Good year? Bad year? Average year? The question is common, extraneous, and yet on everyone’s lips after three days into the 66th Cannes Film Festival.
Good year? Bad year? Average year? The question is common, extraneous, and yet on everyone’s lips three days into the 66th Cannes Film Festival.
Like winemakers willing a vintage harvest into fruition, critics arrive in Cannes with high expectations and trudge through the 12 festival days of nearly non-stop movies with the hope that the pickings this year would at least be better than the last.
That's the one thing makes 4,000 journalists come back here every year. So let's not get ahead of ourselves, for three days are too soon for a verdict (everyone has his or her own in Cannes).
But so far, among the Competition titles, we've seen one major work of the year: Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin is an urgent, angry sketch of modern China in which money and violence compete to become the ultimate redemption – though it's violence that wins, easily, bloodily, shockingly.
Jia Zhangke's "A Touch of Sin"
We will feature an interview with Jia next week, but so far, the question everyone is asking the filmmaker is whether his film, which criticises corrupt authorities and contains graphic violence, will pass the censors in China.
For now, let's say that A Touch of Sin is the one title that moves me in many ways – and one hopes Steven Spielberg and his jury would feel the same.
Also rallying quite an enthusiastic response is Asghar Fhardi's The Past. The Iranian director’s first crossover into French-speaking moviemaking is a domestic melodrama about a messy divorce and a very complicated emotional guilt shared by the participants: the French wife, her Iranian husband, the new French-Arabic lover, and a horde of children of diverse parentage.
In short, it's nowhere near the league of Fahardi's global hit A Separation, but he shows that he's one of the most adept (maybe creatively manipulative?) screenwriters at work in the world today.
Since A Separation opened in Bangkok, I hope The Past will also find its way to our shores.
In the festival's supplementary section, Un Certain Regard, developments have been quite satisfying so far: The opening film is Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, a pop-caper/teen heist/California satire, which is a feast of shallow fun. Starring Emma Watson, among other young leads, the film retells the true story of a group of celebrity-obsessed teenagers who break into superstars' houses and steal their high-end goods.
The film, like its teen protagonists, exhibits a fascination with the bottomless wardrobes of luxurious clothes, handbags, shoes, and all the rest, though of course it presents itself as a cautionary tale against our (or rather, American) obsession with money and fame.
Good news: the film is likely to come to Thailand later this year. Yet the one film that will never make it to Thailand is also the one that is the most mesmerising.
On Friday, Cannes gave us Stranger by the Lake, Alain Guiraudie’s funny, explicit and strangely beautiful film taking place entirely at a lakeside cruising spot for gay people. With the shimmering lake in the background, the film is a cross between porn and impressionism, between murder mystery and relationship drama, between fevered, eroticised dream and subtle horror.
There are penises, buttocks and a lot of homosexual fornication in the woods, lit by the elegant glow of afternoon dappling light. But despite the fact that every character spends his time walking around (and lying) in the nude, the film treats total nakedness with frank humanism that we've hardly seen before.
Stranger by the Lake shows that the "second-tier" Un Certain Regard is sometimes a storeroom of surprises that almost outshines the coveted Competition slots.