Film Notes
Agora (Alejandro Amenabar) - 4th century AD in Alexandria is not only the home of the fabled library of the Ancient World, but also a hotbed of different religious factions - pagans, Jews, Galileans (aka "Christians") all ruled over by the Roman Empire. Instead of being fed to the lions, the Christians have now been legitimized by the Romans and their militant wing, the Palebeni, parade around in filthy black designer rags looking and behaving like the Taliban. Over a number of years, the Christians gain religious (and political) control by provoking the pagans and terrorizing the Jews. In the process the Christians destroy and burn the library with its scientific and philosophical texts. All of this is mixed in with the narrative of Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) an astronomer who grapples with the major questions of the day: do the planets revolve around the earth, why does the position of the sun change, how do I handle that hunky student who declares his love for me by playing the pan pipes in front of my dad? Great production design with epic values but the film suffers from the weight of trying to balance all-out kick-ass religious war with explanations of the ellipse that will be lost on the teen demographic who prefer mano-a-mano Ancient style over Egyptian interpretations of Greek math. Weirdo shots of Alexandria and Egypt from outer space punctuate the film and confirm what we've known all along - the pyramids were built by aliens who also authored Egyptian cosmology; and they loved to watch all this from their eye-in-the-sky perch.
Addendum: French actor Michel Lonsdale plays Hypatia's dad. A favourite since appearing as an exhausted theater director in Rivette's Out One: Spectre he appears here to be channeling Charles Laughton in the unfinished I, Claudius. A curious grace note to a curious film.
Les Yeux Sans Visage (Georges Franju) - nice restoration of Franju surrealist classic establishes the pedigree for the gruesome fetishes of this year's Cannes entries like Antichrist, Kinatay, and Enter the Void. A surgeon's assistant kidnaps suitable young women so that her boss can do secret face grafts on his daughter (who lost her face in a fire). He hasn't succeeded yet so the hapless "donors" end up dead and strewn all over the place. Franju's insistence on the details of cutting off one face to transfer to another, and the generally dungeon-like conditions of his operating room set the tone not only for dismemberment films like Kinatay but also the terrorism of the innocents in the Saw and Hostel series.
Here (Ho Tzu Nyen) - a guy murders his wife and gets sent to a loony bin to recover. The inmates all make therapy videos where they act out stuff - unfortunately it's all really boring and neither Straubian, Warholian, Fellini-esque nor even Herzogian. But the parade of people is quite earnest and serious - would you expect anything else from a film from Singapore? Some of the people in the film are really from the asylum but hey, you wouldn't really know it as they seem kind of normal... but maybe not by Singaporean standards. British shrinks preside over the crazies and explain what it's all about in a really dry way - I tried to sleep through those parts but failed. Possibly the major flaw in this film is its protagonist (the wife killer) - he is butt ugly with greasy long hair that would stain the collar of any shirt adorning his unattractive torso. He seems nice enough - for a pyschopathic killer - but he's definitely not date material. Actually his greasy face is pretty horrific, you think he really needs to stop eating fried noodles. Apparently rehabilitated, he's sent home where he freaks out again and thank God, they return him to the nut house, hopefully forever. In between all of this is stuff that could be read as political metaphor - the "tea party" as affirmation that you're normal (read: acceptable to the ruling politicos), the imprisonment of minds (read: the island nation), and so on. As a short film about an ugly psychopath this might have worked. As a treatise on the imprisonment of minds, it's numbing.
Antichrist (Lars Von Trier) - Charlotte Gainsbourg (CG) and Willem Dafoe (WD) are having wild sex at home watched by their baby son who then promptly falls out of a window and dies. OK - sex and death are immediately signalled by Lars (LVT). CG goes into a deep funk and contrary to all the rules about intimacy with clients, WD who is a certified therapist - takes her on as his patient. They hike up to a cabin in their woods - she, looking very LL Bean in yellow parka and he looking tres European in blue wool jacket. This is after all supposed to take place in the Pacific Northwest where LVT has never been since he has a fear of flying (and it seems of the US). In this cabin in the woods, the therapy turns into something that looks like Ingmar Bergman doing Eli Roth, or maybe more accurately Tobe Hooper doing Stanley Kubrick. Anyway it's all art in the service of horror with WD having a stone wheel attached to his lower leg (some kind of Sisyphus ref), and CG cutting her clit off with a pair of scissors (LVT discovers the female phallus and it scares the crap out of him). The very end (I won't give away the end before the end) is some kind of reference to Carl Theodore Dreyer (another Dane), Cecil B. DeMille, Martin Scorsese and probably God Himself. WD stands on a hill looking like Christ (and there is a reason why WD is cast in this film: after all he played Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ) in films by all those aforesaid Anointed Ones. The movie is dedicated to Tarkovski - we don't quite know why other than his Russian orthodoxy makes him Christ versus the Antichrist of the USA. It's framed as a series of chapters but really since each intertitle is written artfully on a chalk board, it's more like classroom catechism, and it also shows that after his (real-life) post-breakdown therapy, LVT still harbours unmitigated anger against women and his therapist. Plus ca change, baby! Antichrist is not as bad as the bad review in Variety, and it is at once serious and thoughtful. Second best film in Cannes? Maybe.
Samson and Delilah(Warwick Thornton) - according to this movie, life on an Australian Aboriginal reservation consists of sniffing glue all day (Samson), helping granny make native art (Delilah) until she kicks the bucket, all against an unending drone of reggae music played by three guys who seem to have nothing else to do in life. S & D share one characteristic - they don't talk (S is a particularly inarticulate loser) so when they escape the reservation and end up in White Man's town, they are Alienated and live under a freeway. At this point, the film tries to spice things up by pairing them with a talky homeless guy who takes pity and shares his canned spaghetti and spam with them. Even writing about this film seems tedious so let me just say that this is a film with about five endings of which the most desirable one is where we think they have both expired - D gets knocked down by a car while S is sniffing glue so he doesn't notice it; S then hides under a blanket and sniffs glue for days without moving - fade to black. At this point you think oh how tragic but then there is a FADE UP and D comes limping back to the freeway home on a CRUTCH (for crying out loud!) and the blanket QUIVERS - S is still alive! All that spam and glue have kept body and soul together. The film goes on for another lamentable 10 or more minutes as D takes S to her hut in the middle of some godawful desert, skins a kangaroo, and feeds them. Please put us out of our misery - yes, the film ends there! This film is a project by the Adelaide Film Festival so unfortunately it has a life. Also it won Camera d'Or at Cannes which leads you to wonder what the jury was smoking when they watched this irritating pile of kangaroo doo. Worst film in Cannes? Possibly.
Visage(Tsai Ming-liang) - Poor Fanny Ardant, first her famous husband Francois Truffaut dies on her and then she has to soldier through this tedium of scenes that are supposed to reflect on the Salome narrative (though it's hardly explained here). Tsai regular Lee Kang Sheng is supposed to be making a film in Paris with Antoine (Jean Pierre Leaud) but he seems too busy jerking off guys in the bushes, fooling around with deer, and clambering around the bowels of the Louvre, to actually get behind a camera (we never see a camera, only a TV monitor). At the same time his mother in Taipei has died but you wouldn't really know it because she's still around as a ghost and anyway with that actress you don't really care if she's dead or alive. Various references to cinema (predictable), and Louvre artists (David, Delacroix, Rembrandt) don't add up to anything understandable. French iconnes Jeanne Moreau and Nathalie Baye also put in an appearance but if you nod off, you'll miss them because they appear in a very short scene sitting at a table, waiting for someone who never appears. Wonder how much they got paid for that day's work...My main impression was that if you asked a French director to make a Tsai Ming-liang type film,this would be the result. However the best film to deal with the relationship between painting and cinema is still Godard's Passion. Against that, this one looks like some youtube doodling. Final thought: we've all watched Jean-Pierre Leaud grow up in the cinema. He's now 65 years old and looking like a seedy, dirty old man. It would be an act of kindness, not to mention beneficial to his career, if he never appeared in a film again.
Map of the Sounds of Tokyo(Isabel Croixet) - another Spanish movie shot in English (cf. Agora). This time however it's set in contemporary Tokyo and features a Tsukiji fish market girl who not only knows how to slice a mean piece of sushi but is also a hit woman on the side. She's contracted to off the Spanish owner of a wine store but falls in love with him. So, instead of checking his movements and the best time and place to terminate him, they check into a love motel and have a lot of sex in a mock up of the Paris metro. It's all shot in a Wong Kar Wai emulation - with saturated photography and Latin-style music (OK they're Spanish filmmakers so the latter makes some sense). Since I hope you will never see this film I'll give away the ending: the hit-girl dies saving the Spanish lover from being shot by the henchman of the guy who ordered the hit. It's a typical racist Western fantasy (usually male so it's doubly offensive that this is made by a woman) of the Madam Butterfly Asian sacrifice for the White Knight. Anyway this film is so stupid (think: tourist travelogue with guns) that not only do you wonder what it is doing in COMPETITION in Cannes, but why anyone would want to make such drivel.
May 27, 2009
May 26, 2009
My Cannes 2009 - II
Film Notes
Spring Fever (Lou Ye) - three gays, one wife, one girlfriend. Everyone wants to sleep with each other, and if they can't at least they can spy on each other. Well, what else is there to do in Nanjing anyway? It's an exercise in narcissism especially since they all look the same. Directed with the fervour of Just Jaekin and the fantasy lust of Bernardo Bertolucci, this is a film again inflected by Hitchcock - especially his speculation on the exchangeability of women. In Hitchcock, the girls would look the same but one would be blonde, the other brunette. For Lou Ye, the difference is made by long hair and short hair. Semiotics was never so simple.
Air Doll (Kore-eda) - one geek, one inflatable sex doll, and some thoughts about disposability in contempo Japanese society. What makes it all watchable for more than 10 minutes is the fabulous Bae Doo Na (BDN) who becomes the fleshy realization of the inflatable sex doll (we are waiting for BDN inflatables to hit the market now). When owner's away (waiting tables in some low end fast food chain where he is regularly insulted) BDN becomes a hot cosplay girl in maid's outfit who goes and works in a video store where - yes! - she attempts to learn about cinema. But as an inflatable, she's full of air so learning for her is something of a zen experience. Mainly the film is a riposte to Spielberg's AI, another movie about an imitation human who develops emotions. Although they travel different paths, the two fantasists reach the same destination - human society doesn't want machines that talk back. The main differences? Kore-eda can do it cheaper, and Hayley Joel Osment has absolutely nothing on BDN.
Yuki & Nina (Nobuhiro Suwa & Hippolyte Girardot) - one hip Japanese filmmaker who has yet to score in Japan, and a French actor turning director make charming tale of two young girls. Yuki is half-Japanese/half-French (her French father is played by Girardot) while Nina is her French neighbor. Everyone's family is disintegrating and Yuki's mother decides to return to Japan to live. Yuki wants to stay but reject's Nina's crazy plan to bring that about. The tussle between the two is perhaps a reflection of and a reflection on the problems of making cross-cultural relationships.
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa) - Art house darling films diva Jeanne Balibar (JB) and music group rehearsing, recording, and performing (in Tokyo, we know this because of one arty insert shot of two aging Japanese waitresses taking a cigarette break). In between we see backstage of some Offenbach musical opera in which JB is performing. Music is pleasant enough but the filmmaker's focus seems intent on form (black and white, long static shots). Forget it, the movie is like an MTV shot by the Straubs. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Balibar - coming soon to your TV set.
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang Soo) - First Half: Woody Allen-ish filmmaker with no hits serves (or snores) on jury at Jecheon Film and Music Festival and gets into trouble with both the festival director (a woman who has no problem voicing her problems) and his ex-business partner's New Age wife. Second Half: 12 days later, our filmmaker is giving a talk at a film college in Jeju Island. Once again he gets into trouble with his ex-teacher's young wife, and a girl student. Hong's world is plagued by strong women towards whom he means no harm but inadvertently provokes into sometimes violent reaction. It's an apologia for Hong himself, or rather a fantasy version of himself - the modest artist who goes about doing his work quietly but treads on so many emotional landmines that everything blows up around him. Best film in Cannes? Probably.
Thirst (Park Chan Wook) - Song Kang Ho plays a priest who volunteers for a blood infection experiment in Africa (it's always the Dark Continent). He turns into a vampire and fools around with the abused wife of a friend. They have a lot of sex with each other so he turns her into a vampire as well. Big mistake: she wants some kind of independence and loves jumping over buildings and killing innocent guys. It all gets too much so he forces their death by watching the sun rise over the ocean. They turn into variations on Giacometti - something between a spoiled fireplace log and bacon bits. Whatever happened to the good old stake through the heart? (We assume already that garlic doesn't work because they are Korean and eat a lot of kimchee.) This is a movie with a beginning and an end but no middle. And despite all that blood, it's also a movie with no heart.
Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza) - A moral tale. If you're going going to do drugs, make sure you pay your bills otherwise you're going to end up like the poor prostitute in this relentless, gruesome account of kidnap, rape and dismemberment. And if you do buy drugs, it's better not to get them from the type of guys in this movie who are all corrupt cops (is there any other type in the Philippines? Mendoza seems to ask). And don't place any faith in the rookie of the crew to save you out of sheer horror. In this movie the new chop chop recruit is a young police trainee trying to make an extra buck for his young family. Although he tries to change his mind and maybe save the prostitute, he doesn't. He survives the horror of this descent into the heart of darkness but the new day doesn't seem to bring any respite. You know he's going to do it again. For Mendoza the country is enveloped by this dark, seamy side of crime and officialdom. What a downer, and it's all done with no sense of irony at all. Which means that it could be a good REMAKE property for Russia. Vodka with your balut?
Spring Fever (Lou Ye) - three gays, one wife, one girlfriend. Everyone wants to sleep with each other, and if they can't at least they can spy on each other. Well, what else is there to do in Nanjing anyway? It's an exercise in narcissism especially since they all look the same. Directed with the fervour of Just Jaekin and the fantasy lust of Bernardo Bertolucci, this is a film again inflected by Hitchcock - especially his speculation on the exchangeability of women. In Hitchcock, the girls would look the same but one would be blonde, the other brunette. For Lou Ye, the difference is made by long hair and short hair. Semiotics was never so simple.
Air Doll (Kore-eda) - one geek, one inflatable sex doll, and some thoughts about disposability in contempo Japanese society. What makes it all watchable for more than 10 minutes is the fabulous Bae Doo Na (BDN) who becomes the fleshy realization of the inflatable sex doll (we are waiting for BDN inflatables to hit the market now). When owner's away (waiting tables in some low end fast food chain where he is regularly insulted) BDN becomes a hot cosplay girl in maid's outfit who goes and works in a video store where - yes! - she attempts to learn about cinema. But as an inflatable, she's full of air so learning for her is something of a zen experience. Mainly the film is a riposte to Spielberg's AI, another movie about an imitation human who develops emotions. Although they travel different paths, the two fantasists reach the same destination - human society doesn't want machines that talk back. The main differences? Kore-eda can do it cheaper, and Hayley Joel Osment has absolutely nothing on BDN.
Yuki & Nina (Nobuhiro Suwa & Hippolyte Girardot) - one hip Japanese filmmaker who has yet to score in Japan, and a French actor turning director make charming tale of two young girls. Yuki is half-Japanese/half-French (her French father is played by Girardot) while Nina is her French neighbor. Everyone's family is disintegrating and Yuki's mother decides to return to Japan to live. Yuki wants to stay but reject's Nina's crazy plan to bring that about. The tussle between the two is perhaps a reflection of and a reflection on the problems of making cross-cultural relationships.
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa) - Art house darling films diva Jeanne Balibar (JB) and music group rehearsing, recording, and performing (in Tokyo, we know this because of one arty insert shot of two aging Japanese waitresses taking a cigarette break). In between we see backstage of some Offenbach musical opera in which JB is performing. Music is pleasant enough but the filmmaker's focus seems intent on form (black and white, long static shots). Forget it, the movie is like an MTV shot by the Straubs. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Balibar - coming soon to your TV set.
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang Soo) - First Half: Woody Allen-ish filmmaker with no hits serves (or snores) on jury at Jecheon Film and Music Festival and gets into trouble with both the festival director (a woman who has no problem voicing her problems) and his ex-business partner's New Age wife. Second Half: 12 days later, our filmmaker is giving a talk at a film college in Jeju Island. Once again he gets into trouble with his ex-teacher's young wife, and a girl student. Hong's world is plagued by strong women towards whom he means no harm but inadvertently provokes into sometimes violent reaction. It's an apologia for Hong himself, or rather a fantasy version of himself - the modest artist who goes about doing his work quietly but treads on so many emotional landmines that everything blows up around him. Best film in Cannes? Probably.
Thirst (Park Chan Wook) - Song Kang Ho plays a priest who volunteers for a blood infection experiment in Africa (it's always the Dark Continent). He turns into a vampire and fools around with the abused wife of a friend. They have a lot of sex with each other so he turns her into a vampire as well. Big mistake: she wants some kind of independence and loves jumping over buildings and killing innocent guys. It all gets too much so he forces their death by watching the sun rise over the ocean. They turn into variations on Giacometti - something between a spoiled fireplace log and bacon bits. Whatever happened to the good old stake through the heart? (We assume already that garlic doesn't work because they are Korean and eat a lot of kimchee.) This is a movie with a beginning and an end but no middle. And despite all that blood, it's also a movie with no heart.
Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza) - A moral tale. If you're going going to do drugs, make sure you pay your bills otherwise you're going to end up like the poor prostitute in this relentless, gruesome account of kidnap, rape and dismemberment. And if you do buy drugs, it's better not to get them from the type of guys in this movie who are all corrupt cops (is there any other type in the Philippines? Mendoza seems to ask). And don't place any faith in the rookie of the crew to save you out of sheer horror. In this movie the new chop chop recruit is a young police trainee trying to make an extra buck for his young family. Although he tries to change his mind and maybe save the prostitute, he doesn't. He survives the horror of this descent into the heart of darkness but the new day doesn't seem to bring any respite. You know he's going to do it again. For Mendoza the country is enveloped by this dark, seamy side of crime and officialdom. What a downer, and it's all done with no sense of irony at all. Which means that it could be a good REMAKE property for Russia. Vodka with your balut?
My Cannes 2009 - I
Does anyone take Cannes seriously anymore? And does anyone actually enjoy it? You wait in line for hours, only to have some obnoxious "cinephile" push in front of you five minutes before the doors open. There is no reward for following the rules.
And definitely rule-breaking is a philosophy that's adopted by successive juries who preside over each festival. When actresses chair such a body of "professionals" - as with Isabelle Huppert this year - they want to make their mark in the same way they want to upstage their co-stars in a movie. Never mind the quality, feel the controversy.
It's all a show anyway, designed basically to buttress up the pre-eminence of cultural France when its influence has gone down the drain all over the world except with tin-pot dictatorships in Africa and arms sales to dubious nations.
The "problem" with Cannes is that it is constructed around the domination of the auteur - this is the much-maligned creature from the time that Cahiers du Cinema promoted him (and it was resolutely him at the time).
"Auteurs" at the time were considered masters of cinema, not imitators of cinema. It's a mark of our era that we have moved from celebrating the former to fawning over the latter. And whether it's one or the other, auteurs have their "on" and their "off" days. The selection in Cannes is not so much based on films as on filmmakers so in any one year, the quality will be inconsistent and almost always an unsatisfying mix of the unfinished, the half-baked, and occasionally the sublime. It doesn't really matter because these hapless artists are being used as fences to protect one festival dictatorship's territory against poaching attacks from another festival. Barbarians at the gate? All the time!
The pomposity of ritual that demonstrates a festival dictatorship's power has an undeniable symbolism that everyone seems to accept. Going to main competition screenings in Cannes is something like going to church or more accurately, going to the Vatican. You need to dress correctly, and your place in the hierarchy of worship is defined by your "professional" (read: "social") status.
The Anointed One (the auteur who feels justified by Cannes more than the box office) proceeds with his/her entourage of stars, producers, distributors, hangers-on along the red carpet in the forecourt of the Grand Palais (the "bunker" but really, the St Peter's of cinema). The Anointed One pauses for iconic photographs that will define him/her forever so it's not only important to look good, but to stand next to good looking people. The Anointed One then leads his procession up the long long flight of red-carpeted stairs towards the Pope (I mean Festival President) and his principal Cardinal (I mean Festival Director) who glow smilingly on the faithful child returning to show Papa his/her latest indulgence.
Whether it's like a prodigal son returning after deserting Papa for enemy territory, or a faithful son who obeys every word of Papa (including snipping the film here and there to make it more acceptable to the festival), or a newly Anointed One, the ritual not only re-affirms the Anointed One's place in the firmament of cinema Heaven, but also re-affirms the Anointed One's legitimacy in Papa's eyes, the only eyes that count.
And definitely rule-breaking is a philosophy that's adopted by successive juries who preside over each festival. When actresses chair such a body of "professionals" - as with Isabelle Huppert this year - they want to make their mark in the same way they want to upstage their co-stars in a movie. Never mind the quality, feel the controversy.
It's all a show anyway, designed basically to buttress up the pre-eminence of cultural France when its influence has gone down the drain all over the world except with tin-pot dictatorships in Africa and arms sales to dubious nations.
The "problem" with Cannes is that it is constructed around the domination of the auteur - this is the much-maligned creature from the time that Cahiers du Cinema promoted him (and it was resolutely him at the time).
"Auteurs" at the time were considered masters of cinema, not imitators of cinema. It's a mark of our era that we have moved from celebrating the former to fawning over the latter. And whether it's one or the other, auteurs have their "on" and their "off" days. The selection in Cannes is not so much based on films as on filmmakers so in any one year, the quality will be inconsistent and almost always an unsatisfying mix of the unfinished, the half-baked, and occasionally the sublime. It doesn't really matter because these hapless artists are being used as fences to protect one festival dictatorship's territory against poaching attacks from another festival. Barbarians at the gate? All the time!
The pomposity of ritual that demonstrates a festival dictatorship's power has an undeniable symbolism that everyone seems to accept. Going to main competition screenings in Cannes is something like going to church or more accurately, going to the Vatican. You need to dress correctly, and your place in the hierarchy of worship is defined by your "professional" (read: "social") status.
The Anointed One (the auteur who feels justified by Cannes more than the box office) proceeds with his/her entourage of stars, producers, distributors, hangers-on along the red carpet in the forecourt of the Grand Palais (the "bunker" but really, the St Peter's of cinema). The Anointed One pauses for iconic photographs that will define him/her forever so it's not only important to look good, but to stand next to good looking people. The Anointed One then leads his procession up the long long flight of red-carpeted stairs towards the Pope (I mean Festival President) and his principal Cardinal (I mean Festival Director) who glow smilingly on the faithful child returning to show Papa his/her latest indulgence.
Whether it's like a prodigal son returning after deserting Papa for enemy territory, or a faithful son who obeys every word of Papa (including snipping the film here and there to make it more acceptable to the festival), or a newly Anointed One, the ritual not only re-affirms the Anointed One's place in the firmament of cinema Heaven, but also re-affirms the Anointed One's legitimacy in Papa's eyes, the only eyes that count.
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