(The ravishing Pilar Lopez de Ayala in the great Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica. Images courtesy of Cannes FIlm festival.)
CANNES--First impressions, says Chaucer, are lasting. Because several high profile and much coveted English-language titles, like the new Terrence Malick movie, Tree of Life, Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, were not ready in, the general mood was the festival lacked the kind of buzz-generating titles that really shake up the movie landscape.
Based on the first weekend, I’m more optimistic about the quality of the films than when the program was originally announced. (Going back to what I’ve maintained in years past, I have no interest in the deals, the politics, the studio maneuvering. I only care about films and directors—actors, too.) The early days always set the tone, good or bad, about the general state of the movies. Festivals like Sundance and Toronto know this, and they frontload their festivals with the best works.
At Cannes, the top organizers know it’s a marathon and most people are here for the duration. Better not to burn people, but rather develop some momentum and hopefully ride it. Three years, the sixtieth anniversary of the festival and probably the strongest top to bottom program of any of the festivals I’ve attended, Cristian Mungiu’s Romanian winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, played the first night of the festival. Other years, like the Dardennes’ Rosetta, in 1999, or more recently, Laurent Cantet’s The Class, screened the final day of the festival.
Tim Burton’s the jury president. At the three major European festivals, the jury president holds the power, if so exercised, to really dictate the nature of the prizes (like David Cronenberg notoriously, in 1999, with the Dardennes and Bruno Dumont’s L’humanite). He said at the opening press conference that he doesn’t want to be perceived as a judge, but somebody who looks at everything with a certain generosity of spirit.
The first competition film, Mathieu Amalric’s Tournee, screened the first night. (Here’s my formal review at a colleague’s site.) People that read this site are no doubt aware of my admiration for Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin, and Amalric is a key actor in their films. More recently, he’s made the leap outside exclusively French works, or more internationalist vein, like Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and the last James Bond movie, Marc Foster’s Quantum of Solace.
Amalric’s new movie, concerning a group of American burlesque stars traveling through France, is natural material for his gifts for the off-rhythms and melancholy underside of the actor’s inner life. At its best, I wrote, “the movie captures with tenderness and observational precision the desperation and solitary habits of those performers who work in disreputable forms and non-traditional formats.”
Amalric is really too much of a good thing, because I think the biggest problem with the film is the lack of balance between the backstage milieu and natural friendships and camaraderie of the women with the entwining story of Amalric’s troubled past as a impresario trying to salvage his damaged reputation with his new act. The movie’s definitely a mélange, especially of Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Robert Aldrich’s late masterwork, All the Marbles. Those are hard comparisons. Tournee’s not at that level.
But it has some beautiful and trenchant stuff, a late night erotic encounter at a gas station between a still vibrant, beautiful worker clearly weighed down by boredom and life disappointment and the rake played Amalric. “You look like you could be fun,” she says. The actress playing her is named Aurelia Petit. It’s a great example of how a terrific actress, somebody with depth and a real presence, creates a tremendous physical, sensual excitement in a strongly played scene.
It’s a good film that Amalric might have transformed into something beyond that had he done a little bit more on the American women, the cabaret or new revue performers that make up the new burlesque movement. For all of his facilities with actors, Amalric knows how to wield the camera, too. There’s another terrific moment with the most sexually open and exhibitionistic of the women as she performs a startling stage number involving a massive balloon that she submerges herself in.
Thursday morning, I saw Wang Xiaoshuai’s Chongquin Blues. It’s the story of a father, a man away at sea, who returns to the coastal town he once lived with his first wife to investigate the tragic circumstances of his son’s death during an attempted hostage taking crisis at a local supermarket. I probably liked it better than most, primarily because I liked the story construction and the actors’ faces. It has some interesting uses of flashback pieced together with surveillance footage that is quite effective.
I’ve seen one great film so far. It is sublime, thrilling and beautiful The Strange Case of Angelica, the new work of the great and unclassifiable Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. The director is now an astounding 101 years old, but he’s not slowing down, either in his work or the sharp, inquisitive and plangent ruminations of life, death and consciousness. Isaac (Ricardo Trepa), a young Jewish photographer living in small town, is summoned by the estate of the town’s most prominent family to capture the final images of a tragedy, the unexplained death of a beautiful young woman (the ravishing Pilar Lopez de Ayala) just days after her wedding.
Looking through his camera viewfinder, Isaac is startled and elated at the sudden bewitching movement of the young woman and falls instantly in love with her memory, or her spirit or some incandescent variation. The only contemporary director whose work encompasses the silent era, Oliveira fuses a nineteenth-century novelistic sensibility with a twenty-first century notion of possibility and wonder. Sabine Lancelin's camerawork is tremendously alert to movements, faces, bodies, but also the particulars of life, the proud, defiant way a group of day laborers hold their pick axes preparing to dig into the earth.
Isaac is felled by visions of her eternal beauty and wicked come on, her own body or spirit alighted in a gorgeous or slithery monochromatic apparition. Oliveira combines a formalist rigor, altering landscapes, music (especially Chopin) against the material urges and primal needs of his characters. This is the kind of work where a famous Brazilian structural engineer is suddenly invited to a lunchtime conversation to debate a Portuguese colleague on a local bridge project.
In masterpieces like Satin Slipper, Francesca or Valley of Abraham, Oliveira negotiates mysterious, private worlds of grief, loss, beauty and death. In the end, his movies almost always turn on this philosophical inquiry into the nature of good and evil, right and wrong. His movies probe, dig into the emotional currents of the characters, creating lilting, poetic reveries on youth and beauty, thwarted desire and class stratification. The Proustian evocation of an Eden found and lost is one of his recurrent themes. His greatest film, Doomed Love, is an apt exploration of this movie’s irreconcilable synthesis of the material and spiritual permeating The Strange Case of Angelica.
Like many of his best works, it is lyrical and buoyant, the staging never less than innovative and exciting, like the way he frames direct address conversations, slightly askew. This work is punctuated by sadness, pain and loss. It cuts deep, and like the best art, it transforms the elusive and ephemeral into something whole and palpable.
Oliveira based the film on a story he conceived of some sixty years ago. It brings to mind his most mysterious project, a film he has already made that he has mandated only been shown on the occasion of his death. Gracefully, magically the man is still with us. That’s one Oliveira film I don’t want to see anytime soon. He’s too good, and the cinema needs him.
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