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FILM COMMENT
July/August 2002
CANNES: Emotional Rescues
by Kent Jones
above: The Pianist
Gavin Smith's Cannes article can be seen here
Cannes after the fact plays in the mind as the weirdest mixture of excitement, anxiety, and torpor. The ongoing dazzlement on and off the Croisette is nicely offset by the occasional dash of humiliation. The only film festival in the world that suspends ticket privileges for two days should you fail to use the one youāve stood on line for two hours just to beg for is also the most hierarchical. So much so that exhausted critics experienced the Warsaw ghetto selection scenes in Polanskiās Palme dāOröwinning The Pianist as a metaphor for the collective suffering of lowly blue press pass holders. People get giddy after ten near-sleepless days of image absorption and opinion-making.
It seems incredible that anyone could toss off a blasé joke about Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenneās The Son (Le Fils), by any reasonable standard the most fully achieved film in the entire festival. But they managed. The fact is that this European Downer With Only Limited Appeal To The Art-House Fringes is at once a character study, a lesson in suspense, and, rarity of rarities, a genuinely spiritual experience.
The Son is about a carpenter named Olivier (Olivier Gourmet, who has to be one of the greatest actors at work today) who takes on Francis (Morgan Marinne), the young teenager whoās just come out of juvenile prison for murdering his son, as an apprentice; Francis, meanwhile, has no idea who Olivier is. As in Rosetta, the handheld camera stays right on the protagonistās shoulder, drawing us into his single-mindedness through his ceaseless, compulsive forward movement. But unlike Rosetta, Olivier is acting on blind instinct, and the outcome is as much a mystery to him as it is to us. Which makes for an excitingly organic, present-tense experience.
The suspense is not based on what Olivier will or wonāt do. Instead, because of the way The Son operates, itās thrown in our laps: what would you or I do? Every exchange is alternately Heart-rending and nerve-wracking, racheting an already extreme situation up another emotional level. By the time The Son reaches its purifying climax, with Gourmetās snout-like face squared off against Marinneās hollowed out, babyish features, the situation has become so elemental that it could be taking place in the Middle Ages.
Apichatpong Weerasethakulās Un Certain Regard prizewinner Blissfully Yours was another peak, similar to the Dardenne film in its minimal, organic structure. Built around an afternoon shared by an unfulfilled middle-aged housewife, the Burmese immigrant who stays with her, and his plucky girlfriend, Blissfully Yours begins in the same anecdotal/ethnographic vein as the Thai directorās Mysterious Object at Noon, then flowers into a contemplative experience of terrific breadth and mystery. Apichatpong uses duration the way other filmmakers use color or movement. The bulk of the film is devoted to a pastoral escape in a forest clearing on a mountaintop, where the housewife is trysting with her lover and the younger couple are whiling away the hours under the sun. Apichatpong is at the forefront of two of contemporary cinemaās most important movements: the collapsing barriers between documentary and fiction (heās very deft at erasing the distinction between what heās created and what heās observed), and between art and porn. By filmās end, after our senses have been tuned to the natural by so much skin, eating, sunlight, greenery, and flowing water, the image of a penis being lazily coaxed to erection by a womanās hand takes on a wondrous quality, not unlike Painlevéās film about seahorses.
The two African films, Abderrahmane Sissakoās Waiting for Happiness and Mahamet Saleh Harounās Abouna (written and produced by Sissako), were both limpid, delicate works that felt like bookends, sharing the same refined emotional trajectory: melancholia shading into quiet contentment. Sissakoās is the more patient and magical of the two, whereas Abouna, about two village boys who go in search of their wandering father and wind up in a Koranic school, is more of an emotional grabber. Haroun has a gift for small, quick epiphanies that catch you unawares. Thereās a lovely episode where the boys break into the local cinema to steal a large reel of film, wheel it home, and unspool it, believing that it might contain an image of their father. The inevitable winsome note is never struck, probably because the two (excellent) child actors never play the Problem Kid angle. Abouna is a Heartbreaker, but it ends on a note of quiet uplift.
Itās strange to see parallels between a movie like Abouna and Alexander Payneās adaptation of Louis Begleyās About Schmidt, which seems to be emanating from another universe. Nevertheless, they share that same passage from emotional disquiet to hard-won peace of mind. About Schmidt, the tale of a Midwestern retiree and recent widower who tries to find himself on the road but finally does so through his correspondence with the African child heās sponsoring, was scorned by the French critics, who like their social observation documentary-based. Payne is essentially a satirist, and every ćtouchä strikes like a hammer blow. On the other hand, all the details are on target, from the trailer-park housewife speaking in therapeutic banalities to the heavy-metal haircut on future son-in-law Dermot Mulroney. Which would make for just another nice, broad comedy of manners with some extra emotional punch were it not for the presence of Jack Nicholson. Nicholson seemed to have slipped into permanent second gear long ago, but his Schmidt is one of the finest things heās ever done. As for the filmās final image, letās just say that what Nicholson does there is beyond the reach of most actors.
Im Kwon-Taekās crowd-pleasing Chihwaseon is a biography of 19th-century Korean painter Jang Seung Up, a character who would have appealed to Nicholson during his early Eighties hell-raising satyr period. This is a portrait of the artist in the bourgeois outcast vein of Maurice Pialatās Van Gogh, but set in a triumphantly major key. Jang, played with a pleasing mixture of unkempt swagger and puppy-dog charm by Choi Min-Sik, is a naturally gifted painter who is barely on speaking terms with society. Example: he spies a handcrafted chest of drawers and inquires about the high price. Thatās because the craftsman worked so long and hard on it, says the salesman. Cut to Jang bringing the chest home and demolishing it with a club. Imās film has a fairly conventional structure, encompassing adolescent apprenticeship, glorious middle age, and obscure old age, against a background of political upheaval and the search for a perfect woman. But the director revitalizes the biopic form by keeping everything fast, supple, pliant. Just like one of the artistās paintings, Chihwaseon is a dynamic swirl of forms observed with a passionate eye.
Polanskiās movie, which got a predictably snotty reception, also does a nice job of revitalizing an old form. The Pianist has all the earmarks of an old-fashioned, Euro-financed bland-out. But unlike Spielberg, Polanski doesnāt divide the action between high-velocity setpieces and tricked-up exchanges between the principals. Nor does he tart up his Jewish characters with ćhumanizingä traits to make sure we donāt forget theyāre victims. Even though the film stays strictly within the POV of real-life pianist Wladislaw Szpilman, the central character is actually the Final Solution itself, just as the central character of Repulsion was the apartment inhabited by Deneuve. The action effortlessly builds to blunt, horrifying details that are never underlined and that work as unemphatic cappers to each brutal episode: a man lapping spilled soup off the pavement, the ghetto uprising viewed from the helpless POV of Szpilmanās hideout, and most spectacularly of all, the bombed-out remnants of a once major thoroughfare. Ironically, what keeps Polanskiās movie from being truly great is that itās too faithful to Szpilmanās memoir. But as horrifying as that ideal movie is to me, Iām sure itās doubly horrifying to Polanski himself. The real movie is good enough.
The film that everyone thought The Pianist was, Atom Egoyan seemed to be trying to make with Ararat. Sad to say, he failed. Itās hard to even list the many different ways this movie goes wrong. None of the cast members in this ćmodernistä epic, centered around the filming of another epic about the Armenian genocide, leaves much of an impression, and Egoyanās patented echo-chamber approach to narrative falls painfully flat. Where his characters were once intriguing ciphers, now they are loaded down with backstories that might embarrass a network TV executive. Beyond that, why is Charles Aznavourās Edward Saroyan, supposedly one of the worldās greatest directors, making his film on a set that might have been left over from a mid-Fifties Michael Curtiz production? And how are we supposed to feel about that? How does Egoyan feel about it?
In the matter of more recent history, the competition had Elia Suleimanās deadpan, fantastical meditation on life under Israeli occupation, Divine Intervention, and Amos Gitaiās failed cinematic poem about the founding of Israel, Kedma. Suleimanās film was one of the most talked-about in Cannes, and it is brilliant throughout, a series of interlocking, crisply executed blackout sketches that forefront the frustration and ingrained hostility of Palestinian life. Whereas nothing really works in Gitaiās movie, absolutely everything works in the Suleiman. But in the end, the film has a slightly airless quality, with its many moments of vacuum-packed conceptual genius. Thereās no denying its brilliant delineation of personal and cultural anger, but I preferred a smaller and more modest film that covered many of the same issues, Hany Abu-Assadās Ranaās Wedding. Abu-Assad is a documentarian, and for his first work of fiction he stuck with a classic neorealist gambit: a young woman whose father is threatening to take her away to Egypt before sundown must search across Jerusalem and Ramallah for her fiancé and marry him immediately. Abu-Assadās movie, despite a couple of missteps, is a nice job, with a gentle lyricism and a keen eye for offhand details and incidents. Thereās a terrific moment in which Rana (acted with a winning adolescent determination by Clara Khoury) has to cross through a confrontation between rock-throwing Palestinian kids and Israeli soldiers. Every action is carried out in a believably desultory manner, as though everyone has been through the same thing many times before: the rocks, the gunshots, the wounded boy picked up and carried away. For the climax, Rana herself picks up a rock and hurls it over her shoulder for good measure as she runs on in search of her beloved. This small, simple scene speaks volumes, and itās turned out to be one of my most lasting memories of all the wares on display in Cannesās vast, frenzied, hectoring, 24-hour bazaar of cinema.
Kent Jones is Film Commentās Editor-at-Large.
© 2002 by The Film Society of Linoln Center
