My Cannes 2009 - III

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.