Go Go Tales

By Robert Koehler

So deep–and I mean deep–was the impression left by Abel Ferrara’s fabulous, ecstatic Go Go Tales and Asia Argento in particular, that I would suggest that Cannes introduce a new prize in honor of Asia’s oral hyperactivity, which effectively took over the festival for a few days running. I would suggest a Tongue d’Or. Not even Naomi Kawase’s mad, mad heroes trekking through woods and up a mountain in The Mourning Forest, nor the morally-haunted, white-gloved female executioner in Yinan Diao’s masterpiece, Night Train, nor the slow-motion flight of skateboarders in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, nor the cosmic sunrise in Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light (and, OK, not even the kooky opening shot and the skydiving nun shot in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely) could compete with the image of Asia tongue-kissing her Rottweiler (not a pit bull terrier, as I had incorrectly noted in my review for Variety) during a pole dance number in Go Go. Of course, Asia also revealed her chops in Catherine Breillat’s shockingly sober and even classical Une vielle maitresse, licking her tongue all over a thoroughly yucky, bloody wound on the body of lover Fu’ad Ait Aattou (who, it be said, is prettier than Asia). And for good measure, Asia out-did Michael Madsen as a mean motherfucker in Olivier Assayas’ strikingly poetic and beautiful piece of pulp, Boarding Gate, Cannes’ most unjustly maligned film. Asia didn’t need to announce that she was “Queen of Cannes,” even though she did. Anyone with a set of eyes and ears could spot that indisputable fact. What was more remarkable was that she was in at least two exceptional movies–one of them, Go Go, a certifiable masterpiece–and that whatever transgressive elements lay within the warp and woof of the Breillat belonged entirely to Asia. Like Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s The Shining, Asia turns her increasingly unfortunate mistress into a creature that simply disobeys the laws of nature, and certainly of the costume drama. (Which then made me imagine what Jack may have managed in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, the film that Breillat’s most directly recalls, along with the overt references to Choderlos de Laclos’ Les liaisons dangereuses. Then again, as the mind wanders further, Jack was actually Kubrick’s choice for Napoleon, in possibly the greatest movie never made.)

Because Go Go depicts one night in the life of New York strip joint run by Willem Dafoe, and because it’s written by Ferrara, a wild ensemble of night-crawlers, hangers-on, operators, glad-handers, scumbags, landladies (Sylvia Miles, whose screaming and profane Manhattanite should have won some kind of award, and I don’t care if Go Go wasn’t in the competition), fashionistas, showbiz wannabes, artist wannabes and other indescribable denizens fill the screen like an ever-shifting gallery of contemporary Hogarth paintings. As always with Ferrara, the maniacal excesses of capitalism threaten to take over Dafoe’s den of simple pleasures. (Miles, for one, tells him that his business sucks, and that she’s fielding an offer from Bed, Bath & Beyond to take over the property lease–thus, the film’s explosive, off-the-charts closing credit song, “Bed, Bath & Beyond,” written by the director and blurted out in throaty glory by Miles herself.) Dafoe wants his “family” to stay intact, but he has to win the latest New York State lottery to get out of the sea of red in which he’s drowning. He’s the eternal American optimist, facing off against real and illusory windmills, and, of course, he’s also Abel Ferrara. There’s an imbedded, loving tribute to Cassavetes and particularly The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but the results are both more hopeful and more ironic than in Bookie. Ferrara has allowed his comic self to run free, and he imagines a universe in which sensuality and tongue-kissing your doggie is just fun, and an end unto itself.

I’ll refrain here from delving into both Wang Bing (who, with Fengming and his short for the interesting and inevitably uneven omnibus film, O Estado do Mundo in the Quinzaine, was my choice for filmmaker of Cannes #60) and Night Train, both of which I’ll be writing about in upcoming editions of Cinema Scope magazine. Little if anything approached the majesty and formal daring of these films, but I’ll continue to also hoist the flag for Kawase’s The Mourning Forest, which, along with Reygadas’ film, poses issues of pure faith in cinematic terms that challenge non-believers such as myself. This was the case last year with Albert Serra’s Honor de Cavalleria, portraying a Don Quixote in direct conversation with God. (Serra, in a short essay in this year’s Quinzaine catalogue, praises ThÈrËse, by the Quinzaine’s tributed director, Alain Cavalier, as a film with a heroine who is “transformed by divine grace as we had been by the aesthetic experience that allowed us to transcend the world,” and that, “following Catholic tradition, we rediscover the universe through objects and the physical contact we made with them.”) Even though Kawase’s work is imbued with a considerable immersion in Buddhism (a factor, I think, in its rejection by a goodly number of smart critics at Cannes), and even though Reygadas is interested in portraying the plain-speaking and plain-living yet still-exotic spiritualism of Mennonites–an austere Protestant sect that makes a point of keeping to itself–both adhere to precisely this aesthetic of the physical-in-the-spiritual that Serra is referencing, and of which he is a supreme contemporary exponent. (“Yes, there is God,” Serra said to me over a beer in Vancouver last year, “but there are bodies. Bodies are very important–bodies are the key!”) These are films made by artists committed to radically formal cinema who also happen to be deeply religious, and it’s this combination that I think makes them problematic objects of fascination for critics and cinephiles, some (or many?) of whom aren’t religious at all.

I’m an atheist, for one, and a Darwinian, for another, but the manners in which the physical-mystical in the latest films of Serra and Reygadas and Kawase (and one might even add Kiarostami, although his own religious adherences are more subtle and hardly in line with strict Islam) comprise one of the most fascinating and unexpected patterns in new creative cinema. After a long stretch of time since Bresson and Dreyer (the overwhelming–perhaps too overwhelming touchstone in Silent Light) and, twenty years ago, since ThÈrËse (a film I now dearly wish I had caught in the Quinzaine), a certain kind of ecstatic religious beauty expressed through corporeality has returned in a big way. Since it confronts the contemporary skeptic with concerns and ideas that juggle the new and the ancient, it requires a longer and more thoughtful reflection than can be managed in a blog. (Blogs do have their limits.) In The Mourning Forest, a pantheism takes hold in the final third as an old man and his younger caretaker approach a gravesite, and death is contacted in a way that recalled for me Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. After Reygadas’ quite mortal humans work their way through a complicated marriage and a more complicated affair that the husband has been carrying on–and after several extended shots of bodies and machinery (cars, engines, threshers, soft-swirl ice cream dispensers)–a metaphysical miracle caps the final act, and in a moment, we are unmistakably back with Christ rising from the dead. These, with the remarks raised by Serra, are notions that Cannes has left me musing over, and that perhaps in cinema’s combined ability to conjure up dreams and the imagined as well as the visible, physical world, that an intrinsic system operating in the medium itself is being tapped by these (believing) artists. These aren’t objects of pure belief, for sure, but they insist that two worlds, the seen and the unseen, coexist. In the church of cinema that is Cannes, it shook things up. That’s what matters.

Silent Light

By Robert Koehler

The Palmares were handed out Sunday night, in what was alternately a
respectable and nutty show (with Charlotte Rampling, Carole Bouquet
and Jane Fonda keeping things classy, and The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly director Julian Schnabel blabbering on like a fool). The
results could have been worse, and were in some categories striking
and even brave. Several of the recipients, happily enough, line up
with what I would argue were the few really worthy films in the
competition: A Jury prize for Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light (shared
with Marjane Satrapi’s disappointing Persepolis); the well-deserved
Grand Prize for Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest; the actress
prize to Jeon Do-yeon, who explores every facet of her massively
complex and contradictory grieving mother in Lee Chang-dong’s Secret
Sunshine; a special 60th anniversary prize to Gus Van Sant, who came
to Cannes with one of his most personal and fully realized films and
one of the few formally inventive competition titles, Paranoid Park;
and, capping the evening, the Palme d’Or to Cristian Mungiu’s 4
Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, which has already become overrated.

Everyone had anticipated that last year’s jury president Wong Kar-wai
would lead his group to make some provocative choices; he didn’t, or
at least, tried and failed, leading to a Palm for Ken Loach’s
perfectly OK The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a compromise choice
on a jury whose members were deeply divided over Colossal Youth.
Odds were that this year’s Stephen Frears jury would operate in the
middle-brow manner that Wong’s group surprisingly did: This is the
man, after all, who made the quintessential middle-brow film of 2006,
The Queen. The results above suggest that, once again, juries
seldom obey prediction, but the guessing game that fills
conversations here in (especially) the final five or so days is
fueled by assumptions based on the jury president and makeup. In this
case, yes, there were the esteemed presences of Abderrahmane Sissako
and Marco Bellocchio, but there were also no less than four female
actors–two, it’s true who had made films themselves (Maria de
Madeiros, Sarah Polley), plus Toni Collette and Maggie Cheung, and
one male actor, Michel Piccoli. Actors can be wonderful, but on
juries, watch out: They can, in my experience on numerous juries, be
a notoriously mercurial bunch, with sometimes a vague sense of
aesthetic standards. It’s one of the reasons, for example, that the
Academy Awards are so often wrong: The Academy’s actor branch dwarfs
that of other branches in the voting.

In other words, I sure as hell didn’t expect a prize for Kawase or
Reygadas, let alone both. But it’s also not like this jury didn’t
blow it on occasion, in a grand collapse of taste. Handing Schnabel
the director prize is just nuts (as I noted in my previous post, the
real filmmaker of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is
cinematographer Janusz Kaminski), but handing Fatih Akin (who some of
us, deep into some beer-filled nights, began to nickname George W.
Bush-style as Fatty Atkins) the screenplay prize for the wretchedly
structured narrative of The Edge of Heaven is flatly an insult to
screenwriting. The most accomplished screenplay in this competition
was James Vanderbilt’s brilliant Zodiac adaptation of Robert
Graysmith’s book–Zodiac, putting aside Gus and Coen Brothers, who
were both in first-rate form, was easily the best American film on
the Croisette–followed by Secret Sunshine (Lee once again
displaying his prowess as a veteran novelist). Handing a Palm to
actor Konstantin Lavronenko for Zviagintsev’s risibly pretentious
The Banishment is just weird, especially from a jury so stuffed
with actors.

As for Mungiu’s 4 Months, nobody can really complain, though its
shortcomings became quite apparent on a second viewing. Festival
goers called it “The Romanian Film” from its first screening on the
second day of screenings–like last year, the Palm winner was
unveiled extremely early in the lineup schedule–and I started
teasing people about it. “Why can’t you call it, say, ’4 Months’ for
short? Or how about, in classical Cannes parlance, ‘The Mungiu’?
Mungiu is too hard to pronounce?” This went on for days. I finally
resorted to “432,” figuring that was the best shorthand of all. I’m
not sure that it was picked up by many. But it goes to serve that,
regardless of what one called it, “432″ was a film that stuck with
people and remain locked in their memories, long after many other
films had come and gone. Mungiu’s drama deals with an abortion that’s
being handled rather badly by a nervous and somewhat mousy college
student Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), whose roommate Otilia (Anamaria
Marinca) is doing her best to make things as comfortable as possible
prior to the illegal abortion. Bebe (the spectacular Vlad Ivanov, who
owns the film for the 35 or so minutes he’s onscreen) is the
abortionist, and the manner in which he verbally slaps the young
women with a chilly splash of realism on one hand, and then uses
their ineptitude to extract sexual favors on the other. We are in a
very hard, cold world, where mutuality has dried up and blown away.

Mungiu appropriates a variation on Ozu’s technique for positioning his
camera at the level of the actors, whether organizing things in their
dorm room, or sitting on a bed, or having dinner. He tends to control
his action, actors and mise en scene to excess, though; this is
brought out in the way he frequently films with handheld cameras, but
with such a tight rein on the camera that one hardly notices for many
minutes that it is handheld, which in turn begs the question: why
shoot handheld at all? To a degree that’s bothersome only on a second
viewing–since a first viewing is so emotionally enveloping, you
don’t notice–his script is uncommonly dependent on Gabita fucking
matters up at every step of the process. It’s understandable that she
might forget to make a timely reservation for a room in the hotel
Bebe specifically requested; it’s another thing to forget to pack a
proper plastic sheet. Gabita’s biggest screw-up is lying to Bebe
about how many months’ pregnant she really is (read the title for
that answer); out of shame, she reduces the time period, but by doing
so, she risks her health. But Mungiu’s rhythms literally push the
viewer past all of these concerns and others (Pierre Rissient, for
example, was citing some bits of action in the hotel bedroom that,
upon further consideration, couldn’t have possibly happened),
pressurizing his drama at every step. “432,” to that extent, has
some of the physical properties of a thriller, even as it’s also an
extended observational portrait of a country built on corruption and
deceit. “432″ makes its own deal: Sacrifice greater resonance and
overarching meaning beyond the mere events at hand, in exchange for
placing viewers in an ethical and medical pressure-cooker. It isn’t
the kind of deal quite worthy of a Palm (Gus needed no such
compromises for Paranoid Park), but as we noted near the top, it
could have been a whole lot worse.

Next, a look at where the good films in Cannes (hint: Don’t peruse
the competition roster)……

The Mourning Forest

By Robert Koehler

First, a bit of housekeeping…..The challenges–and near-impossibilities (technical, logistical, and otherwise)–of regularly
posting from Cannes have proven nearly insurmountable during the
first year that we’re attempting this. I hope that the following
postings will help fill in the gap of time since the previous post.
Given that I was reporting on Cannes for the Christian Science
Monitor, reviewing films for Variety, and prepping material for
upcoming writing in Cinema Scope magazine, the blogging thing got a
bit overshadowed. I’ll try to manage this better next year, for
Cannes’ 61st edition.

Speaking of my previous post: if a whiff of dejection could be
gleaned from it, that was because too many films in the first days of
the festival were either poor or disappointing or a little bit of
both. I can’t say that matters improved over the following days and
on to the end of the competition. On this, I have to say that I’m
parting company with a number of my friends and colleagues here (such
as Tony Scott in the New York Times) who have declared the 60th
edition one of the best of recent years. I would argue that this is
wrong on a few counts:

NO COLOSSAL YOUTH

There was no film in the competition that approached the heights of
Pedro Costa’s masterpiece in last year’s competition, Colossal
Youth. Only Naomi Kawase’s highly controversial The Mourning
Forest strove to do something new with cinema, while Silent Light
showed Carlos Reygadas being yet again a man who follows his own
rules and precepts, this time training his expansive eyes on a love
triangle in a Mennonite community in Mexico. Just as the Kawase
marked a stark departure from her previous feature, Shara, (but
don’t tell this to some of my Cannes buddies, who fled for the exits
long before a stunning ending that suggested Taste of Cherry remade
by a Buddhist), so the Reygadas contained a rhythm and visual
language that was hugely different from his last film, Battle in
Heaven. In fact, the only thing that conjured up Colossal Youth
was a short by Costa, made for the omnibus film in Directors
Fortnight, O Estado do mundo, titled Tarrafal. Ventura, the star
of Youth, is back, surrounded by other emigres from Cape Verde–
ghosts one and all. There’s even a sighting of a rabbit hunter, whom
Ventura and his ghost pals think has no chance of making a kill;
this, in turn, points to Costa’s other new short film, titled
naturally The Rabbit Hunters, shown recently in the Jeonju film
festival.

PROMISES WEREN’T KEPT

Where or where do we start with the disappointments?
As if My Blueberry Nights wasn’t enough to kick off the party with
a crushingly minor doodle of a movie–even the hardest of hardcore
Wong Kar-wai-ites couldn’t stir a defense–the previously noted The
Banishment and Psalms/Tehilim kept the disappointment train
rolling. Tarantino’s expanded Death Proof was surely no improvement
on his shorter form edition for Grindhouse…..it was just longer,
but with that where’d-it-go? lap dance reinserted.

For admirers of Fatih Akin’s Head-On, his new The Edge of Heaven
exposed a director who has little-to-no idea how to create an
interesting shot, and whose tortured manner of storytelling (the
death of not one but two characters is foretold in title cards) was
one of Cannes ’07′s major embarrassments. In ways even more
depressing, the great Bela Tarr returned to Cannes seven years after
his masterpiece,Werckmeister Harmonies, with a misbegotten
adaptation of an obscure George Simenon novel, The Man From London,
that never found visual or thematic traction, and revealed once and
for all that Tarr is an artist who finds fullest expression when he
liberates himself from plot.

Marjane Satrapi’s charming and bracing autobiographical graphic
novels, Persepolis 1 and 2, have been faithfully adapted by her
and co-director Vincent Paronaud into an animated film version, but
the emotional impact has been significantly diminished by the
narrative compression, and the books’ chapter-based episodes make
for an awfully episodic movie. In this all-French film, people in
Tehran and Vienna alike speak in Francais; I await the English-
language version (care of Sony Classics) with a certain horror, given
that Catherine Deneuve reprises her role as Satrapi’s mom–this even
though Deneuve’s Engljsh is notoriously impenetrable.

TOO MANY BAD MOVIES BY BAD DIRECTORS

The Competition lineup alone was stuffed with ‘em. There’s our old
bugaboo, Kim Ki-duk (see my Buenos Aires postings for the full Kim
hoe-down), who surprised no one–except perhaps Derek Elley–with
Breath, which was screened and mercifully forgotten. Christophe
Honore is clearly mad, having shifted from his unwatchable Bataille
workout, Ma Mere, to the dreadful Dans Paris, and now to Love
Songs. I avoided this like the plague; having seen how he butchered
the French chanson tradition at the end of Dans Paris, a feature
full of chansons a la Honore sounded like a long night in Hell. From
nearly every account (except many French critics), it was.

Julian Schnabel, who should stick to painting, is credited with
“directing” The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (based on Jean-
Dominique Bauby’s autobiographical account of his own debilitating
stroke, written with a code system to spell words in which he blinked
his one operable eye for his therapist), but the film is really made
by his genius cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski. It is a purely
Hollywood account (which will be the official French film this year
lapped up by Hollywood) of an arrogant man made humble and thoughtful
by infirmity, and reduces the great French actor Mathieu Almaric
(whose real performance of the festival was in the fascinating and
brave Nicolas Klotz Fortnight film, La question humaine) to a few
expressions and voice-over narration. James Gray, who continues to
spin his wheels about New York Russians on both sides of the law in
the ultra-straight and stupefyingly boring We Own the Night–those
watching who think they’re in some kind of Little Odessa/The Yards
timeloop-cum-flashback will be forgiven–has lost all artistic
credibility.

Denys Arcand, who hasn’t made a good film since Jesus of Montreal,
closed Cannes with L’age des tenebres, furthering Cannes’ tradition
of concluding with a film with no comers. (Nobody, I mean, nobody,
had the slightest urge to see it.) And taking up the rear with an
odorous work that many were comparing to the worst Cannes titles ever
screened–and in which the Ontario Cinematheque’s James Quandt left
during opening credits when the film’s broad, grotesque acting was
already amply in evidence–Emir Kusturica’s Promise Me This did as
much to permanently destroy any remaining shreds of a filmmaker’s
reputation as any film could. If no film was as good this year as
Colossal Youth, no film in last year’s lineup was as unendurable as Promise Me This.

Even after the Palmares (just handed out during this posting, and
which I will write about in the next post), I continued to hear
praise for this year’s lineup. This Pollyannish view reached the
point of extreme absurdity in the bar of the Gray d’Albion Hotel
(where I saw best actress winner Jeon Do-yeon, for Lee Chang-dong’s
exceptionally rich and risk-taking drama Secret Sunshine, arrive
triumphantly from her press conference and tearfully hug a proud and
moved Lee) when Dutch critic Peter van Buren claimed this to be the
best Cannes in 25 years, even though he had seen only four films.

Next–the Palmares, good, bad and ugly. Plus, the worthy films.

I’ve been holed up sick this past week, and just in time, Cinema Scope and Variety critic Robert Koehler–whose excellent posts from BAFICI 2007 we’re still referring to–will begin filing occasional posts from this year’s Cannes Film Festival. –Doug

* * * *

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

By Robert Koehler

The 60th anniversary of Cannes was meant to be a celebration, but by the end of day four, there’s been little to shout about. I wasn’t about to assume that Wong Kar-wai’s hopelessly banal opener, My Blueberry Nights, was going to be a precursor of the competition program–it was the opener, after all, and we know what openers are like. But who knew that Wong would have any desire to make a Zalman King film, only without the sex? Wong’s densely textured images, drenched in neon, glassy reflections and nocturnal desire–set in New York, Memphis, the open highway, Reno and Vegas–are the reliable decoration to material that alternately borrowed devices from American plays (Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead came to mind all too often), American road movies (Wenders’ pathetic recent ventures kept coming up) and bad American straight-to-video romances. Norah Jones, looking a bit spooked by the whole affair in her debut film role as a gal who’s lost at the game of love (to borrow some of the film’s astonishingly corny rhetoric), tries to keep up with the mysteriously excited and enthusiastic Jude Law, whose New York cafe owner appears to be caught up in some kind of sweeping tale of love that might be happening just off-screen. It’s surely not happening on screen, as Jones hits the road to discover that love comes in all forms (from Rachel Weisz to David Strathairn to a sexed-up Natalie Portman) and usually ends up in disappointment–except when you come back to New York, and find Jude Law still waiting for you behind the counter. The one pleasant matter that My Blueberry Nights confirms is that Wong is, cinematographically, his own man: Sans Chris Doyle–their once-happy collaboration gone seriously off the tracks during the endless making of 2046–he extracts the same level of dreamy image-making from Darius Khondji as he had from Doyle. The remaining mystery, as best summed up later outside the Palais by Amy Taubin: Why does Norah’s blueberry pie, mixed with melting vanilla ice cream, look like afterbirth?

The Romanians are on the march–witness Cristi Puiu (here in Cannes as part of the Un Certain Regard jury with one of our favorite critics, Kent Jones), or the extraordinary The Paper Will Be Blue (which screened January in the Palm Springs festival) and now, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, which follows the ever-worsening prospects of two female students during the final months of the Ceausescu regime. Mungiu constructs scenes in single takes, often with an unexpectedly steady handheld camera positioned Ozu-style at the same level as his characters. This tends to create a barely perceptible (at first) pressure that builds inexorably to an astonishing sequence in which Mungiu’s women (Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu) are forced into an awful business arrangement with an abortionist (Vlad Vasiliu, in one of the most astonishing supporting performances since R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, and equally as fierce). What Mungiu doesn’t provide is a political context: Anticipating Ceausescu’s fall, women who had once been called upon to make babies as their patriotic duty either began to practice some form of birth control or abort as an act of political protest. While Romanian audiences will surely read this background into the scenes, non-Romanians just as surely will not, which is why 4 Months seems in the end to be about nothing more than the events on screen, with no resonance to speak of. Mungiu does show, though, an impressive control of dramatic action inside the frame–which, like almost everything in the competition so far, is in widescreen.

Zodiac is still the best of show in the competition at the end of day four–I say this having not seen the Coen Brothers’ widely admired No Country for Old Men–which is perhaps not so surprising for a high masterpiece of American cinema. It’ll be interesting to note what competition jury president Stephen Frears thinks of David Fincher’s densely constructed film, which is among many other things a procedural drama about the dizzying effect that information overload has on intelligent professionals. I say this in the sense that Frears’ The Queen is a procedural about two opposite forms of governance in the modern world (or perhaps more accurately, one that’s pre-modern, and one that’s post-modern) and may very well find some kinship in Fincher’s project. Who the hell can tell though, considering he heads a jury including Maggie Cheung, Abderrahmane Sissako, Sarah Polley and Michel Piccoli? (The latter of whom is just smashing as, of all people, Nikita Khrushchev meeting the Pope in Manoel de Oliveira’s amusing contribution to the festival’s 60th anniversary omnibus film, Chacun son cinÈma.) Thus, rule number one at Cannes: Never expect juries to take the expected path; nobody figured that Wong’s jury last year would opt for such a safe, standard choice as Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley, so I can hope that Frears’ team might look favorably upon Zodiac, but I’m not counting on it.

That doesn’t mean that the jury will do something as stupid as giving a prize to Raphael Nadjari’s Psalms/Tehilim. Oh boy. Nadjari has laid the biggest egg so far with a massively disappointing follow-up to his intensely fine drama, Avanim, one of the few worthy Israeli films of recent years. Once again, Nadjari focusses on an Orthodox family in Jerusalem, whose father suddenly disappears after seeming to deliberately crash his car while driving his older and younger sons. Shades of L’avventura, the father vanishes from the film, leaving us with a tale of sons trying to make sense of this rupture in their lives. Or rather, the patina of a tale, which never gets a head of steam or finds any purpose beyond an immediate conveyance of loss. Nadjari trains his telephoto lens on faces, but after the first shock, the camera vainly searches for…something. It’s just not there, and it becomes painfully obvious that Nadjari never had a complete work in his head. Why it’s in the Palme competition is a puzzle right up there with Wong’s blueberry pie a la mode.