From baby elephants to Christmas trees, the 62nd Festival de Cannes is immersed in art and life imitating each other on and off the cinema screens, writes MICHAEL DWYER, Film Correspondent
IF SEEING IS BELIEVING, sometimes it takes at least a second glance to distinguish between the real and the surreal at the 62nd Festival de Cannes. As the movie marathon reaches the midway point, we have become immersed in art and life imitating each other on and off the festival cinema screens.
Walking along the crowded Croisette over the weekend, I saw what appeared to be an elephant across the road. It was paraded by men in laughably tacky uniforms and I assumed the animal to be a fake along the lines of a pantomime horse with humans hidden inside. It transpired that this was indeed a real baby elephant and it was being exploited to promote a new hotel in Cannes.
Just a block away, the front of the elegant Carlton hotel had been transformed into a winter wonderland – in the blazing sunshine. Christmas trees bedecked with baubles stood at either side of the hotel's frost-covered lawns to promote Disney's new version of A Christmas Carolstarring Jim Carrey, who is here to promote it.
The Cannes weather had taken a temporary turn for the worse the day before and the rain was torrential on the eight-minute walk from my hotel to the Festival Palais for the 8.30am screening of Bright Star. Proving that the business spirit of the festival extends beyond the film industry, I noticed four young men along the way, each doing a brisk trade in selling umbrellas.
Despite the downpour, all 2,200 seats in the festival's largest auditorium were occupied for that early morning screening, and some people had to sit on the balcony steps. In a festival where there has been no positive critical consensus on any movie so far this year, Bright Starhad its passionate supporters and some dissenting voices.
Jane Campion's first feature film in six years, Bright Startakes its title from the love poem John Keats wrote for his Hampstead neighbour, Fanny Brawne. Beginning in 1818, the film spans the last three years in the poet's life before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.
Keats is depicted as impecunious and physically frail, hurt by a review accusing him of vulgarising poetry and disappointed by the poor sales for Endymion. One purchaser of that volume is Fanny, who designs all her own clothes; by the age of 18, she has such a wardrobe that she parades a different ornate outfit in every scene.
As they become closer and Keats tutors her in appreciating poetry, his protective best friend bluntly expresses his resentment at what he regards as Fanny’s intrusive presence. The friend is played by US actor Paul Schneider with a ripe Scottish accent and in a declamatory manner that grates with his every irritating appearance.
In marked contrast, Ben Whishaw portrays Keats as a remote, listless young man and Abbie Cornish is quite subtly expressive as Fanny, although she looks and is 10 years too old to play someone who's 18. We learn little about either over the course of a film that is handsomely designed and photographed, but disappointingly unadventurous by Campion's standards. As a film exploring the creative process, it falls far short of An Angel at My Table, her illuminating film on the troubled New Zealand author, Janet Frame.
UNUSUALLY, THREE OF the 20 films in competition this year are directed by women, and Campion is eclipsed by Andrea Arnold, who invests Fish Tank, her second feature film, with gritty social realism. It introduces its 15-year-old protagonist Mia (Katie Jarvis) as a sullen, foul-mouthed girl simmering with aggression.
Mia lives in a grim English flats complex with her younger sister and their feckless single mother (Kierston Wareing). The catalyst is the mother's latest boyfriend, Connor, an Irish security guard played with seductive charm and moral ambivalence by Hungerdiscovery Michael Fassbender.
Connor becomes a surrogate father figure to Mia and encourages her ambitions as a dancer. There are boundaries that should not be crossed, and Arnold confronts them head-on in this boldly uncompromising film which affirms the promise of her earlier tension-steeped Red Road. Robbie Ryan's mobile camerawork adds to the edgy atmosphere of the film, which features a remarkable performance from newcomer Jarvis.
She is certain to be an awards contender here on Sunday night, as is Tahar Rahim, the equally inexperienced actor who is centre screen throughout A Prophet, the riveting new film from Jacques Audiard, the French director of The Beat My Heart Skipped. With astonishing assurance and naturalistic screen presence, Rahim smoulders as Malik, an illiterate 19-year-old of North African origin. Sentenced to six years behind bars, he is taken under the wing of an elderly Corsican criminal (Niels Arestrup) who claims to run the jail.
The film takes a cynical view of the prison system as a breeding ground for young criminals rather than a source of rehabilitation. Malik learns to read and write, but he learns much more about the workings of crime and its financial potential as he gains in confidence and ambition. Audiard’s tough, violent drama is charged with raw power and visceral energy, marked by precise attention to detail, and accompanied by a terrific Alexandre Desplat score.
Saturated with stylised violence, Vengeanceopens in the Macau home of a married couple and their two young boys when killers call and spray them with bullets. The wife's father, a Paris chef played by French pop music legend Johnny Hallyday in a goatee, sets out to wreak revenge, and there are explicit nods to Mementowhen he is revealed as amnesiac.
The movie’s raison d’être is to set up protracted shoot-outs by day and night, in streets and woods, and in torrential rain. Hong Kong action maestro Johnnie To revels in choreographing these set-pieces to a soundtrack reverberating with gunfire.
AND THEN, HORROR of horrors, came the new Lars von Trier film, Antichrist, written, he says, while he was in a deep depression over the past few years.
It’s his third film set in the US, this time in Seattle, even though he has never set foot in America and shot the film in Cologne. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg go into method acting overdrive as a couple who, at the outset, are making love in the shower when their only child crawls from his cot and falls out the window.
Recriminations ensue when they try to address their grief and loss through loquacious, pretentiously scripted exchanges that might make watching paint dry engrossing by comparison, and it’s impossible to care about either character at any point.
Von Trier resorts to shock tactics to jolt us of our torpor, starting with an early close-up of sexual penetration, and then the appearance of a talking fox, before he goes to wildly provocative extremes of gratuitous violence and graphically depicting male and female sexual mutilation with the help of gruesome special effects.
This wretched, often repulsive and ultimately pointless effort reeks of pathetic attention-seeking and self-indulgence. The final insult is an on-screen dedication of the movie to the late, great Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, who never would have even contemplated stooping anywhere remotely as low as this.
Emerging from the Palais afterwards, I welcomed the invitation to contribute to a voxpop for a TV channel from von Trier’s native Denmark. I expressed my views with candour.
Michael Dwyer continues his Cannes reports on the news pages of The Irish Timesthis week and in The Ticket on Friday.
Peace, love and understanding Seeing the funny side of Woodstock
In a festival screening with so many movies laden with dark and heavy themes and often liberally splattered with blood, it was a relief to get back to the garden, so to speak, for Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, an endearing comedy set during the build-up to the landmark rock festival held in the Catskills 40 years ago this summer.
The factually based film draws on the memoirs of Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), a young gay interior designer who seized the opportunity to bring the event to his area when a neighbouring town refused it a permit. He saw it as a way of saving the decrepit motel run by his parents (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) from being taken over by the bank, and of freeing him to pursue a new life in San Francisco.
Woodstock was billed as "three days of music, peace and love", and Lee acutely captures the spirit of that brief, idyllic moment in time. He adeptly juggles the scenario's multiple characters, so many that he frequently employs split screen in the style of the hit three-hour concert documentary, Woodstock, when it was edited by, among others, emerging director Martin Scorsese.
The most engaging personalities include the canny young concert promoter (Jonathan Groff), an unhinged Vietnam war veteran (Emile Hirsch), a couple of representative trippy hippies (Paul Dano and Kelli Garner), and a towering transvestite ex-marine named Vilma (Liev Schreiber).
Lee treats his characters and their good-natured idealism with infectious affection and with the lightest of touches as his movie gradually seduces the viewer. There is no footage of the actual concert, and no need for it as that material has been so widely exposed down the decades.
Compared to Lee's weighty dramas such as Brokeback Mountainand The Ice Storm, Taking Woodstockhas the substance of a souffle, but one that's there to be savoured, and it leaves a satisfying aftertaste.
