Women vs Nature
A scene from Naomi Kawase’s Still The Water.
The frothing waves crash, the typhoon roars and teenage love crackles in Naomi Kawase’s Futatsume No Mado (Still The Water), the sole Asian entry in this year’s main competition at Cannes. Delicate, lyrical, sun-dappled and somewhat calculated, but it wasn’t the masterpiece that some of us might have been waiting for. Last week, prior to the festival, Kawase, one of the two female directors in the male-dominated Competition, made a bold announcement that Still The Water was her chef d’oeuvre that deserved the Palme d’Or. We’ll see if that rings true on Saturday when the awards are handed out, though to be honest, the odds seem long for the Japanese auteur.
Still The Water is set on the remote island of Amami, and it’s about many things: tradition, family, death, love, the pains of growing up and the unstoppable force of nature. At its centre is a mellow romance, with all its awkwardness and anxiety, between Kaito and Kyoko, the two sweet 16s of the story. But Kawase, who at her best can evoke the magical from the mundane, surrounds the lovebirds with folksy wisdom, parental woes and several island songs crooned by grey-haired elders — before a furious typhoon (and an epiphany) strikes.
Kawase has a soft, poetic touch, but her strategy seems a little too conspicuous here — unlike the effortless grace of The Mourning Forest, which won her the Grand Prix, or the runner-up prize, here in 2007.
Pitting the force of women against, or alongside, the majesty of Mother Nature seems to be the theme of the female directors at Cannes. Besides Kawase, Alice Rohrwacher has given us the small and touching Le Meraviglie (The Wonders), which chronicles the daily existence of a beekeeping family in rural Italy. It also has a teenage female at the centre of the struggle between tradition and modernity, family values and personal pursuit, and between the familiar provincial lull and the urge to move on. The poetic reality of Rohrwacher’s film is tender, and its spirituality is at one with the vast earth on which the family home is set. In short, if Kawase is to win the Palme on Saturday, it’s Rohrwacher who’ll discreetly stand in her way.
A Different Look
Cannes’s second-tier section is called Un Certain Regard, which roughly means “a different look” in French. In the past few years, the main competition has become somewhat predictable while small gems and innovative filmmaking are more manifest in this sidebar programme. The case in point this year is Jauja. Directed by Lisandro Alonso from Argentina, this little curious beast has become a sensation among a band of critics. Taking place in 1882 in the vast expanse of Patagonia, the story centres on Captain Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), a Danish engineer who arrives at this remote part of the Earth with his teenage daughter. When the daughter runs away with a local solider, Dinesen sets out into the unknown territory, scarcely populated and yet infested by rumours and myths, and by the melancholic ghosts of the past, as well as the future.
Like most films that dream their way to transcendence, Jauja is hypnotic magnificence that defies easy description. This film is a history (or memory?) of the place and the time locked inside it — and in that Patagonia inferno Alonso has joined kindred spirits like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bela Tarr and Lav Diaz as cinema visionaries who, like Dinesen himself, keep on exploring the unknown boundaries of the medium.
There are a few more noteworthy titles in Un Certain Regard. From Sweden comes Turist, a sharp, hilarious satire on macho value and searing study on marital tension directed by Ruben Ostlund. Set in a ski resort, the film is about a middle-class couple who notices the cracks in their supposedly solid marriage when an avalanche nearly strikes them and their two young children. Ostlund’s smart script sees through the fact that in most marriages, the most ever-lasting wounds are those that are invisible, with or without the cover of the snow.
Another poisonous marriage — literally this time — depicted with such modernist elegance is in La Chambre Bleu (The Blue Room), a French film by director/actor Mathieu Amalric. At the crisp length of 75 minutes, this is a detective story, a crime thriller, and a passionate drama about lethal adultery set in a small town in which a rich married man (Amalric) has a heated affair with a local pharmacist that leads, somehow, to her husband’s death. The film is told in smooth-edged jigsaw fragments, going back and forth in time, and is constructed like a faint memory rather than a revelatory exposition. Maybe a slot at a French Film Festival in Bangkok? That I truly wish.
Hits and misses
The Cannes Film Festival is said to be the most elite list of world cinema — and yet every year, chalking up the hits and the misses often reveals an equal force competing for wide-eyed adulation and bitter carping. At this point, four days before the awards night, the strongest entry seems to be Winter Sleep, a Turkish drama that encompasses profound social observations with husband-wife verbal showdown. The director is Nuri Bilge Ceylan (his previous film, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, was screened in Bangkok), and he’s one of the few filmmakers in the world who rarely makes a weak film. In Winter Sleep, he channels Bergman, Cassavetes and perhaps Tolstoy in a story of a wealthy landlord, his young wife, and the poor villagers who depend on their mercy. Let’s hope this one finds its way to Thailand, somehow.
To me, another first-class entry is Saint Laurent, a biopic of the French designer by Bertrand Bonello. We’re familiar with the arc — a tormented artist struggles to maintain his creative dazzle while battling drug problems and love malaise — but Bonello constructs each scene with dreamy fluidity and innovative bravura that make it all seem fresh, and turns what could’ve been a straight narrative into a splendid opium den. Maybe the Saint Laurent family won’t be pleased with everything they see here, but still, the good news is that the film will definitely open in Thailand later this year.
And the misses: Atom Egoyan’s kidnapping thriller Captives is absurd and weak, while Damian Szifron’s episodic satire Wild Tales is full of zest yet without a real punch.
Meanwhile, another much-anticipated title, Maps to the Stars by David Cronenberg, has divided the reception into indifference and disappointment. This is a Hollywood-plays-itself black comedy that could’ve been blacker (or bloodier). Julianne Moore plays a neurotic middle-aged actress who tries to score a lead role in a remake of a film that once made her mother, also an actress, famous; the film also stars Mia Wasikowska as a disfigured girl with a violent streak, and Robert Pattinson as a limo driver who, like everyone in LA, writes a script that he believes could be the next big thing. Having a laugh at Hollywood is always fun, but the irony is that it’s Hollywood that always has the last laugh, even at the bastion of art house cinema of Cannes.
The Palme d’Or will be announced on Saturday. For more reports from the Cannes Film Festival, go to www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/film
