Cannes @ Home
Minus the red carpet COVID testing
Watching
You know what they always say: if you can’t make it to the Cannes Film Festival yourself, make your own little film festival at home.
Mauvais Sang (1986)
(Leos Carax, Annette)
Leos Carax’s second film is manifestly the work of a 25-year-old man. This is less a statement about quality than it is about sensibility. In a drab and dystopian Paris, a young Denis Lavant leaves his girlfriend, a young Julie Delpy, to assist Michel Piccoli in a heist to steal a drug known to be the only remedy for an illness that has been sweeping the nation and killing anyone who has sex without love. Along the way Lavant falls for Piccoli’s mistress, a young Juliette Binoche (I cannot emphasize enough how startling it is to see all these familiar faces at the starts of their careers).
What I mostly remember from this film—which is waning now that it’s been almost two months since I watched it—are its most striking bits: Lavant and Binoche having a playful shaving cream fight, Lavant cartwheeling down the street to Bowie’s Modern Love, still fresh and new at only three years old. The latter scene is of course the inspiration for a similar scene with Greta Gerwig in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, though Baumbach’s take replaces the nervy abandon of the original with a more blissful whimsy. I guess Carax repaid the compliment by stealing Adam Driver for Annette.
Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988)
(Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jane par Charlotte)
Famous people making a movie about their friends, who are also famous people, can be a hard sell. Agnès Varda clears that hurdle in her film about Jane Birkin by making the film both photographically interesting (it looks incredible) and thematically adventurous.
Rather than film a straightforward account of Birkin’s career and family life, Varda and her subject collaborate to turn the film into an elaborate game of dress up. At its simplest, that involves literally dressing Birkin up in the style of various figures from art history and filming her in static role play—here she is in the manner of Manet’s Olympia, there she is as the Virgin Mary receiving tidings from the angel Gabriel. At its most complex, the dressing up turns into more fully-realized cinematic playacting, such as in a black-and-white Laurel and Hardy-esque sketch and an extended sequence of spy-movie cat-and-mouse where Varda’s camera gymnastically chases Birkin and some pursuant thugs through a warehouse.
Varda enjoys making herself an active participant in the film as well, whether she’s talking to Birkin from behind the camera, appearing in front of it, or phoning up Jean-Pierre Léaud at Birkin’s behest to stop by the shoot for a walk-on part. I don’t watch many biographical documentaries but I could be convinced if more of them had as much fun as this one does.
Basic Instinct (1992)
(Paul Verhoeven, Benedetta)
This torrid thriller from the before years—before I was born, before Showgirls derailed Paul Verhoeven’s reputation, before the Great Twitter Movie Sex Discourse Wars of the 2010s—hinges on the minor detail that all it takes to become a criminal mastermind is a bachelor’s degree in psychology. We’d really be in trouble if that were the case! Sharon Stone, either a latter-day Kim Novak or a Margot Robbie avant la lettre depending on how you look at it, turns heads as a glamorous pulp fiction writer the plots of whose novels eerily align with deaths that have been happening in her orbit. Michael Douglas’s detective, necessarily a recovering alcoholic per the demands of the genre, is put on the case but easily falls for her charms. Verhoeven knows the material is trash (it’s unclear if the screenwriter does) but not unlike Hitchcock he treats it as inherently interesting anyway, leaning in to the parts that make it so: power, sex, car chases.
The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (2016)
(Juho Kuosmanen, Compartment No. 6)
Another victim of Watching Movies at Home With Your Phone Nearby in a Pandemic Syndrome (listen, we have to keep ourselves honest). This black-and-white flick about the Finnish featherweight boxing champion of the title starts on what is presumably the happiest day of his life. When his lady friend’s car breaks down on their way to a wedding, Olli Mäki gives her a lift on the basket of his bike. The rest of the film goes on to test the thesis that no amount of athletic glory can compete with sharing a moment out of time with your true love, immortalized here in a gorgeous tracking shot.
Eden (2014)
(Mia Hansen-Løve, Bergman Island)
I’m normally a big fan of Mia Hansen-Løve’s movies—I have an enormous, but I mean, like, truly enormous poster of Things to Come in my house—so I was bummed that I didn’t like Eden. Hansen-Løve’s films often incorporate autobiographical details and Eden is in that regard of a piece with the rest of them. Co-written with her brother Sven, the movie recounts some twenty years in the life of Paul Vallée (a Sven stand-in) as he rises to prominence as a house DJ and inexorably falls out of it. There are some odd choices: Hansen-Løve forgoes the use of professional makeup to indicate that any of the characters in the large ensemble cast are aging as time goes on; Greta Gerwig has a walk-on role as an old flame who gets her short stories published in The Atlantic despite speaking in the stilted English of a French screenwriter trying to get the language right. There’s also a scene where a guy makes his friends watch Showgirls for the third time to prove it’s quietly a masterpiece and one very good bit, involving a bouncer who won’t let Daft Punk (playing themselves) into a club because he doesn’t recognize them without the helmets.
What really got me was how Paul is depicted as becoming an expert at DJing with minimal effort involved. Friend of the newsletter B.D. McClay recently wrote about this phenomenon of movies and TV shows that skimp on showing the labor involved in an artist’s trade and I think Eden fits well into the landscape she sketches. The only work we see Paul really do is actually just delegation, when he asks his little sister (presumed to be Mia) to listen to a tape recording of a song he likes and figure out how to play the melody on the piano. Sure he travels the world, goes to a lot of meetings with producers, yadda yadda yadda, but when did he actually learn how to get good at this?
Mia and Sven are instead preoccupied with the way that friend groups grow and shrink across time. In itself this a worthy topic to explore, but there’s so little distance between the filmmakers and the subject that the movie (I think wrongly) takes as a given that the casual viewer won’t need any coaxing to care about the people the Hansen-Løves already know so well. The only real exception is Roman Kolinka’s cartoonist character, who rises above the rest of the cast by having a short and tragic story arc. Paul’s arc is a downer, too, in that it ends with him splayed out on his bed in a depressive funk, reading a poem that a girlfriend insisted he should read. But it’s less tragic than “sorry that happened to you, bro.”
Happy Hour (2015)
(Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car)
5 years ago, in the second-ever issue of this newsletter, I wrote a short blurb introducing Happy Hour, which had just won two prizes at the Locarno Film Festival. We’ve come full circle! As you may recall, this breakout film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi clocks in at five hours and 17 minutes and features performances from a quartet of actresses whose roles involved a fair bit of improvisation. Presently Hamaguchi is enjoying a year of being the It Director, having won the second place prize at Berlin for his anthology film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and the screenwriting award at Cannes for his Murakami adaptation Drive My Car.
We don’t know at first how Akari (Sachie Tanaka), Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), Fumi (Maiko Mihara), and Jun (Rira Kawamura), four friends in their mid-thirties, met. They lead somewhat disparate lives—Akari is a nurse, Fumi runs an arts space, Sakurako’s a stay-at-home mom—but they make time to go on outings at least once a month. On a trip up a mountain at the beginning of the film, they make plans to attend an improv workshop led by a traveling artist. Hamaguchi spends some 20 or 30 minutes showing us said workshop, where the activities consist of silly teamwork-building exercises and a lesson in getting a chair to stand up on one leg.
Putting an acting class at the front end of your 5+ hour film necessarily invites comparisons to Jacques Rivette’s Out 1, though Hamaguchi doesn’t make too much of his influences. Ozu also comes to mind in a handful of scenes where Hamaguchi breaks from his otherwise naturalistic way of shooting dialogue and has characters address the camera directly. That style of shot was simply part of the grammar of Ozu’s movies, but here it signifies a shift—not quite a metaphysical one but an attention-grabbing one all the same. The other influence I sensed looming large over the film was Antonioni, whose signature is all over the crux of the story (more on that in a bit).
After the improv workshop, the four ladies go out for drinks with some men from the class. Akari gets riled up talking about her job, where the younger nurse training under her is an incompetent and where hospital bureaucracy saps her ability to tend to patients compassionately. She goes on to bond with one of the men over their shared experience as divorcés. Jun seizes the opportunity to casually drop that she is in the middle of seeking a divorce, to the shock of Akari and Fumi, though not to Hakurako, in whom Jun had already confided. Though Akari and Fumi are shaken with mistrust, the three ladies come together to support Jun through the court proceedings. Yet it quickly becomes clear that Jun lacks a compelling reason for a divorce and is not above using deceit to frame her husband for wrongdoings he never committed.
On a bus ride home from a spa day with the girls, Jun talks up a stranger and explains (for the first time we’re hearing of it) how she knew Akari, Fumi, and Hakurako separately and decided the four of them would make good friends. She also mentions her divorce, which sends a disturbance through the air; the woman she’s talking to leaves in a haste, and Hamaguchi stays in the bus for another minute to track Jun’s contemplation through an expressionistically-lit tunnel. Jun appears one final time, bidding another character adieu as she hops on a boat and vanishes from the back half of the film, taking after Monica Vitti’s friend in L’Avventura but with more agency over her departure.
Just like in Antonioni’s film, Jun’s disappearance is spiritually shattering for the other characters, who spend the rest of the story reorienting their lives around her absence. The final 2 hours of the film are draining, partly owing to the mostly-downward trajectories the rest of the women are on but also owing to another extended sequence at a book reading in Fumi’s arts space where Hamaguchi films the fictional novelist Yuzuki Nose reading a short story in toto. It’s hard to point to any one part of a movie this long and say, this is it, this is excessive, but this may be it. (I’m sure I would feel differently if I remembered any of the content of the story in question and could try tying it in to the rest of the movie.)
If anything, this exercise in extreme length—IMDB calls it the longest Japanese film ever made, which I suppose must be true since Kobayashi’s The Human Condition was released as three separate films—permits the viewer to develop a different sort of relationship to the characters. We become invested in the mundane parts of their lives as well as the dramatic ones; unlike movies with less room to breathe, Happy Hour powerfully demonstrates how the latter aren’t possible without the former.
Reading
The Maels and Sondheim both have a flair for melodrama, and the songs in Annette are reminiscent of how Sondheim’s described his approach to the score for Passion, which “lie somewhere between aria and recitative, with an occasional recognizable song form thrown in” (from his book Look, I Made a Hat). They navigate the space between the austerity of musical theater and the flamboyance of opera rather than leaning into one or the other.