(Moving in space: Cecile de France and Thomas Doret in the Dardennes' pungent The Kid with a Bike. Image courtesy of the Cannes Film festival.)
The decompression after Cannes is more intense and severe than any other festival. The heightened daily swirl is such that returning home is always a fascinating, telling instance of: What was that exactly.
Not all festivals are created equal. And no two years are exactly the same. This was the first time in my sixteen years I had an abbreviated schedule. In the past, my recovery time always happened around the festival, or more specifically, Cannes itself, or points near there, with a couple of days to unwind and relax. This year, I had to leave a couple of days early.
It meant not only missing a couple of competition films, but that I had to make the transition to my regular life with little time to assimilate my daily routine and normal structure. I saw all the competition films save the final three. Just as I suspected, Paolo Sorrentino‘s This Must Be the Place and Radu Mihaileanu’s The Source were two of the weakest works in the competition.
(I have no idea why the festival programmed Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which is by all accounts sensational, for the last day.) One suspects if the jury had more time to really fully consider it, the movie might have snaked past Malick’s Tree of Life to win the Palme d’Or. As it was, the Ceylan shared, with the Dardennes’ engrossing The Kid With a Bike, the festival’s runner-up prize.
This was one of the strongest festivals I’ve attended. The main competition was mostly dynamite. Even that stuff that wasn’t that good had one or two saving graces about them. I’m going to reveal my grades later this week. The strength and aesthetic coherence of the competition had some negative repercussions.
Suffice it to say, the Un Certain Regard section was not as strong, but there’s no way it could have been, when you consider last year had great films by major directors such as Manoel de Oliveira (The Strange Case of Angelica), Cristi Puiu (Aurora) and Hong Sang-soo (Ha Ha Ha).
This year’s edition also indirectly confirmed how good Sundance was this year. Jeff Nichols’ excellent second feature Take Shelter won the Critics’ Week prize. Sean Durkin’s superb debut, Martha Marcy May Marlene, earned almost unanimous praise after its international premiere in Un Certain Regard. (A lot of the other Sundance competition titles played in the market. Props to the discerning and daring cinephiles at Strand for buying Braden King’s excellent though difficult HERE.)
The endless (and for me irrelevant) debate about the commercial significance of the Palme d’Or has never been more topical given for the first time in memory, Malick’s winner is opening less than a week after the end of the festival. Malick is also now the rare filmmaker who’s won at least two of the three major European prizes: the Palme d’Or and the Golden Bear (for Thin Red Line in 1999).
Here are the prize winners:
Palme d’Or: The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick).
Grand prix: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (The Kid with the Bike) and Nuri Bilge Ceylon (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia)
Best director: Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive)
Best actor: Jean Dujardin (The Artist)
Best actress: Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia)
Jury prix: Poliss (Maïwenn)
Best script: Joseph Cedar (Footnote)
Camera d’Or (best first feature): Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli)
I was certain after last Wednesday’s morning screening of Lars von Trier’s extraordinary Melancholia it was going to capture the top prize. It was just a couple of hours later, returning from a market screening of The Artist, that a friend told me about his toxic press conference. The most talented filmmaker on the jury, the great French director Olivier Assayas (also the most learned), called it the best film in competition.
I’ve said it in the past, and I’ll repeat, my enduring complaint that the awards and the corresponding controversy always monopolize the larger discussion of the aesthetic worth of a festival. I rarely agree with the prizes.
Who’d have thought that von Trier would become such a great director of women? Dunst is stunningly good, giving a kind of range, emotional intensity and concentration I never would have associated with her. I’m less impressed with the Dujardin performance. He moves great; there’s a fantastic closing sequence that really showcases his sexual magnetism, but too much of the performance is ungainly and overly obliging in how he tries to manipulate emotion and feeling. He demands it rather than earns it.
I was into Poliss, Maïwenn’s French feature about the inner workings and quotidian details of Paris cops who work on the Child Protection Unit (CPU), for most of the first hour. Emanuelle Bercot (Backstage) helped write the script, and I found a sharp energy and bounce in the raucous energy and lively exchanges of the very strong French ensemble. Maïwenn cannot sustain it, and seems to realize as much by substituting one absurdist stunt after another until a staggeringly overwrought conclusion. It’s not bad, but it is ludicrous that the Kaurismaki, Lynne Ramsay and Julia Leigh films were shut out.
I’ll have more to say about Drive coming in a separate piece, but the American debut of the talented Danish action specialist Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson) also has a great opening that suggests a work of true originality but losses its nerve and settles for something I’ve already seen.
Joseph Cedar’s Israeli film, Footnote, was shown early on, and did not take immediate impression. One friend who arrived late to the festival said he felt no need to see the film based on what friends and colleagues told him. Who, I asked him. “Everybody,“ he said. It’s the kind of work that looks and sounds better after you’ve had a couple of days to fully explore it. A story of warring Talmudic scholars vying for the country’s most prestigious prize, it’s Bellovian (an Israeli Humboldt's Gift) in its electric exchanges, especially about guilt, sangfroid and the contentious interplay of disciplines and mentors, or in this case, fathers and sons. I wish Cedar had extended his playful and imaginative formal energies to his use of music and contrapuntal sounds, but you can’t have everything.
That was Cannes in 2011: you can’t have it all, but this might be as close as we get.
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