Movie Enthusiast Issue 34: Cannes 2017 in Review
Coming to you a week ahead of schedule, it’s Tim’s comprehensive overview of this year’s Cannes Film Festival! Please excuse any details I may have gotten wrong by virtue of, you know, not being there myself.
The pink badges are for the priority guests, proliferating in number each year though no one quite knows why or who these people even are. The blue badges are for media, but, then, so are the yellow badges—so why do the blue badges always get the better seats? The white badges are for the rest of us, plebeians made to stand on line for hours in the hope of snagging a back-row seat but more likely than not to make it through the increasingly more elaborate security checks too late to be admitted to the theater at all.
Such was the strange state of affairs at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, its 70th edition, and a possible explanation for the tampered enthusiasm from the press this year. Compared with years past, where one or two movies always tended to set the festival on fire and enrage the jealousies of those homebound cinephiles forced to wait months to see the year’s hottest new movies for themselves, nothing this year seemed worth writing home about.
Well, one thing did: David Lynch premiered the first two episodes of his new Twin Peaks series to the best reviews of the festival…several days after the episodes had already aired on Showtime in the States. Perhaps we lower-profile movie lovers are the real winners this year.
The festival opened with Ismaël’s Ghosts, the new film from Arnaud Desplechin, one of those French directors whose filmography seems to consist entirely of movies about middle-aged men having women problems, usually with with younger women. Desplechin is not to be confused with André Téchiné or Philippe Garrel, both of whom also had new films playing out of competition none of whose movies I’ve ever seen but who are indistinguishable on paper except for the fact that Garrel always gets the best reviews whenever the three of them debut their movies in the same festival. It was no different this year for Garrel’s warmly-received Lovers for a Day, a brisk, black-and-white, 70-minute-long film (the preferred length, I’ve heard, for weary festival-goers) about a father whose 23-year-old daughter returns home after a bad breakup and meets the father’s…23-year-old girlfried. The French, amirite?
The actual competition, presided over by Pedro Almodóvar and his jury of Jessica Chastain, Park Chan-wook, Maren Ade, Will Smith and others, kicked off with Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck. After the rapturous reception of Carol back when Haynes was last in competition, his latest enterprise—a family film, partly silent, based on a book by Hugo author Brian Selznick—underwhelmed, but only depending on whom you asked. Certain American critics loved it; others were noticeably cooler. If the latter were holding out higher scores for “better” films later in the festival, I have bad news for them.
Bong Joon-ho’s factory-farming adventure-parable Okja had a similar reception, with most critics agreeing that the change in tone of the movie’s second half requires some reckoning with. Regardless of the film’s quality, it is responsible for the newsiest happening of the festival. Financed by Netflix, who will not be showing the film theatrically in France or the rest of the world, Okja’s presence at the festival was cause for controversy with the French press: should a film be allowed to compete for the highest prize in all of cinema if most audiences throughout the world will never be able to see it in theaters? When the Netflix logo appeared onscreen at the premiere, it was met with a chorus of boos (an exasperating staple of Cannes press screenings), which were only exacerbated by curtains that got stuck pulling back from the screen and a projection error that caused the film to be displayed in the wrong aspect ratio for the first 5 minutes before chaos erupted in the seats and the whole thing had to be shut down and restarted.
Things didn’t get much more exciting from there. This year’s Russian entry, Loveless, was one of several instances of the “cinema of cruelty” that is starting to wear out its welcome. It had plenty of defenders though, and was pegged as an early frontrunner for the top prize. Michael Haneke, two-time Palme d’Or winner and modern progenitor of the cruel cinema movement, brought his own pony to the race. One of the more hotly-anticipated films of the festival, his Happy End, a portrait of a bourgeois French family and the technological and refugee crises happening at their doorstep, received some of the worst reviews a Haneke film has earned in recent memory. So much for the master!
Two cross-cultural upstarts of some renown this side of the Atlantic wanted in on the sadistic fun. Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster) brought his Greek-myth-inspired The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which disgusted just as many critics as it delighted. (I am told that a Greek chorus of sorts appears halfway through the film to announce all the gruesome things the viewer is about to witness in the second half. How…charming?) Meanwhile Swedish humorist Ruben Östlund sharpened his throwing knives for the highbrow art world with The Square, a satire that had its admirers but generally was commonly agreed to be too long and too meandering in making its blunt point.
The most positive critical consensus that I’m aware of formed around two movies with little innovation to share between the two of them. Hong Sang-soo’s The Day After continues in the venerable Hongian tradition of depicting soju-drunk artists in Seoul having conversations about art, life, and love in plainly-shot, unadorned domestic settings. (Hong, ever the workaholic, also had another movie at the festival: the cute trifle Claire’s Camera, featuring Isabelle Huppert as an amateur photographer whose first onscreen line of dialogue is “I’ve never been to Cannes before!” The fastest way to a film critic’s heart, I have found it.) Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute) trains a classical filmmaking eye on the Act Up movement in France in the 90s. Though most seemed to agree it wasn’t a piece of groundbreaking cinema, it was enthusiastically and emotionally received and instantly entered the race for the Palme d’Or.
Godwin’s Law of Artist Biographies states that movies about artists are universally terrible. Rodin, this year’s demonstration of the Law at work, at least features an impressive beard on lead actor Vincent Lindon.
Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, a remake of the 1971 Don Siegel/Clint Eastwood western, garnered much praise from the American press and much less from the foreign press. It opens stateside in June so we don’t have long to wait to judge for ourselves. Also coming soon from American directors to a theater near you is the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, a Queens-set odyssey with Robert Pattison as a bank robber intent on getting his brother out of jail. The Safdies make loud, unhinged, neon movies (maybe “acid trips” is the more apt term); Good Time, one of the later premieres of the week, was the shot in the arm everyone needed and picked up some of the highest scores for a competition film this year. I value my sanity and my eardrums and will probably be skipping it.
I hope the exhaustion is starting to set in with you by now—all the better to approximate the real Cannes experience! Feel free to take a rosé break at any time.
I haven’t mentioned one of the worst-reviewed films of the festival yet! It’s called Jupiter’s Moon, it’s Hungarian, it’s about a levitating refugee, its overtly religious allegory got a lot of people hot and bothered. Not far behind: Redoutable, the Jean-Luc Godard biopic from The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius. This pastiche was, as expected, reviled by that subset of the critical population that worships at the footstool of Godard, but elsewhere was greeted with a shrug. Amy Taubin, the legendary editor-at-large for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, found the movie to be such a “nothing” that she refused to walk out “because that would have been too grand a gesture for a movie this bland.” SAVAGE!
François Ozon’s erotic thriller L’amant double opens with an up-close and personal shot of a gynecological exam that match cuts to a woman’s eye shedding a single tear. Quelle trash! Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, also produced by Netflix and also booed before it even started, features Adam Sandler back on his A-game. I think people liked this movie? There’s a lot of noise and not a lot of consensus, so it’s hard to tell.
People didn’t like the Ukranian film, A Gentle Creature, which, contrary to the title and early reports, is evidently not based on the Dostoevsky short story of the same title. Lame! At 2 hours and 23 minutes, it was the longest film in competition. Like Loveless, it takes aim at the Russian government, scoring points with the right political sectors, though I don’t know if spending that long watching a woman work her way through labyrinthine eastern European bureaucracies on a mission to deliver a package to her incarcerated husband is worth the effort. People also didn’t like In the Fade, a terrorism-flavored courtroom drama and Diane Kruger awards vehicle. After her character’s husband and child are murdered by Nazis, she cries! She screams! She drinks a lot! She dyes her hair! She assaults somebody in the courtroom! She [redacted for spoilers]! This movie was followed up with Lynne Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here, evidently finished 5 days before its premiere (somebody somewhere mentioned that Ramsey plans to recut the film before it goes anywhere else). It’s been described in some quarters as Taken by way of Drive with Joaquin Pheonix in the lead role and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood in the composer’s chair. I’ll bite.
The only competition movie we haven’t gotten to yet is Naomi Kawase’s Radiance, noteworthy mostly because Kawase is one of those directors who keeps showing up at Cannes even though no one ever likes her movies and no one in the rest of the world ever sees them. She’s only one of three women directors in competition this year, though, so I’ll take what we get. Curiously, the more-or-less well-received Claire Denis film, Un beau soleil intérieur (the English title is so dumb I’m sticking with the French) was not granted a spot in competition, despite a starry cast featuring Juliette Binoche and Gérard Depardieu. The politics of Cannes are as dependably nonsensical as ever.
The more exciting Cannes films this year were to be found at the margins, in the specialty and sidebar programs. Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, a magical realist adventure starring the six-year-old children of families uprooted by the real-estate rapaciousness of neighboring Disney World and Willem Defoe cast very against type, more or less won the festival: everyone seemed to agree that it was the best movie they saw this year. Another crowd favorite was Faces, Places, a documentary collaboration by the French New Wave veteran Agnès Varda and French street artist JR. The two intrepid image-makers set out to meet new people and see new places in the French countryside, but the movie turns into a touching exploration of the 88-year-old Varda’s failing memory and mortality.
Also noteworthy from around the fest: German director Valeska Grisbach’s Western premiered early on in the festival and, despite a premise and trailer that hold no immediate interest for me (something about construction workers embarking on a pseudo-western adventure in the style of the American outback, but in Hungary), became an early critical darling. Perhaps it will float your boat! The Rider by Chloé Zhao, whose debut, Songs My Brother Taught Me, played to praise at Cannes in 2015; Zhao’s new movie, about a horse trainer searching for new meaning in life in the American heartland after a fatal blow to the skull ends his once-promising rodeo career, was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for U.S. distribution. Expect in in theaters later this year or early next. I Am Not a Witch, a Zambian satire about a young girl accused of witchcraft and exiled to witch camp (witch camp? is it like summer camp?), also sounds like an enticing debut, though who knows when any of us will get to see it. That all three of these movies are directed by women is a heartening sign of, hopefully, changes on the horizon in world cinema.
Alas, it is with a heavy heart that I must report that Jeanette, l’enfance de Jean d’Arc, the rock musical about the young Joan of Arc, was…pretty much trashed. It has its defenders! But after watching a clip of one of the musical numbers I’m, uh, pretty comfortable just putting this one away on the shelf.
Compared with last year’s disastrous jury, which sent home empty-handed no fewer than five of the most well-received films of the festival (or at least five that I enjoyed: Toni Erdmann, Aquarius, Sieranevada, Elle, and Paterson), Pedro Almódovar’s jury made satisfying choices, despite the lack of consensus enthusiasm for anything other than BPM, which took home the Grand Prix (2nd place, more or less; Almódovar teared up discussing it in the press conference, suggesting it was his personal choice for the Palme). Diane Kruger won Best Actress, as expected; a very bewildered Joaquin Phoenix, wearing Converse with his tuxedo because he had already packed his dress shoes in his luggage, won Best Actor. Lynne Ramsey split the screenplay award with Yorgos Lanthimos, while a visibly upset-at-not-being-the-Palme-winner Andrey Zyagintsev took the Jury Prize (third place, kind of) for Loveless. Sofia Coppola was not present to collect the Best Director trophy awarded to her, making her only the 2nd female recipient of the award in the festival’s history, but jury member Maren Ade gave a sweet rendition of Coppola’s mailed-in acceptance speech (“…blah blah blah I’m not Sofia Coppola”). Nicole Kidman, who had 4 projects at the festival, received a special Cannes Anniversary prize for her contributions to this year’s festivities and immediately touched off a battle, fought on the battleground of Kidman’s Wikipedia page, between the Kruger and Kidman factions of Gay Film Twitter. Don’t ask.
Finally, the Palme d’Or was awarded to The Square, one of the first comedies to take this prize that I can think of. A v extra Ruben Östlund got on stage to claim the prize and…uh…jump around rabidly and attempt to make his acceptance speech into a work of performance art involving the audience? Well then. Vive le cinéma! Until next year.
(Alastair Grant / Associated Press)