentioning the disruptions in the zoom in her description of it, saying that it is “by no means absolutely steady, but proceeding in a slight visible stammer.”(“Toward Snow,” 174) Shot with various stocks of 16mm film – some expired, some current – the film is very much a collection of reels. Not that it is any big secret that Wavelength was not actually done in a single take (the film goes from day to night and back to day in the course of 45 minutes). The reality of the matter is that Wavelength, a film made in 1967, couldn’t have been done in a single, 45-minute take even if Snow had wanted to; no reels of film, neither in 1967 nor now, support shots that are even half that length. The illusion that what we are seeing is continuous is an intuitive connection between our awareness of the limitations of the medium, and our detection of the intentions of the filmmaker to overcome these limitations.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, who coincidentally published his article “Observations on the Long Take” in the same year of Wavelength’s premiere, likens the long take to that of our own present perception:

“Reality seen and heard as it happens is always in the present tense. The long take, the schematic and primordial element of cinema, is thus in the present tense. Cinema therefore ‘reproduces the present’.”⁷

If the lingering shot is the present of a particular, subjective observer, it remains a reproduction of the present until it is finished, whereby it becomes the past, allowing for interpretation. Pasolini’s theory develops to posit that a shot’s meaning can only be given value once it is finished; like with human life, the possibilities of relations and meanings and developments is endless, “chaotic,” until it is over. This reveals Wavelength to be an anomaly of sorts. When its shots end, they are each followed by a brand new shot that begins in almost exactly the same place, with almost exactly the same perspective of exactly the same room as when the previous shot ended. While Pasolini sees montage as the construction of an objective viewpoint – the selection of the best of every possible subjective perspective to present objectivity devoid of the present – Wavelength exists as a montage that retains its subjectivity and its illusion of the present.

Bazin’s opinion on long takes differs from Pasolini’s in that it promotes long takes in order to retain the objectivity, rather than the subjectivity, ingrained in the single, unedited shot. He speaks of three different types of editing, and “All three have a common feature, which is the very definition of editing and montage: they create meaning which is not objectively contained in the images and which derives solely from placing these images in relation to one another.”(“Evolution of Film Language,” 88-89) In Bazin’s essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,”⁸ he details how a photograph, captured on emulsion, presents the photographed subject in the present. The photo is objective proof of the subject’s existence. Similarly, a motion picture film presents the change of the subject objectively. This change in the subjects exists as it was captured, regardless of image distortion. The objectivity of this change is interrupted, though, with montage, which introduces the subjectivity of the editor, inviting interpretation and meaning that was not invoked in the original shot. Going back to Bazin’s thoughts on Nanook’s hunt, the duration of his wait is presented in its actual temporal form; the wait that we experience in watching the hunt is identical to the duration that Nanook experienced at the original moment of filming. It is, thus, made present again in the viewer. Any cuts or edits in this shot would extinguish its validity as an objective document of the duration of Nanook’s wait.

There are comparable problems with this theory, again, when it is matched up with Wavelength. Because the shape of the structural film is the subject of the work, it is the zoom that should be considered the subject of Snow’s film (as opposed to the walls of the loft, any of the human performers, or the photograph of the waves). Going by Bazin’s ideas, then, the film is a document of the change of the zoom, and the duration of that change. The duration of the camera zoom at the heart of the film is fixed at 45 minutes once the starting point (the back of the loft), end point (the photograph), and the zoom speed are determined, all of which is set in the first moments of the first reel. The camera’s projected zoom is intermittently broken up by cuts, but, again, each shot progresses in the same direction at the same speed. Repeating one of Michelson’s key thoughts, “[Wavelength’s] ‘action’ is the movement of the camera as the movement of consciousness,”(“Toward Snow,” 175) the film presents only one consciousness. The fact that the zoom is broken up into many parts is inconsequential to the duration because all of the shots are intra-subjective, giving the illusion of a continuous trek. Wavelength successfully functions as a document of the duration of a 45-minute zoom through a loft because of this approximate continuity among its successive shots. The objective duration of the zoom would be the same as one shot as it is as several.

That Wavelength represents a single journey despite being composed of several shots is a result of the viewer’s intuition of the mode (celluloid) in which it was captured. This is a cognitively formulated suspension of disbelief, but as Rodowick details, it is also an inevitable awareness that is inherent in, and shapes the way that we perceive, every creative medium:

“A medium, then, is nothing more nor less than a set of potentialities from which creative acts may unfold. These potentialities, the powers of the medium as it were, are conditioned by multiple elements or components that can be material, instrumental, and/or formal. Moreover, these elements may vary, individually and in combination with one another, such that a medium may be defined without a presumption that any integral identity or an essence unites these elements into a whole or resolves them into a unique substance.”⁹

Thus, in McLuhan-ist fashion, the potential of the recording medium is a very important factor in its interpretation, in large part because we know what something can and cannot do, and therefore are more open to compensations. This is why the emergence of a medium such as video provokes new grounds for the perception of the extended long take. With video, several-hours-long shots are possible.

A sample of some of the structural filmmakers who have taken the plunge into digital capturing methods, other than Michael Snow, includes Ernie Gehr, Jonas Mekas, and, most recently, James Benning with his 2009 film Ruhr. Benning makes for an interesting model at this point, because a majority of his films are founded on durational concerns that he explores in long, static shots. Ruhr is Benning’s first ‘film’ not captured or exhibited on celluloid in thirty-two years of filmmaking, and contains the longest shot of his career, coming in at 60 minutes. Mark Peranson described this shot in his review of the film in the Winter 2010 issue of Cinema Scope magazine¹⁰:

“Relieved of the necessity of changing camera rolls, Benning goes all out with a mesmerizing shot of a coke-processing tower in Schwelgern, where every ten minutes water pours down onto the base and creates a billowing pillar of steam leaking through the steel-latticed structure and into the atmosphere; the tower looks that it is on fire. As it repeats, surrounded by clouds it itself creates, the image takes on a psychedelic quality, with each billowing blossoming into differing colours, a function of both the material being processed as well as the changing quality of light.”

As a continuous documentation of the repeating cycles of the steam from the tower, and of the daylight’s shift into the darker tones of the evening, this kind of shot is unique to the technology of video capturing. No form of celluloid could present the entire duration of this event.

A peculiar anecdote in the same review reveals another facet of video, and at the same time calls into question its indexicality. Near the end of his description of Ruhr’s concluding shot, Peranson reports, “the shot grew dark faster than time allows – Benning condensed 90 minutes to 60, in effect speeding up the sunset”(“Ruhr,” 57) (*Note – According to an interview with Benning, the shot was actually narrowed down to 60 minutes from a 120- minute shot¹¹). In this off-hand factoid, the credibility of the documentary value of the shot virtually vanishes. The shot, which is perceived to be a particular duration in the film, is revealed to have been twice as long in the original captured moment. First of all, it is important to note that there are two methods in which Benning could have eliminated that hour of running time. Either he sped up the video to play at 200% its captured speed, or he cut out a chunk from somewhere in the middle, and joined the remaining fragments through very slow dissolves and color correction. In the aforementioned interview with Benning, he reveals the latter method to have indeed been the case, but it is the potentiality of both options that questions and complicates the ways that we perceive video and its indexical value for duration and change.

To capture, and then playback, a document of a subject’s change in a manner which can be deemed to be indexical, there is a responsibility placed on the coordination of frame rates in the production and post-production development of the shot. In the analogical medium of celluloid, options for deviating from this coordination have always been slim, and have only gotten more strictly defined since the end of the silent era. Presently, 16mm and 35mm films are almost universally shot at 24 frames per second; with super 8mm, one has the added option of 18 frames per second, and the silent era saw a range of complicated frames rates, some of which, such as 17 frames per second, are awkward prime numbers that are practically incompatible with any of today’s projectors. While many of these frame rates were used for slow motion or fast motion techniques, the options for projecting a film at a frame rate that is different from that which it was captured, while still retaining an illusion of being ‘real-life’ speed, are nil (anything less than a 10% speed change will be imperceptible to most eyes). Even so, a film projected at a faster or slower frame rate than which it was shot is still, materially, unaltered.

Video, on the other hand, has a wide and complicated array of potential digital speed alterations. In editing suites such as Avid and Final Cut Pro, video can be sped up or slowed down by as little as .01%. Changes in video speeds will result in one of two distortions in the frame counts: in progressive video, frames will intermittently be dropped so that the final running time corresponds to the calculated manipulation, and in interlaced video, two frames will weave themselves together in order to compensate for the lost or gained time. In Europe, where the PAL video standard calls for frame rates of 25 frames per second instead of 24, films are telecined with a 4% speed-up to compensate for the difference, yielding very slight, though imperceptible fast-forward in practically every video available in the continent. The reality of this type of speed-up, though, originates in the post-production process: a film shot on either celluloid or video is subject to this manner of durational manipulation.

In contrast, the potentiality of the technique of ‘seamless splicing’ (i.e. Benning’s method of halving the duration of his shot of the coke tower) is rooted in the moment of capture. In the Fall 2009 issue of Cinema Scope¹², Benning recalls the circumstances for another shot used in Ruhr in which seamless splicing was also used:

“I began filming…in a wooded area adjacent to the Düsseldorf International Airport. There was no wind. It was absolutely still, not one leaf was moving. The high definition captured every tiny twig…I found the frame and pushed the start button filling two SxS cards with one take – a 114-minute shot. During that time 40 planes landed. The frame remained absolutely still, no registration movement, no dancing grain…I wasn’t sure this stillness would be acceptable, but then a plane passed through the frame providing momentary movement. Ten seconds later a wind vortex produced by the passing plane sang though the frame and disturbed one loose branch hanging from a nearby tree… When the next plane landed it started all over again…When I looked at the footage on my computer that night I realized I had recorded an action that would have been impossible to capture on film.”

In the film, this shot lasts roughly seventeen minutes, in which 4 of the 40 captured planes are seen landing. Just like in the coke tower scene, any jumps in time that Benning added in post-production are imperceptible. What we see in the film dictates that there are approximately 4 minutes between the landing of the first plane and the landing of the second; however, it is anyone’s guess as to how much time actually passed between the original landings of these two planes, or even if there were other planes that landed in between them. What we are aware of while watching this shot, though, is the potentiality that Benning recorded a large stretch of uninterrupted footage, and is presenting the viewer with his most ideal representation of this event.

This boundless, uninterrupted palette of moments likens the editing process to the more subjective, ‘hands-on’ artistic medium of painting. Rodowick quotes Thomas Elsaesser’s “Beyond Distance”, in which Elsaesser writes, “…the digital image should be regarded as an expressive, rather than reproductive medium, with both the software and the ‘effects’ it produces bearing the imprint and signature of the creator”. Rodowick adds, “The image becomes not only more painterly but also more imaginative.¹³” This is such a monumental quality for video to have, not only because it validates its place among more traditional fine art media, but because it gives it an edge against celluloid as a tool for artists’ and filmmakers’ creative and subjective freedom. When a shot is captured on celluloid, the potentiality of missed moments – via reel changes – comes into play. Therefore, because there are moments in the entire duration of the captured event that are ineligible for inclusion in the final presentation, the viewer cannot be confident that the filmmaker was allowed to curate the duration down to his most desired selection. This is akin to denying a painter access to certain viewing angles of his model, or the use of particular, appropriate brushes.

Michael Snow’s Solar Breath, thus, both suffers and reaps rewards from video capture’s potentialities. As a presentation of a long, continuous shot of wind playing and fighting with the window drapes, the indexicality of the duration of this event is dubious from the moment it is clear that it was captured in video. We see three or four instances in which the drapes blow forward to reveal the outdoors, but the intervals in which these, or any change, occur is shrouded in doubt and cannot be assumed to be an accurate representation of the real duration (this, of course, disregards situations in which an artist may explicitly state his faithfulness to the captured material in the editing process, which itself is a rare circumstance that cannot be read into the long-term interpretation or perception of the work).

On the other hand, Solar Breath’s capture method instills a subjectivity and creative freedom into the work via this same slight-of-hand potentiality. Like Benning’s hour-long coke tower shot, or his fifteen minutes of overhead planes and rustling twigs, Snow’s film is viewed with the possibility that the bit that we are seeing is only a fragment of the entire capture. Solar Breath isn’t randomly 62 minutes long; it is that length because Snow didn’t want it to be any longer or shorter. The piece presents the moments from the original shoot that Snow deemed to be worthwhile; the distance between the first and the second glimpses into the outdoors is what it is because Snow didn’t feel the need to shorten it (or even lengthen it). The potential for greater authorial control in the duration grants what is seen more weight as an expression of Snow’s tastes and intuitive sense of temporal composition. It is not just the work of nature, but a collaboration between Snow and nature.

Recalling Bazin’s ideas on the ontology of the photographed image, he likened it to a mummification of the model, and he saw film as the mummification of change in the model. Furthermore, these media were proof that the model and its changes existed, unaffected by the image’s distortions in focus, discoloration, or incorrect aspect ratios. As Bruce Elder explained in his dissection of Michael Snow’s film Presents,¹⁴ an image is not indexical when there is distortion, and this is detailed in the opening minutes of Presents when the squished image of a naked woman becomes completely unrecognizable as a representation of a human being. Likewise, then, any distortion of time in a moving image should be seen to diminish the image’s indexicality of the model’s change. This is the most liberating feature of video as a documentary medium. In the takeover of photography in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Bazin purported that “Photography is thus manifestly the most important event in the history of the visual arts. Both deliverance and fulfillment, it enabled Western painting to rid itself once and for all of its obsession with realism and to rediscover its aesthetic autonomy.”(“Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 10) Likewise, video’s inability to objectively present a durational event allows the medium to jump right into its own autonomy: the unquestionable faith that the image and its duration represent the artist’s uncensored intuitive vision.

Citations

1. André Bazin, “The Evolution of Film Language,” What is Cinema? Caboose,
   Montreal, QC, 2009: pg. 91.
2. D. N. Rodowick, “The Incredible Shrinking Medium,” The Virtual Life of Film.
   Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007: pg. 7.
3. Clement Greenberg, “Modernism,” Clement Greenberg – The Collected Essays and
   Criticism: Volume 4 – Modernism with a Vengeance (1957-1969), The University
   of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL and London, UK, 1993: pg. 86.
4. P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” Film Culture, no. 47 (Summer, 1969), pg. 327.
5. Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow: Part 1,” Artforum, 5:10 (June, 1967), pp. 175-76.
6. Michael Snow, “A Statement on Wavelength for the Experimental Film Festival of
   Knokke-le-Zoute,” Film Culture, no. 46, (Autumn, 1967), pg. 1.
7. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Observations on the Long Take,” October, Vol. 13 (Summer,
   1980), pp. 4-6.
8. André Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema? Caboose,
   Montreal, QC, 2009: pg. 3-10.
9. D. N. Rodowick, “An Ethics of Time,” The Virtual Life of Film. Harvard University
   Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007: pg. 85.
10. Mark Peranson, “Ruhr,” Cinema Scope, Issue 41 (Winter, 2010), pg. 57.
11. James Benning, Interview with Michael Guillen, “Darkest Americana & Elsewhere:
    Ruhr: A Few Questions For James Benning,” Twitchfilm, March 2, 2010,
    link.
12. James Benning, “Knit & Purl,” Cinema Scope, Issue 40 (Fall, 2009), pg. 39.
13. D. N. Rodowick, “Paradoxes of Perceptual Realism,” The Virtual Life of Film.
    Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007: pg. 106.
14. Bruce Elder, “On the Concepts of Presence and Absence in Michael Snow’s
    Presents,” in Wees, William C. and Michael Dorland, eds. Words and Moving
    Images. Mediatexte, Montreal, QC, 1984: pp. 34-51.

Standouts
Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)
Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean)
Ha Ha Ha (Hong Sangsoo)

Quite Good
Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino)
My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa)
Benda Bilili! (Florent de la Tullaye & Renaud Barret)
Young Girls in Black (Jean Paul Civeyrac)
Picco (Philip Koch)

Good
Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois)
I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhang-ke)
The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler)
The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira)
Poetry (Lee Chang-dong)
The Joy (Felipe Bragança & Marina Meliande)
Lily Sometimes (Fabienne Berthaud)
On Tour (Mathieu Amalric)
Two Gates of Sleep (Alistair Banks Griffin)
Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs) (Lodge Kerrigan)
Carancho (Pablo Trapero)
Adrienn Pál (Ágnes Kocsis)
The Housemaid (Im Sangsoo)
The Wanderer (Avishai Sivan)

More Interesting Than Watchable
Aurora (Cristi Puiu)
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)

Decent
Udaan (Vikramaditya Motwane)
A Screaming Man (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)
The Princess of Montensier (Bertrand Tavernier)
The Lips (Ivan Fund & Santiago Loza)
R U There (David Verbeek)
Tender Son – The Frankenstein Project (Kornél Mondruczó)
All Good Children (Alicia Duffy)
Heartbeats (Xavier Dolan)

Problems
Shit Year (Cam Archer)
We Are What We Are (Jorge Michel Grau)
Chongqing Blues (Xiaoshuai Wang)
Route Irish (Ken Loach)
Everything Will Be Fine (Christoffer Boe)
You All Are Captains (Oliver Laxe)

Big Problems
The Tiger Factory (Ming Jin Woo)
The Light Thief (Aktan Arym Kubat)
October (Daniel & Diego Vega)
The Tree (Julie Bertucelli)

Bad
Little Baby Jesus of Flandr (Gust Van den Berghe)
Lights Out (Fabrice Gobert)
The Silent House (Gustavo Hernández)

——————————————————————————————————————————-

10 That I’m Most Interested in Re-Visiting
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira)
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard) – with real English subtitles, please!
The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler)
Aurora (Cristi Puiu)
Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino)
My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa)
Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean)
The Lips (Ivan Fund & Santiago Loza)
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)

The Princess of Montpensier (Competition), and the last day begins with a loud whimper. The story of forbidden love and jealousy, inspired by an old French short story – which was itself almost certainly inspired by any number of Shakespearean tragedies – is handsome, bombastic, and occasionally rewarding, but the production is too generic and uninspired to elevate it above a typical costume dramatization of classic, and by now over-exposed, scenarios. Based on the strength of the original story, the film naturally has some effective bits and reasonably sympathetic characters, who are all decent, but, like the rest of the film, unexceptional and unambitious. Not surprising to hear that Tavernier wasn’t originally attached to this project, who seems to be making grab-bag decisions on what projects he will direct. Shrug.

My Joy (Competition), Completely different from his archival documentary style – also, notably, fictional – this film is of no less quality than the films with which Loznitsa has made a name for himself. There is a palpable dread to the proceedings of the protagonist, a truck driver who makes his way through Russia on a job, picking up and dropping off strangers, and running into some trouble. The oddly engaging journey moves at a snails pace, but the compelling performances – especially by the lead – and breathtaking camera work (not the showy kind on display by Mundruczó) support the film just fine. While the symbolism that I could sense was there was not all connecting with me, the general disdain for society, on its way to complete, hellish anarchy, will always come through, especially as it becomes more scarily relevant. This is all magnified to the nth degree when the film jumps forward in time for a truly chilling second half. The truck driver, barely recognizable now, appears to have gone mute, seemingly troubled or fed-up by a climatic run-in that closed the former half. The pacing of the film really grinds for certain stretches, and the misanthropic tone of the film grows increasingly unpleasant. The film continuously re-energizes itself just enough, though, with its intriguing structure, in which dramatic moments are interrupted by completely incongruous scenes that only become logical as they gravitate closer and closer to where we’d left off, often resulting in a violent pay-off. This is most certainly the case with the film’s closing half-hour, which stunned and rewarded me in its stone-cold proclamation that, sometimes, the worst possible outcome is the only justifiable course of action, especially in a society as fucked as this one is.

Of Gods & Men (Competition), Certainly a well-timed telling of this true event – in which a handful of French monks refuse to leave an increasingly violent Algeria (their monastery being threatened by nearby terrorist attacks), resulting in their deaths. I couldn’t completely engage with the material because it is too much a ‘really well-assembled retelling’ rather than a unique cinematic entity. The tension and looming danger arise early, and while the rest of the film (save for the finale) is terrorist-free, the threat of another, more harmful attack, is suffocating. That the monks stay even a moment after the first raid injects the film with all of the dramatic weight – not to mention potent religion/sacrifice allegorical substance – that it needs to successfully sustain itself. Unfortunately, though, the dialogue doesn’t progress from here, but only uses the inherent drama of the real-life event as a crutch. That this event is existing as cinema is never really justified other than as an easy way to make a really compelling fictional document of it. Obviously, it’s enough to create an effective thriller with some real meat for discussion – and to please critics, earning the film the runner-up award of the Competition- but, then, so was the real thing, as told in the news.

On Tour (Competition), Often dazzling, energetic, and poignant, in the end the attempts to stress the weight of family over business felt forced and hollow. Right before seeing this, Amalric was awarded with the Best Director prize, obviously for the warm and naturalistic performances that he extracted from his cast of real-life burlesque ladies, which, admittedly, sometimes fall flat. The film is best when the girls are either performing campy, soulful numbers, or having random, catty conversations in their traveling hours. The film seems to balance, though, on the fact that Amalric’s character, the touring manager, is timing their tour to hit Paris so that he can meet up with his sons who he never sees, which for some reason displeases the girls, which misguidedly calls upon certain acting skills that they clearly lack. Still, though, hold-ups aside, the quality bits here are really impressive; the kind of work I didn’t expect Amalric could (or even wanted to) pull off.

The Tree (Closing Film – Out of Competition), A young father has heart attack, or something, while driving, and rams his truck into his family tree and dies. His spirit is inhaled by the tree, which talks to his daughter, and maybe his wife, possibly. No, this isn’t a sequel to The Fountain, nor is it the awesome B-movie it may sound like. It’s pretty genuine and awful. But at least Gainsbourg is in it, a long way off from the bravura role in Antichrist, playing the kind of character that Miley Cyrus will likely excel at when she’s ten years older. Did I mention that the tree ends up swallowing their house during a storm, ala The Poltergeist? An awesome way to end the festival.

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

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 the enchilada con carne I was waiting 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 all put to rest.

Boonmee further develops what seems to 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 are 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 regularly participate.

Also notable here is that politics have, naturally, 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 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 supremely 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 freaking 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 at anything at anytime. Because nothing very definitive actually happen in the film, it’s clear that what is going on at any given moment is not as important as it is to just absorb the dystopian lives and carefree rhythms on display, which more than often is just 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, 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. Alas, it won’t win Best Picture, and will therefore live on, just as Slumdog should have, as a slightly-more-entertaining-than-usual distraction.

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