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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS
1998 |
The 51st International Film Festival by Harlan Kennedy
AT THE 51st But any great event – such as a premier filmfest beginning its second half-century – has to have a moment of gravity or existential reverb. At the American Pavilion there were two. On consecutive nights they tied a yellow ribbon round the old palm trees. First the last "Seinfeld" episode was satellited down to a weeping nation-in-exile. Then an even greater M.I.A. was announced: 01' Blue Eyes. We gasped, shook our heads, and moistly recalled the old tunes. And on the evening of his death Sinatra's voice was blared round the Salle Debussy before the skedded screening of Tsai Ming-liang's The Hole: whereon that austere Taiwanese helmer, who favors films about people dying of surreal inanition, seemed to catch the mood. His Beckettish yarn about neighbor apartment-dwellers bonding weirdly during a monsoon season – you never saw so much rain outside a Ridley Scott picture – was punctuated with high-kitsch song-and-dance numbers. Sinatra would have been moved. Puzzled but moved. This, though, was a festival with a sense of fun. Nothing could rain long on a competition that included two good Italian comedies (Nanni Moretti's Aprile, Roberto Benigni's La Vita è Bella), a pair of Danish booby-bombs, something sweet, deep, and Greek (Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Day), and a Ken Loach (My Name Is Joe) that was genuinely comical before turning genuinely tragical. The Kennedy Theory, obtainable on all good cybernets, is that the human race has passed the point of pre-millennial anxiety and is now into a blithe, omnivorous acceptance of anything life throws at it. The charm of the characters in Loach's My Name Is Joe is that they try to engage with this new age of Zen Acquiescence even though their director first found voice in an era when the byword was Serious Radical Response. His new hero is a jobless ex-alcoholic (Peter Mullan) who falls for a health visitor (Louise Goodall) and then falls foul of old gang-land chums while trying to help a friend in debt. Twenty years ago this would have cued yards of onscreen Loach pamphleteering about the state's responsibility for the state of things and the individual's responsibility to pressure the state. Today Loach offers a different thesis: There is no simple answer to the mess Joe is in. He put himself there, and the nexus of cause and ill-effect is too intricate to solve with a political fiat. In addition, the film's limber realism – seamless cutting-on-movement, serendipitous reaction shots, telephoto lenses that flatten group scenes into egalitarian human frescoes – would fight tendentiousness even if Paul Laverty's screenplay (leagues ahead of his script for Carla's Song) didn't. Performances are terrific from an unknown cast unlikely to stay unknown, especially Mullan, who copped Best Actor prize. The new positivism at So we had von Trier's own Idiots, a scabrously funny ensemble piece about commune-dwelling hoaxers who sally into the streets – or restaurants or museums – pretending to be insane. (The auteur hewed to his Dogma by not turning up at the press conference.) And before that we had Thomas Vinterberg's equally raw black comedy Celebration (Festen), which won a Special Jury Prize for its pains. A family reuniting at the ancestral pile for Dad's 60th birthday trades formality for dysfunctionalism, sanity for quarrelsome delirium. The first toast is toast almost before it is drunk. Son confronts father with his (Dad's) history of bisexual child abuse, blaming him, among other things, for a sister's recent suicide. The film is like Chekhov reworked by the Marquis de Sade. We hardly know which tormenter to side with as masks are ripped and social faces flayed. As subplot to the parent-child conflict we also have a workout for racism, with a systematically humiliated black guest. The audience watches agog, its only dark suspicion being that the whole movie is shaped and motivated by the number of titillating no-go areas Vinterberg can think up. Each Danish offering had
giddying handheld visuals – watching was like stepping into a rickety rowboat
without even the safety of a taboo-proof lifejacket. Especially in Idiots.
As well as an orgy scene whose "penetration
shot" has already caused Von Trier's picture of mental illness and our response to it is both funny and cauterizingly perceptive. First we giggle guiltily at waiters or shoppers discombobulated by pseudo-spastic pranksters. Then we grin more nervously at the scene where one scam artist is cornered in a public toilet by suspicious Hell's Angels (we fear a replay of the Ving Rhames comeuppance in Pulp Fiction). Finally we cringe in sympathetic embarrassment when the group's most likable, gullible female conscript "takes her work home" and tries it on a husband and family recovering from a recent bereavement. Von Trier and Vinterberg come out on the side of the good – mercy and decency to those who deserve it, justice to those who don't. But they give the Devil a fair crack of the tail, too. The racy, maverick style of their cinema is suited to a vision of earth in which hypocrisy can run but cannot hide, and Heaven and Hell take turns at the time-share. When the Danes had finished their iconoclasm, in came two Americans with satiric pickaxes. In Happiness and Velvet Goldmine the Todds Solondz and Haynes showed that it is (a) good to be gay, (b) okay to be sex-obsessed, and (c) – though only Solondz went on to (c) – even worthy of sympathetic understanding to be a pedophile shrink (Dylan Baker) hopelessly drawn to drugging and deflowering your son's male friends. The Givenchy crowd didn't have to sit through Happiness. It showed in the 30th anniversary Directors Fortnight, proving that three decades after this counter-show was inaugurated by les événéments de '68 it still puts its choice of film where its radical mouth is. Solondz's movie is a Short Cuts for liberals with deep lungs. When not actually gasping – count the shots of flying semen – you need deep draughts of air to stay on the mountain heights of the director's mischievous tolerance. That he's funny as well as evangelistic in its plea for more open minds and hearts is almost too much to take in at one climbing. Velvet Goldmine is loud and likable, but
less integrated. Nostalgia is on overtime here. Must we go back yet again to
the glam-rock early Seventies? Heels, glitter, flared trousers, and
permissiveness without tears – it's like Austin Powers on acid. Still:
the music's nice, Ewan McGregor is good as a
bleached-blond rocker, Toni Collette better as a freelance music moll, and
whenever Haynes finds a moment of true fairy-tale regression – camera panning
down through stars, mythomanic nods to Kane's style
of High Investigative Baroque – he is back at the pitch of Poison. Ideally you need footnotes for
a movie like this. You need them also for two other eye-grabbing films that
plunder "real" cultural history. John Maybury's
Love Is the Devil turns painter Francis Bacon, entertainingly but
aberrantly, into a fairy queen of slaughterhouse Fauvism. Derek Jacobi sprays the Even the rubbish at FILM FESTIVALS TEACH a great lesson. The more exuberant the movies, the more exuberant the world around them. Art doesn't imitate life, it infects it. So obviously two high-enchantment Italian comedies in mid-fest, RobertoBenigni's Life Is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella) and Nanni Moretti's Aprile, would create conditions for a Felliniesque epiphany on the Croisette. It happened like this. On
Monday, Benigni unveiled his commedia dell'arte take on The Great
Dictator. Very funny in its first hour, with the director-star playing a
waiter who puts his foot in it all over Mussolini's On Tuesday, Moretti took the fiveyear dustsheets off his career with a Dear Diary-ish auto-biopic about his travails as a father and filmmaker. Slow and a touch ramshackle, the movie is still irresistible whenever the comedian-auteur is on screen, suggesting as ever an El Greco saint who has strayed into the age of urban stress. Then, soon after this double whammy, the whole Croisette went crazy-Italian. An Amarcord-style ocean liner glittered into the night bay, causing heads to turn, musical gasps to fill the air, and all the photos of Federico Fellini in the Palais to smile indulgently. ("Miracolo!" cried witnesses.) Although the ship itself wasn't Italian – it was the SS France, rented for the festival climax like a tuxedo – it was still the world's biggest working liner and it caused people to realize two things. One, all the world's a movie. Two, all the cinema's a voyage. So the festival bowed out with two very similar films, a Theo Angelopoulos pic and Godzilla. Both make the point that what comes from the sea must go back to the sea, although the Greek director does it with Bruno Ganz and two hours of poetic stasis while Roland Emmerich does it with a monster, 8 million extras, and enough computer power to light up New York. I liked Theo's version. It won
a long-awaited Palme d'Or for a
veteran who has been enigmatizing An amazing image landmarks the
movie's hinterland. A scene by the Greek-Albanian border has bodies – are
they alive? dead? we can
hardly tell – frozen and spreadeagled at different
heights all along the tall, long wire fence. They look like human musical
notes thrown onto a giant stave. But these are notes that have been silenced
by history. The scene comes, goes, vanishes. Yet it
tells us more about the importunate, important spaces of the political and
historical unsaid than any other image at The film seems to have filmed itself, to have been produced by parthenogenesis. As in life, nothing is still even when nothing seems to move. Angelopoulos's camera shifts continuously and minutely, inching onward in its contrary-motion track-zooms that seem to say, "Every pace forward is a pace back, and every retreat an advance. And the sea that wraps the globe is just the circle of birth and death to which we all belong." It was a good flick. Actually the sea that wraps the globe also served as blue carpet on prize night to the audience and the jurors led by President Martin Scorsese. The event was set to take place – in a gesture of startling grandeur and excess (if you have a Palais des Festivals, why not throw it away?) – on the SS France. Nervous glances assured all guests that the event was not being filmed by James Cameron, although Billy Zane had been seen in town earlier, disguised with a shaven pate. The deserving who won exchanged polite smiles with the deserving who didn't. First category included John Boorman, nabbing Best Director for his briskly anarchic yarn shot in scouring-bleach monochrome about a Robin Hood-ish supercrook The General – based on real-life Dublin crime boss Martin Cahill (Brendan Gleeson) – and Elodie Bouchez, named Best Actress (along with co-star Natacha Regnier) in the favorite French flick The Dream Life of Angels (La Vie revée des anges). Directed by first-timer Erick Zonca, this tale of two flatmates split by one girl's amour fou for a handsome disco-slob has a zinging immediacy, and so does La Bouchez. The deserving who didn't win
included Lars von Trier, Ken Loach, and my friends
the It seemed to sum up the whole
of COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE
JULY-AUG 1998 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights
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