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Cannes Dispatch: Part Three
An online exclusive
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
By Patrick Z. McGavin
CANNES, France—The size the festival is so great, it is best to take everything here in parts and movements rather than in one big gulp. About a third of the program has been unveiled, and the deep satisfaction provided by two contemporary masters, France’s Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale) and Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Three Monkeys), has been approached though not quite equaled.
The festival organizers have to feel pleased. In past years, they appeared under constant institutional attack by the media for their programming choices. Right now, they are benefiting from a deep and strong lineup, while very few complaints have emerged.
To their credit, they also have a strong sense of timing. After launching so many serious art-driven works, they knew intuitively they had to deliver something more accessible. In that vein, the big weekend premieres were Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Steven Spielberg’s fourth installment of the Indiana Jones cycle. The Indiana Jones film, another collaboration between Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, premiered at one o’clock local time on Sunday. (A longer review is appearing here this week, so I’ll limit what I have to offer: a mediocre script that is dull, labored and unwatchable in the opening half only to become marginally more interesting in the final hour, enlivened only by an exciting jungle chase sequence.)
Spielberg and Lucas have offered an object lesson in how to control information on a project shrouded in negative buzz. Spielberg’s E.T. closed the festival 26 years ago. Lucas had the second and third prequels of the second-generation Star Wars trilogy premiere here. The two movie moguls understand a compliant international media is fond of celebrating itself. After a throng of European art films made by mostly unknown directors, a largely personality-free, machine-tooled Hollywood super-production offers a tantalizing alternative.
Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a larky, agreeably bittersweet romantic and sexual roundelay that contains some of the liveliness and funny, observant flair of Allen’s short fiction. Two stunningly beautiful young American women, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall, spending a couple of summer months in Spain, are quickly drawn to a flamboyant and handsome painter (Javier Bardem). The sexual intrigue and discreet maneuvering occasions several funny and clever variations and reversals.
The story kicks into a higher gear with the arrival of Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), here wonderfully cast as Bardem’s former wife. She’s a beautiful, demanding and deeply sensuous presence, a force of nature that further ruptures the already fractious and fluid relationships. The texture and rhythms of the city, however, are no more persuasive than Allen’s London portraits in Scoop and Cassandra’s Dream.
The blend of the puritanical and the contempt for some of the characters is rather off-putting. Averaging a movie a year for four decades, Allen has repeated himself of late. I’m not sure he is further capable of making a sustained and brilliant work, something on the level of Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters. The short story equivalent is more inviting, because Allen is now better and funnier in miniature.
The material is partially saved by the jaunty style and the charisma of his performers. It flight (don’t know what’s going on in this section) in the explosive, provocative exchanges, in Spanish, between Bardem and Cruz. Their exchanges were wholly improvised on the set and Allen is judicious enough to allow his ferociously gifted performers a free and open rein.
The two key works shown Sunday and Monday are smart, engrossing movies, each acknowledging the emotional and personal costs of the flourishing underground black market economies in Europe. Italian director Matteo Garrone's blistering, riveting Gomorrah intertwines six different stories of corruption and amorality, providing a detailed, frightening examination of the hierarchal power structures of the Neapolitan Mafia,. The complex intercutting yields a cascading and revealing sense of how power, fear and the constant specter of death govern the daily activities.
At times I wanted a stronger feel for the rivalries of the different gangs and “families” that constitute the Camorra families of Naples. The film has a circular structure, opening and closing with two chilling and deeply visceral acts of assassination. The ellipsis between fiction and documentary is rarely more transparent. I didn’t recognize any of the actors, but the bodies and faces all possess an eerie verisimilitude. Garrone individuates the large ensemble cast through telling expressions and subtle body movements.
Though based on the popular novel (the author is now under police protection in Italy), the documentary realism elevates the work, providing both heft and nuance. Garrone is aided immensely by the astonishing work of cinematographer Marco Onorato. Despite the genre affinities of the material, the work is never flashy or overstylized. Most of the action unfolds in a developing housing market in a vacant and dreary suburb of Naples. It’s a milieu that Garrone excavates and transforms into a frightening and brutal stage.
Belgian masters Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have twice won the festival’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or. Their highly anticipated new work, Lorna’s Silence, premiered Monday morning. Steeped in the filmmakers’ alternately lucid, elliptical investigation of morality and behavior, the movie showcases a terrific young actress, Arta Dobroshi. She plays an Albanian émigré living in Liege who’s drafted into a nefarious plan by local gangsters to marry a junkie, establish her citizenship and then kill him in order to marry a powerful Russian also seeking EU status.
The Dardennes (Rosetta, L’enfant) use the speed, movement and volatility of the handheld, mobile camera to examine interior consciousness. Their scenes play out in short bursts of duration, with little cutting, as the drama is established in the tense relationship between the actors’ bodies and the cameras. Their movies are often shrouded in questions of grace and deliverance. Their movies are grounded not in parable, but in the harsh realities of contemporary life, locking in on the desperation and survival mechanisms the marginalized employ to escape their often impoverished or socially restricted lives.
Dobroshi is both vulnerable and methodically determined, trapped between humanity and consciousness and a ruthlessness to achieve her own ends. Jeremie Renier is also exceptional as the junkie. The explosive, expressive young actor has lost a lot weight to capture the proper look, and he delivers a tremulous, unsentimental performance.
Lorna’s Silence is subtle, compelling and tense, but it’s also a little limited to the point where I wish the Dardennes would push their work toward the unexplored. Regardless, the Italian and Belgian works offer further evidence of a festival that shows no sign of slowing down.