Monthly Archives: April 2009

Cannes Bloody Cannes

Posted in Commentary, Film festival by

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Drag Me to Hell (left); Enter the Void (top right); Thirst (bottom right)

By Robert Koehler

Lost amid the general, conventional sense of the Cannes competition lineup (see here) as a colloquium of auteurs–from Haneke to Campion, Audiard to Tsai, To to Resnais–is the fact that, for better or worse, the Palais will be the site of a bloodbath this year. There will be a whole lot of killers stalking around the lineup that Thierry Fremaux and Gilles Jacob have constructed. In his good rundown of all the sections announced today, complete with reference links, IFC Daily‘s David Hudson inadvertently provides a reading list of murder and mayhem.

Consider the following: The Devil (theoretically) gets vicious with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (Lars von Trier’s Antichrist); Nathaniel Brown gets nearly mortally wounded (Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void); a violent Corsican gang rules a prison (Audiard’s A Prophet); young Nazis prepare for power (Haneke’s The White Ribbon); Johnny Hallyday’s daughter’s family is massacred, and Hallyday comes for revenge (To’s Vengeance); Mussolini hanky-panky (Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere); victims’ body parts are chopped off and mutilated (Brilliante Mendoza’s Kinatay); a medical experiment turns a priest into a vampire (Park Chan-wook’s Thirst); Rinko Kikuchi works nights in a fish market and days as a contract killer (Isabel Coixet’s Map of the Sounds of Tokyo); and a motley crew is rounded up by Brad Pitt to collect Nazi scalps (Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds).

Then, in Un Certain Regard, we have a mom searching for a killer who framed her son (Bong Joon-ho’s Mother); a father’s suicide and its effect on his family (Mia Hansen-Love’s Le pere de mes enfants); and Ivan the Terrible (Pavel Lounguine’s Tzar). Meanwhile, in the Midnight series, there’s Alison Lohman hexed by an old woman who wants to send her to Hades for denying her a home mortgage extension (Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell, previewed in SXSW). In fact, Thierry and Gilles have a clear interest in the Devil, since he’s involved not only with the Raimi, but plays a prominent position in Antichrist (which makes sense, I suppose) and is played by Mr.Tom Waits in Terry Gilliam’s out-of-competition The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

And while we’re tallying up the corpses, there’s the endless roster of French film stars to contend with, sometimes in movies made by non-French directors. Tsai, for example, has a bunch of them in Visage (Fanny Ardant, Nathalie Baye, Mathieu Almaric, Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Pierre Leaud), while Von Trier has Charlotte Gainbourg going evidently crazy in the woods, Johnnie To enlists both Hallyday and Sylvie Testud, Tarantino has Julie Dreyfus and Melanie Laurent in Inglourious Basterds, Michael Lonsdale is in Alejandro Amenabar’s version of ancient Egypt in Agora (out of competition) and Heitor Dhalia recruits Vincent Cassel in Adrift (UCR). Almaric and his regular Desplechin co-star Emmanuelle Devos will be all over the Palais, Almaric in the Tsai and the Resnais, Devos in the Resnais and Xavier Giannoli’s In the Beginning.

More interesting–and maybe the most interesting development of all– is how UCR has decided to let Raya Martin in the door with his latest, Independencia. Perhaps the most radical of the young Filipino filmmakers, Martin made last year’s Now Showing the avant film in the Quinzaine, which may suggest that UCR is either warming up to unconventional cinema or that Raya has done something unpredictable (again). He also appears as half of the director team (with Adolfo Alix, Jr., another striking voice in the Filipino movement) of Manila, in the amorphously-titled “Special Screeenings” section. Manila appears to remake and honor great independent Filipino filmmakers of the ’70s and ’80s (Lino Brocka, the far less championed Ishmael Bernal), much as Khavn has been doing lately in some of his work, most prominently Manila in the Fangs of Darkness.

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Finally, I will declare Cannes’ official 2009 poster their best ever, since it’s comprised of Monica Vitti glancing out a Sicilian villa window in my favorite film, Antonioni’s L’avventura. The image comes from a scene roughly midway through, after Monica and her new lover Gabriele Ferzetti have decided to take a break at a friend’s villa during their eventually futile search for the vanished Lea Massari. In my various researches and studies of L’avventura, the film that fundamentally shifted cinema towards real modernity, the image itself is one I’ve never seen printed as a still in books or literature, so it’s use here by Cannes provides the nearly 50-year-old film (violently booed and rejected by the gala Palais audience, who had to be constrained from ripping chairs out of the floor during the screening) with a new visual stamp and flavor. It also exemplifies Antonioni as film’s most sublime visual artist, expressing inner states of mind and emotion outward, onto the objects, nature and bodies he films, the outward physical realm as a magnifier of an inner reality. And all of it can be seen in this single image.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

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Last weekend, LACMA screened the new print of Chantal Akerman’s riveting portrait of life as a series of imprisoning rituals, Jeanne Dielman: 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a film that charts the actions of a matronly widow (Delphine Seyrig)–and covert prostitute–as she performs house chores and errands over a three day period. Comprised of lingering, static shots of Dielman in her apartment and around town, and clocking in well over three hours, its uncompromising and provocative vision has long been an inspiration to those lucky enough to see it. It’s never been released on video in the US, but Janus is distributing the new print, so a Criterion DVD should be in the works. In the meantime, the film is included in a Belgian box set of Akerman titles.

The film is often described as an ultimately chilly perspective of a woman defined–by others as well as herself–by her utilitarian value, but for much of the film’s running time, its appealing actress, motionless camera, and precise treatment of space facilitate a deliciously ambiguous experience for the viewer. Is the camera’s obsessive gaze a tribute or a lament? As Psycho (1960) commentators often point out, when Norman Bates disposes of Marion Crane’s body and meticulously cleans up the murder scene, viewers often sympathize with Bates in spite of his actions because of a universal admiration for a job well done. Film has the power to pictorialize and highlight even the most mundane actions and invest them with a kind of dramatic intensity with their own setup, conflict, and resolution; each of Dielman’s chores constitutes a mini-narrative within a larger effort to maintain a pristine order that borders on the metaphysical.

I haven’t heard of the film described in musical terms, but Seyrig’s stunning physical performance recorded in long takes–methodically washing dishes, shining shoes, peeling potatoes, flouring veal, serving dinner, scrubbing the bathtub–features organized and fluid movements that could make a dancer blush. For the first 90 minutes or so, Dielman seems like a manifest professional. It’s only when her routine begins to crumble that the lack of a person inside it becomes evident. This shift arises in tiny, almost innocuous ways, but in the context of Akerman and Seyrig’s established, all-enveloping rhythm, the slip registers as a shock wave.

The film’s representation of space is equally fascinating: virtually every shot in the movie is composed with the camera at a 90-degree angle toward a wall or pointed down tunnel-like hallways or receding sidewalks. Figures turn to the left or the right and disappear into the next shot, creating a narrow field of action. Rooms in Dielman’s apartment are never connected by a camera movement, nor are they shot from a corner angle, but are always depicted from positions that directly face the carefully arranged display cabinets or repetitive wallpaper, and utilize lenses that emphasize the perfect, grid-like patterns of the floor and wall tiles; it’s a highly ordered world alternating between impasse and predetermination, colored in subdued hues of muted browns and pale, sickly greens.

Like Agnes Varda’s brilliant Le Bonheur (1965), the film’s pleasant (though spare) conversations merely emphasize the emotional disconnect that pervades its characters. Dialogues are virtually monologues, whether they feature a neighbor’s breathless description of her thought process planning dinner, a letter read out loud without response, or Dielman’s teenaged son confessing to Freudian secrets like he’s summarizing a sitcom. An hour into the film, a shoemaker asks Dielman if her terminally bored and unresponsive son listens well, and she replies, “I’d be lost without him,” a line that seems absurdly hilarious until Dielman’s moments of spare time force her to sit and stare blankly into space seemingly without thought or impulse except a growing sense of unease. (Has any actor expressed existential dread more perfectly than Seyrig when she stoically brews a series of unsatisfactory coffees, the dramatic task–for once–stalled in perpetual limbo?) Whether Dielman’s mechanical actions have replaced her inner life or whether she never developed one in the first place, automation seems like the only alternative to complete and total shutdown.

Days in Buenos Aires: Lisandro Alonso

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By Robert Koehler

Was this the single most memorable image of the entire BAFICI? Perhaps. Just as Godard’s festival trailer for last year’s Viennale, Une Catastrophe, stamped the entire festival with the filmmaker’s own form of visual-audio music and sense of the Zeitgeist, so Lisandro Alonso’s BAFICI trailer, mysteriously titled S/T, seemed to stamp this edition of BAFICI. I would say that it’s the single greatest festival trailer I’ve ever seen: A close, static shot trained on an owl, in turn very much trained on the camera, its whole body undulating with the inhaling and exhaling of breath timed perfectly to a pulsating soundtrack of beating, pounding drums. It was Alonso’s entire cinema encapsulated into a single minute, a cinema defined by remorseless observation, of the power of solitude, of the essential nature of nature and the nature of watching and listening. After a minute of Alonso’s Owl staring back at us, demanding our attention and some explanation of ourselves, we are able to watch anything that follows…..

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Here’s the maker of the Owl Trailer, Alonso himself, dropping by the festival just outside BAFICI’s Festival Space. The title S/T? A mystery…..And excellent news for Southern California lovers of Alonso’s films: He informed me that he’ll be starting a residency at CalArts, starting in mid-April. (Meaning, starting just about NOW.) He’ll be based at CalArts for several weeks, screening and discussing his films, and who knows what else. Stay posted at Film Journey and the usual places for any further Lisandro sightings/events/encounters in Los Angeles.

We may be seeing the start of a shift in Alonso’s cinema, which reached a new development in Liverpool. Whether this also means a shift away from Argentina to….somewhere else, only time will tell. With what some consider the world’s most interesting director, it is always worth keeping track….

Days in Buenos Aires: Miguel Gomes

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Robert Koehler has sent in a few final updates from his recent trip to BAFICI; next stop: Cannes. -Doug

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Miguel Gomes, writer-director of Our Beloved Month of August, is seen here answering audience questions after a screening of his brilliant, Lewis Carroll-like first feature, The Face You Deserve–which he thinks is better than August. (I would respectfully disagree.)

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After the screening, Miguel with Mark Peranson outside the cinemas in the Abasto shopping mall. Mark thinks enough of August to make it the cover of Cinema Scope‘s Winter ’09 issue (in what is surely one of the more original film magazine covers of recent years–all text, straight from the film’s Cannes pressbook, listing each individual in the film, in order of appearance–all text, in direct contrast to the text-free Cinema Scope cover bordered in black honoring the death of Danielle Huillet); that, and an accompanying epic interview between Mark and Miguel that more or less covers this highly creative young filmmaker’s opus to date. (Read it here.)

As for Gomes’ cinema, which was shown intact at BAFICI, features and shorts, one has to stand back in some wonder, and consider that here’s an artist who treads lightly through his art form. A gentleness pervades Our Beloved Month of August, which begins as a loose-limbed non-fiction account of a seemingly rudderless film crew and the mountainous central region of Portugal they find themselves in. Locals of the region come and go, an apparent randomness, or at least the wide, ambling qualities of a large mural painting, seems to govern the film. But what it is, is all part of a greater design, informed by a freedom from the restrictions of making a strictly “non-fiction” or “fiction” film–which are in fact, the actual conditions in which the film was made, in which an original, very long script is junked for what becomes the film Gomes actually made. In other words, a film documenting itself, and even better, learning to become itself not only as it’s being made and edited, but as we’re watching it.

This is, as I like to call it, handmade cinema. A very important moment in the indescribable The Face You Deserve (a film, like all of Gomes, that’s both a “musical-comedy” and one that starts off as one kind of film and ends up as another): The central character departs from a house in which he’s been involved with a group of men in a set of ruses, exercises and serious business, and as he leaves, night turns to day. But it does so INSIDE THE CAMERA. I asked Gomes (just before taking the picture above) to confirm what my eye suspected: That the camera lens itself had been opened up for greater light exposure, in effect, from a “day-for-night” exposure to a full daylight exposure. (Please note: This kind of thing just isn’t done anymore in cinema. This is, as the film school teachers would admonish, what film labs and post labs and CGI are for. You never, ever, actually change your lens setting while filming. This is a violation.) Gomes happily confirmed to me that this was the case, and that he had consciously committed a violation.

And this is why his cinema is so important, and essential. The BAFICI jury agreed: August won the international competition, a follow-up to its special jury prize in Guadalajara.

Extra note: Mark’s t-shirt is by Godard. “Now out of print.” The first word is most relevant: “Liberte.”