Humour is hardly ever associated with Cannes competition films -- to win the Palme d'Or, for example, it's assumed a film should possess art house gravitas, serious humanity, or weighty, topical, discourse-stimulating subject matter (last year's winner, Dheepan, is about immigrants in Paris, and before that, the three-hour-long Turkish drama Winter Sleep).
So it's a relief, a reason to rejoice in fact, that midway into the world's most important film event, we have Toni Erdmann as a front-runner. A film about a father-daughter relationship, it's also the funniest film in the Cannes competition in recent memory -- funny as in you can't help cracking up at all the silly jokes, fart gags, denture dislodges, and the most hilarious nude scene, ever.
Toni Erdmann is a German film, which makes the "funny movie" label all the more culturally refreshing. The director is Maren Ade, who has a following in Thailand after her last film, the relationship drama Everyone Else. In this new film, earning its elite slot in the Cannes competition amid more "serious" brand name filmmakers, Ade gives us a strange and yet touching family tale, in which a prankster father follows his uptight, performance-driven daughter around as she chases an important business deal.
The father, Winfried, is a music teacher (played by Austrian actor Peter Simonischek). His daughter Ines (the well-known German actress Sandra Huller) is a high-profile business consultant working in Bucharest. After Winfried visits her and is basically kicked out of the flat as Ines is so obsessed with efficiency and work success, the father sets out on an eccentric mission: he disguises himself (very badly) as a businessman called Toni Erdmann and shadows his daughter into all her important meetings, trying to make her see that life isn't all about winning contracts -- and that capitalism, well, doesn't really have to be that heartless.
Rester Vertical.
Is this a metaphor for all of Germany, the saviour of Europe in its decline? Is laughter the way out from the bane of neoliberalism? Perhaps. Who knows? Regardless, Toni Erdmann revels in its irreverence and unpredictability; the film is, at heart, a feel-good story, and yet it arrives at its destination through a sense of awkwardness, a rough sexual episode and many solemn, jargon-filled meetings about cost-cutting and business models. If "good films" are one way or another about humanity, our Toni is the unlikely mascot -- he actually becomes a mascot at one point, all brown and hairy, a fantastic reminder to his realistic daughter that the world isn't going to end just because her German company fails to achieve its target. There has not been a good German film at Cannes for many years, and the festival made the right gamble to put Toni Erdmann in the top shelf. Critics and the industry love it, and although there's no way to tell if the George Miller-led jury will share the sentiment, the good-humoured film has generated the biggest buzz at the festival.
In fact besides Toni Erdmann, humour and family trouble are the ingredients of many competition films this year. Cristi Puiu's Sieranevada is a black comedy surrounding a family gathering, where the ghost of communism, the long shadow of conspiracy theories, and daily domestic woes come together (it is another favourite among critics here).
We also have Bruno Dumont's Slack Bay, an art house slapstick (that's new) spoofing the French bourgeoisie through a family of cannibalistic mussel-gatherers. And in Alain Guiraudie's Rester Vertical, another eccentric gem, a bisexual man fathers a child with a shepherdess in rural France, before the weight of fatherhood and his own sexuality drive him along a disturbingly comical path, including sex with a dying old man. And then, the biggest family -- a surrogate one -- is the mobile sales force in Andrea Arnold's song-filled road movie American Honey, which looks set to become an indie hit when it opens in cinemas.
American Honey.
We're in the open country of inner America, and the sales force is a tacky tribe of wild, lost youths who travel together from county to county, state to state, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Sasha Lane plays Star, a Texan girl who's inducted into the group by the slickly charming Jake (Shia LaBeouf, in a big performance), and she joins a dozen other young souls, who're always dressed as if they're going to the beach, or to a rave, rather than attempting to to sell anything worthwhile. Their team-meetings involve dancing to Rihanna and hip hop.
This is a portrait of the American underbelly and excesses, its rebellious spirit and indomitable optimism -- the only problem is that the film, at 162 minutes, nearly overstays its welcome, especially with the backgrounding of each moment with song, dance, and the sweltering sex appeal of the cast. Still, American Honey will provide talking points in the months to come, while Lane, the leading woman, has a shot at the Best Actress prize on Sunday.
Southeast Asian picks
Cambodia — or French-Cambodian — has a strong presence in Cannes this year with two films: from the master, there's Rithy Panh's documentary Exile, showing out of competition, while from a young maverick, we have Diamond Island by Davy Chou, showing in the sidebar Critics' Week.
While the documentary touches on the lingering phantom of war, exile and memory — Panh's familiar trope — Diamond Island is a tender, street-level look at the young generation of Cambodians and a glimpse of the future they wish to carve out for themselves in a country that's changing fast. Both Panh and Chou live mostly in France; Panh fled the Khmer Rouge 40 years ago, while Chou, not yet 30 and born in Paris, comes from a family of Khmer filmmakers. Together, the past, present and future of Cambodia comes full circle.
Apprentice.
Diamond Island is set on, yes, Diamond Island — Koh Pich. This is a patch of real-estate near Phnom Penh, which is full of construction sites and modern apartment buildings. In short, the symbol of the future, the cradle of the onset of the middle-class awash with wealth. But, like Thailand of 30 years ago, the new rich is built on the back of rural labour chasing their own dreams too. Bora (Sobon Nuon) is a teenager who left his farming village to work as a construction worker on Diamond Island. There he meets his older brother Solei, who left home years ago and soon introduces Bora into the circle of his rich friends, with fast motorcycles, sexy girls, and expensive coffee shops and nightclubs.
If the story seems familiar, even generic, Diamond Island makes up for that with its fully-drawn characters, the intimate observations of their lives, and the honest lamentation of the place and the people that are going through uncertainty. With its deliberate rhythm, the film has an immediacy of fate — of something that's about to happen to Bora, to Solei, and to all the young people toiling away in mud to bring to life the promise of diamond. That sounds very much like what's going on in Thailand, not 30 years ago but also now. Hopefully the film will make it to Thai cinemas, where the story will play with a genuine resonance.
Likewise the Singaporean film Apprentice, showing in the second-tier Un Certain Regard programme. The film by Boo Junfeng tells the story of a young prison guard who becomes an assistant of a hangman, and his troubled past and professional worries raise many questions, personal and social, legal and moral, Singaporean and universal. Aiman (Malaysian actor Fir Rahman) wants to work with convicts because he believes he can help make them "better people"; that principle soon faces a challenge when he becomes fascinated with the veteran executioner Rahim (Wan Hanafi Su), a silver-haired lion who has pulled the deadly lever of the Singaporean gallows for over 30 years and who — spoiler ahead — also hanged Aiman's convict father.
Diamond Island.
We may expect a more extensive debate on capital punishment and whether the crime of drug trafficking merits the death sentence, but the film focuses on the inner struggle of Aiman, on the good and bad within himself, the idealist and the angry young man, and how his professional obligation is at odds with his personal belief and value. Apprentice is so well-structured that it may seem programmatic at times, and yet it is a rare film from our region to hit on a heavy subject in a thoughtful manner.
More films from Southeast Asia will hit Cannes this week, notably the Filipino film Ma' Rosa, which scores a place in the main competition. Another Singaporean film, A Yellow Bird, will also screen in Critics' Week. More reports will feature on Friday in Life, as well as on the Bangkok Post website.
