Cannes journal: Crazy love

Cannes journal: Crazy love

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Cannes journal: Crazy love
“The Lobster”, by Yorgos Lanthimos.

Critics go to Cannes carrying a degree of hallucination: we always expect the next screening to be a knockout – something that will "shut down the festival", like the so-dubbed grasshopper gown worn by Lupita N’yong’o on the red carpet five days ago.

Well. So far, we keep taking the drug though the high hasn’t yet materialised, or not fully. In the high-flying competition, two or three titles have racked up points, and one – the impossibly bad “The Sea of Trees” by Gus Van Sant, starring Matthew McConaughey as an American man lost in Japan’s suicide forest – was lynched by the critical community here. On the bright side, we still have six days to go from here (gasp).

Besides the Holocaust thriller “Son of Saul”, which I wrote about earlier, two other films have left a mark. Both of them deal with crazy love and the tyranny of forbidden emotion: “The Lobster”, by Yorgos Lanthimos, stars Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in an eccentric and strangely romantic story about a future in which single people are forced to find partners, or they will be transformed into animals; and “Carol” by Todd Haynes, in which Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are tangled in a same-sex romance set in the luxuriant East Coast of the 1950s. It’s likely that both films will play in Bangkok later this year.

“The Lobster” maps out the logic of the near-future in which society values couples and condemn “loners”. Those who remain single are sent to a hotel where they must find compatible partners in 45 days – and in a parody of the superficial norm of modern courtship, “compatibility” here means a shared characteristic between two people that’s essentially meaningless, such as myopia, or a tendency to have nose bleed, or a limp. Loners who can’t find partners within the specified period will be turned into an animal of their choice. Farrell (pudgy and vaguely resembling Joaquin Phoenix from “Her”) plays a man who fails to find his match and, in order not to be transformed into a lobster, escapes into a forest to join a ragtag army of militant loners.

Driven by dry wit and deadpan humour, “The Lobsters” is a clever allegory about human relationship and the artificiality of social prescription that dictates our feelings (or non-feelings mistaken as feelings). The two leads – especially Weisz, a sensitive actress playing an insensitive human – give the film an odd pull, while Lanthimos plunges us into the tricky terrain in which his brand of poker-faced absurdity hides complex layers of genuine emotion.

"Carol", by Todd Haynes.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Todd Haynes’ mid-century drama “Carol”, a lushly filmed period romance that should be expected at next year’s Oscars. Two years ago, Cannes was super-heated up by the lesbian sex in “Blue Is the Warmest Colour”; this time, Blanchett and Mara go for a colder, more sensitive kind of same-sex love set against a more restrictive society (the social context is thin, though). Mara, in her gamine pluck, plays a department store clerk who falls for a rich socialite and distraught mother, played by Blanchett with a slight air of theatricality. There’s a sex scene, yes, but the film depends more on coded gestures and calibrated performance of the two actresses. This isn’t nearly Haynes’ best work – it doesn’t even match the moving sensibility of his five-hour TV series “Mildred Pierce” – but here’s a director who knows and cares deeply about his female characters.

"Arabian Night", by Miguel Gomes.

Elsewhere in Cannes, the film that really stands out is not in the much-hyped competition: over at the sidebar Directors’ Fortnight programme, we’ve seen the first part of “Arabian Night”, a three-film epic from Portuguese director Miguel Gomes. Part documentary, part dramatization, and altogether an indescribable experience structured like Scheherazade’s tales, “Arabian Night” is a chronicle of Portugal’s economic malaise featuring, in the first film at least, caricatures of greedy bankers, IMF bigwigs, government lackies, as well as touching, sincere portraits of working-class people who bear the brunt of the global financial trickery. Another point of note is that “Arabian Night” was shot on 16mm and 35mm by Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who spent a year working in Gomes in Portugal. I will write more about the film after seeing the second and third parts, which are showing later next week. For now, stay tuned. 

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