'Infernal hipsters and their irony." So says a very unhip character in <I>The Dead Don't Die</I>, and of course, what else could it be? Jim Jarmusch's zombie comedy opened the 72nd Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night with a sort-of infernal hipness that both literalises and subverts the zombie formula -- with mixed results.
As the curtain-raiser of the world's most hyped film festival, The Dead Don't Die lives up to its A-list magnetism: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloe Sevigny, Selena Gomez, Danny Glover, Iggy Pop and even Tom Waits chip in deadpan irony and conscious jokiness, for they all take pride in knowing that they're in a zombie flick directed by the maestro of cool himself. But as a vision of America on the brink of destruction with the "head" of the undead horde needing swift decapitation -- you know who Jarmusch seems to be referring to -- the film's metaphor is almost undone by its stylised daze.
On the red carpet, flashbulbs feasted on Selena Gomez, who was making her Cannes debut (big news for her Instagram devotees). The Dead Don't Die, however, is led by Murray, Driver and Sevigny, playing poker-faced police officers in an old-school town called Ceterville (motto: "A Real Nice Place"), a sleepy, off-the-highway postcard collection of a 50s diner, a picturesque bungalow-motel, a rundown petrol pump, a hardware store, a shady cemetery, and so on.
On TV, reports of a weird cosmic phenomenon alert people to a possible shift in the Earth's rotation, and that apocalyptic influence soon awakens the dead in the town's cemetery. Thank God the undead here move languidly, in that George Romero zombie slo-mo, rather than the contemporary breed (say World War Z) that impatiently sprints towards their prey. The three police officers find more and more gouged-out corpses, stomachs ripped open and all, as the army of the undead threaten to take over the town.
Each of the stars in the large roll call is given a fair share of eccentricity. Tilda Swinton plays a Scottish mortician who has a way with a samurai sword; Steve Buscemi is a redneck farmer sporting a "Make America White Again" red cap; Tom Waits plays a hermit who has long left the materialistic world and now watches the town unravel with poetic morbidity (what else?); Selena Gomez appears for about five minutes as a Cleveland hipster who rolls into town in her vintage Pontiac; and naturally, Iggy Pop plays a zombie, flesh-gnawing, blood-dripping and all.
The zombie genre, from Night Of The Living Dead right down to The Walking Dead or even Game Of Thrones' White Walkers, has subversive potential, since the undead can carry a rich metaphor.
Jarmusch, meanwhile, is known as a statesman of punk-poetry who looks at the mundanity of contemporary America through an absurd lens -- from his indie breakout Stranger Than Paradise to his recent Patterson, a lovely cinematic poem, and Only Lovers Left Alive, a vampire melancholia that looks at the cultural and physical decay of a Midwestern town. His Centerville in The Dead Don't Die is another America under attack, by its own stupidity perhaps, or by the unstoppable force of the recalcitrant undead. "How do we kill a zombie?" a character wonders. "Kill the head," replies a horror film nerd -- "that's the only way to kill the dead."
Subversive or not, it doesn't really matter, for Jarmusch is clearly more interested in slipping in cinephilic in-jokes and acknowledging his own efforts in tinkering with the zombie playbook. At one point, the Adam Driver character hands a Star Wars key chain to Tilda Swinton, who delightfully exclaims: "Star Wars is an excellent fiction!" (At least she doesn't call him Kylo Ren point-blank.) Throughout the film, the country song The Dead Don't Die, by Sturgill Simpson, is heard from the radio, with the character flatly saying that, yes, this is the theme song of the film.
As a contender for the Palme d'Or, The Dead Don't Die doesn't carry much weight to go all the way. And yet the infernal hipsters and their irony, something for the "in-crowd", kicked open the festival in spirit and style.
The Dead Don't Die will open in the US next month, though it's not clear when it's coming to Thailand.
