Thankfully we’ve put Grace’s distress behind us (see previous post), but the woes of European women remained a subject of scrutiny on the second day in Cannes.
As many have predicted, the low bar set by “Grace of Monaco” means everything that follows is sunshine, and on Thursday we’ve seen women directors taking on women's issues in modestly ambitious yet seriously sketched-out films. (It should be noted, however, that the day began with “Mr Turner”, Mike Leigh’s biopic of the illustrious British painter J.M.W Turner, a plodding and tedious affair, so dissimilar to the evocatively coloured paintings of Turner himself). But as is often in Cannes, the films showing outside the elite Competition can sometimes save the day.
Scene from Party Girl.
The second-tier Un Certain Regard section opened on Thursday with “Party Girl” (directed by a French trio of Marie Amachoukelli, Claire Burger and Samuel Theis). Set near the French-German border where the underbelly of Europe lives, the film carves out the life of the “party girl” of the title: a 60-year-old cabaret dancer called Angelique, recalcitrantly Goth-like, her fingers decked with countless rings and her eyes haloed in perpetual shadows. At this age and at this point in life, Angelique (played by Angelique Litzenburger) decides to leave her job at the seedy joint to get married. “Party Girl” follows her attempt at this life-changing transformation, which promises happiness and stability at a time — it’s only hinted at — when the poorer half of Europe is struggling to find its footing.
The whole film is anchored by the performance of Angelique, a witchy, trashy seducer who slowly discovers, to her own sadness and horror, that some people are just not cut out to live a “normal” life. “Party Girl” — maybe the French Film Festival in Bangkok will bring it to screen? — has the wistful tone of a morning-after, and it benefits greatly from the realistic working-class milieu. Female trouble is not just her trouble, but everyone else’s — watching Angelique, a mother of four grown-up children, fighting her way through the emotional thickets only emphasises the glittering emptiness of “Grace of Monaco”.
Another woman is in trouble in “That Lovely Girl”, by Israeli director KerenYedaya (maybe Cannes has actually planned this covert theme by showing the two films back to back). This one is less successful though; the story of a tortured woman who succumbs to the fascist whims of her lover almost reeks of female masochism, and perhaps the only way to turn the whole thing around would be to make the leading woman a blood-curdling murderer of her hideous persecutor. Which, of course, isn’t the case, and the enervating effect of the story soon takes full control.
If “Party Girl” is a portrait of an old French woman, “Bande des filles", showing in the sidebar Directors’ Fortnight programme, is its perfect counter-point. Set in a Paris suburb populated by black citizens, the film traces the transformation of Marieum, a 16-year-old girl from a responsible sister of her working-class family to a brash drug-pusher working the street for a local mafia. Don’t ask what you can do to France, but what France has done to you. The director — Celine Sciamma, whose previous film “Tomboy” was released in Bangkok last year — is more interested in capturing the youthful abandon of life lived without certainty, and to document the rush of camaraderie among the girl gang to which Marieum belongs. At times the film comes across as self-indulgent, but its complex look at age, gender, and social environment lifts its narrative above the usual story of a poor girl in search of her destiny.
I’ll be back with more later.
