Scott Foundas, chief film critic, Variety Todd McCarthy, chief film critic, The Hollywood Reporter Marco Grosoli, www.spietati.it Joan Dupont, International Herald Tribune Stefan Grissemann, Profil Jonathan Romney, contributor to FILM COMMENT, Sight & Sound, The Observer, and Screen
My Golden Days Gavin Smith: So what’s the general feeling about the festival this year? Todd McCarthy: Well, I think it’s a pretty slack festival, but the first thing I would say is that, from what I’ve seen, the festival’s decision to throw its lot in with French cinema this year has not paid off at all. I don’t know why they did that, I think a lot of the films are okay, ordinary, good films—if you were to see them in cinemas, you might think, “Well, one’s okay, one’s better than another”—but they’ve not been, in my view, really high-end, festival-worthy French films. So I think that’s the first thing to say. GS: One exception being the Arnaud Desplechin film My Golden Days. TM: I’m avoiding even including that because it was rejected for the competition, which, now that we’ve seen some of the other films, is particularly shocking. What could have motivated that? Jonathan Romney: Well, there’s no surprise—the Audiard film Dheepan is something we would expect to be in the competition. GS: Automatically. Scott Foundas: Yeah. TM: Yeah, but one could say that about Desplechin too. So there are a number of French films that you would call, I would call films that you’ve got to come to a film festival to see. SF: The festival under Thierry Frémaux has made this concerted effort to not play certain filmmakers just because they are who they are, and we saw that back in the year of Mike Leigh and Vera Drake where the film was rejected and then it went to Venice and won Venice. I’m all for the idea of including younger and less well-known filmmakers in the competition. I think it’s great that this year, among the French directors, they put in Stéphane Brizé with The Measure of a Man. He’s a very interesting French filmmaker. GS: And Valérie Donzelli’s Marguerite and Julien! Joan Dupont: I saw that. SF: —which went over like a lead balloon… JR: It’s a very problematic film. JD: Very.
Marguerite and Julien JR: I think it was partly there because it has this heritage link with Truffaut. The Jean Gruault script that she re-adapted was originally going to be a Truffaut project, and it’s got a kind of Truffaut homage element running all the way through it. But it’s also very weird because it’s this postmodern play with conventions, a complete anachronism—at one point it’s quite clearly a medieval story, but then it seems to be taking place in the 1900s. And then it has modern microphones and helicopters. It just doesn’t come across in any way—it just feels really banal, it’s almost as if the anachronisms are the only thing it has going for it. GS: I heard it dismissed as a kind of a Wes Anderson imitation, because of its whimsical trimmings. JR: It’s pure kitsch, but not in any sort of interesting, self-ironizing way. JD: I can’t say I’m disappointed because I don’t think I was expecting much, but I thought it was very, very all over the place—a little of this, a little of that. The only nice moment for me was getting a glimpse of Geraldine Chaplin, who plays a kind of wicked witch mother-in-law! I thought she was great. SF: She has a habit of coming into movies and turning them up a notch. JD: Yeah, but isn’t it nice to see that, you know? With those eyes, and all that… But otherwise, I don’t know what Donzelli was after. It’s not romantic, it’s not sexual… JR: It’s quite insipid, strangely, especially given the subject of incest. Marco Grosoli: Gruault very clearly thought of this idea for Truffaut—it’s a pastiche of pretty much every aspect of Truffaut’s filmmaking. So you have to ask some questions when you approach such a subject. The approach is completely anti-Truffaut—which could be a good thing if there is some awareness in it, but there is none. Truffaut would have clearly stretched the childhood of the characters, up until their mature love story when they’re adults. Here, the exact opposite takes place: when the two main characters are children, they’re already adult and provided with sexual tensions that read very clearly in the film, which goes in a direction that’s completely different from the one that was intended in the script. And all of the other mistakes that she makes—and there are a lot—come from this original fault in the way she conceives the film. GS: We started with one of the minor films in competition. Maybe we should step back and talk about the things that either had high expectations or have been met with great acclaim.
Our Little Sister Stefan Grissemann: Jonathan was speaking about cinema heritage, or heritage culture, and I think two of the best films that I’ve seen here were Todd Haynes’s Carol and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister. Both of them have a sort of melancholy quality that is directly derived from nostalgia for the classical era. Our Little Sister, of course, harkens back to Ozu and Carol goes back to classic melodrama. Even though they look very different, they have a lot in common: they’re both almost 100 percent actress’s films and I think both of them work very well because they’re also very toned-down, they’re decidedly unspectacular. I appreciate that very much, and I know that Haynes is criticized by some because of the texture or quality of his films, because of the emphasis that he lays on costumes and gestures, suggesting that he can be perhaps too superficial or not deep enough or cold or chilly as I’ve read in some reviews. I don’t think so at all. I think this is the perfect way to tell this particular story. SF: I also think in this one he really finds the perfect balance of his interest in all of those surfaces and the meaning of objects and gestures and in just a really compelling story, which I felt totally wrapped up in from the very beginning. I never felt that sort of distance that you sometimes feel even in his good films. And I totally agree with you about the Kore-eda film. I’ve felt that with the last four or five films by him that if you wanted to imagine what an Ozu film would look like today, this is it. He has the same kinds of concerns about looking at Japanese society through the prism of the family in a totally effortless, lucid way. SG: Totally, yeah. It’s really masterful, and it’s deceptive because the story seems so slight. SF: He had some ups and downs in his career early on, and now I think he’s completely found his voice. JR: What’s very interesting about those two films, I think, given the fuss last year about there not being enough women directors in competition, is that this year has become a women’s festival, but not with women directors. Donzelli really kind of blew it I thought, and Maïwenn blew it dreadfully, and Emmanuelle Bercot didn’t really pull it off in the opening film, Standing Tall. But the women in the films—I didn’t like Maïwenn’s film at all, but I think Bercot gives a really, really strong performance in it, even if it goes off the rails. The women who played the sisters in the Kore-eda film, the ensemble of women I’ve just seen as Moroccan prostitutes in the Nabil Ayouch film Much Loved—they’re really strong performances, and, of course Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara— SG: And even on a more frivolous level, of course, in Mad Max: Fury Road. SF: Not frivolous at all! JR: And not forgetting Amy Poehler as, you know, an emotion in the head of a little girl in Inside Out, which I think is a great film. SF: And I think you could also add Emily Blunt in Sicario, where she is literally the only woman in a film totally dominated by men, but it’s all through her eyes. GS: She’s the moral center of the film, in fact. JD: If there is one. JR: While it’s not a very interesting film, it wouldn’t have functioned at all if she hadn’t been there just kind of frowning through the whole thing, constantly saying, “What is going on?” I mean, it’s not even a role, but she somehow carries it nevertheless. TM: I didn’t care for Kore-eda’s film. I thought it remained in a minor gauge for me the whole time, and I got very tired of it. I don’t know why. I love Ozu, but not that. The one film that I would speak for that just knocked me out way more than any other was Son of Saul.
Son of Saul JR: Yeah, absolutely. TM: I think it’s an extraordinary film, one of the most amazing opening shots I’ve ever seen that completely establishes the perspective from which you’re going to experience these events, which, in a way, I think is the most appropriate and convincing way of showing Holocaust-related material I’ve ever seen in any fiction film. In other words, the perspective—you know what’s going on outside the frame or out of focus in the back of the frame, the character doesn’t want to see it, doesn’t want to think about it, you don’t actually see everything that’s happening but you know what’s happening. And I think that was sustained in an extraordinary way all through the film. It’s the one film that just stays in my mind in a way that I could say it was worth coming here to see. I felt like everything else that I’ve liked—like Mad Max, Carol, and Inside Out—you know, they’ve already opened or they’re going to open very soon, and somehow the sense of discovery at Cannes hasn’t been there for me this year, the one exception being Laszlo Nemes’s Son of Saul. GS: Whether you like it or hate it, that’s definitely the big discovery and flashpoint of the festival, at least so far. JR: It’s quite brilliant, because formally and thematically, it completely rethinks the Holocaust film and the whole question of whether you can represent the Holocaust, whether you should represent it, the question of there being a taboo and if you stage these horrific events, whether you can show them at all or not. So it’s extraordinary to think about all of these things going on, apparently being reconstructed very realistically and panoramically, but they’re all out of shot or they’re obscured by the protagonist’s head. And as you said, it also becomes a kind of metaphor for his situation because he’s someone who’s completely innocuous. And it radically de-sentimentalizes the Holocaust, because one of the ideas that we always hold onto about the Holocaust which is very sort of reassuring, is the idea that among the victims there was some sort of solidarity and people were able to reach out to each other emotionally, and this suggests that the horror and the oppression was so complete that even that became impossible and is now isolating people, making victims into Sonderkommando executioners and then making executioners back into victims. And it’s just a genuinely horrific—and I think very, very lucid—rigorous rethinking of what it means to think about the Holocaust cinematically. TM: And while the character knows what’s going to happen to him eventually and we know what’s going to happen to him in three or four weeks, he’s blocking it out. He can’t think about that at this moment, he’s just going to make it one more day and one more day and as long as he can—it is the perfect metaphor. SG: I agree that it is a virtuoso film in a way—it’s a knockout. But I think that’s already part of the problem for me, because I think the Holocaust doesn’t need a knockout director but a responsible director. I think that Son of Saul is a very smart-ass film in a way, because he’s on top of the discussion, he even makes the Lanzmann argument of focusing on the Jews that rebel and revolt and not on the Jews that let themselves be slaughtered. And the thing that he incorporates, the true story of the photographs being done within the camps, the four photographs that remain—there’s one being taken in the film—shows that he has something to say about the making of images and the question of should we make images of this. But nevertheless, I think the whole enterprise of doing a film like this, in such a knockout form, is in itself highly problematic and also obscene, I think. Just thinking about staging such a thing, just thinking about laying 20 nude dead women on top of each other and then let one be dragged across the floor with her legs open… I think that’s highly obscene and it doesn’t give me any clearer or more enlightening picture of what happened. MG: But the knockout aspect of the film is on the margins. The film is about an obsession, which is precisely why it manages to avoid sentimentality: obsession and sentimentality are mutually exclusive, something obsessive is by definition “unsentimental,” and we are 100 percent on the side of the obsessive main character here. GS: Do you think that justifies the style of the kind of bravura plans sequences? MG: Well, yeah, because you don’t see anything beyond the main character because the character doesn’t see anything around him beyond his own obsession.
Son of Saul SG: But in the scene where he gets almost shot, it turns into a thriller, into a genre film: can he escape, will somebody identify him as a Sonderkommando and save him? And then he drops the whole system of keeping everything on the fringes, it’s totally clear how people are shot, over and over again. It’s a totally narcissistic adventure story. The narcissism kills the objective that it should have, mainly, to enlighten about the Holocaust. MG: But it didn’t want to enlighten about the Holocaust! SG: Then what does it do? MG: It tries to be about the obsession of the main character. The Holocaust is a kind of contour, is a kind of side thing. JR: You can put it like that, but the Holocaust and the question of how you represent it is absolutely essential—but then it becomes marginal precisely because of the strange mechanism by which it’s blocked out and literally placed on the edges. MG: I think what is essential is the testimony of the Holocaust, not its representation, which are two distinct things. When you consider the film as a testimony of the Holocaust, you already have in mind a possible addressee, so the issue that it tackles is not really how to represent the Holocaust but to what extent is it conceivable to want a testimony of the Holocaust at any price. It has such an outstanding pace and obviously spectacularizes the Holocaust, but at the same time, by means of the things that the main character does and thinks, it kind of implies that anything can be sacrificed for the sake of the testimony, and of course the immorality itself falls within this “anything.” So in a way it says, “Okay, I am immoral because I spectacularize the Holocaust, but on the other hand it’s true because everything can sacrificed—including morality itself—in order to provide a testimony of it.” TM: Could I just ask what examples you would hold up as a successful or, in your view, correct or moral representation of the Holocaust? In a dramatic format, not documentary. SG: Well, yeah, there’s a film called Passenger by Andrzej Munk. TM: Okay. SG: I think it’s very tough to portray things like this. It’s also tough to portray the Vietnam War. But the Holocaust of course is a very, very special point in history and it’s very hard to represent. I mean, Nemes is a first-time director, maybe he shouldn’t feel that it’s his duty to do that. I think if you’re doing it, it should really be painful. If you want to be true to the Holocaust, you should make a really painful film. JR: I found this film acutely painful— SG: —I found it more technically brilliant. JR: Well, I also found it very kind of polemically important. Having been coming to Cannes over the past 20 years, I’ve become aware of a shift in that line where the taboo lies, and of course in the mainstream it started with Schindler’s List but then it went on to what I regard as the genuine obscenity of a film like Life is Beautiful, which I thought was horrific! Now that’s an obscenity because it’s saying, “It’s okay, we can laugh about the Holocaust.” And I know that some writers have tried to do this, even a very fine British comic writer, Howard Jacobson, has attempted this in Kalooki Nights. And for me that’s the only attempt—it’s called—that’s the only attempt to sort of laugh at the Holocaust, but it comes from a particular kind of sort of tradition of Jewish humor. Benigni’s film was just gross sentimentalizing, and at that point it almost felt like a spell was broken, that once he’d done that then you could also have that terrible film Jakob the Liar, and I thought, well, where can you go after this? So I think what Nemes is doing in his film is saying, “Okay, let’s kind of reposition this question of taboo, let’s remember this question of taboo, and now let’s confront it, but confront it from a very serious position.” And I can absolutely see why you’d still feel there is that element of obscenity there, and I think he wants us to be aware of it, but I think he also wants us to be aware of the position from which, you know, that obscenity might possibly be regarded and analyzed. Now, I think it’s a very difficult, brave, polemical film, and I do hope that people are going to be arguing about it very passionately. GS: Stefan, when you spoke of the narcissism of the film, I have to say the “Look Ma, no hands!” virtuosity of the camerawork does somehow undercut the gravity of the material. SF: But don’t we come back to the Godard-Rivette discussion of the tracking shot in Kapò? This is that question all over again. GS: It might almost be a reference to that. JD: Son of Saul absolutely works for me. I don’t see why this is more narcissistic than anybody else’s film! GS: Maybe because of the context. JD: But it’s that context that is a very difficult context, but is extremely powerful. And this fantasy that he gives birth to something beautiful, that he wants to bury, it’s an extraordinary thing, and…for me, it was very emotional. GS: What’s stood out for you so far?
Carol JD: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Journey to the Shore I liked a lot… I found it very mysterious. And I’ll say something about Carol right here: I did not find Carol mysterious or intriguing. I found it beautiful to look at, but very surface. But the Kurosawa film took me other places. And that’s what I like: to not know where I’m going, and to go into the woods with somebody. And that film for me does it, because the way he shifts from the husband who comes back and then their voyage together, I found really interesting, really intriguing. MG: It’s a very free kind of writing. JD: It’s very supple. MG: It’s basically his genre films, his horror films, minus the genre, if such a thing is possible. And it is, I mean, this film is a demonstration that a rather interesting reflection about the thin line between life and death can be carried out by itself without the genre structure. SF: So it’s a better version of Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees then? ‘Cause I haven’t seen that one yet. [all laugh] GS: Yeah, it’s the antidote to The Sea of Trees. JR: It’s a really different, interesting thing, this whole question of “mystery.” There’s a certain quality that we all look for when a film sort of touches us, where we don’t just see events that are being staged in front of a camera and filmed in a particular way and edited in a particular way—where it becomes something else. GS: An experience. JR: An experience that becomes more than the sum of its parts, in the classic formulation. But somehow when you see some works, all the ingredients are there, but it’s not clicking somehow. And there are a couple of films which could have almost been calculated to please me, on paper they would be exactly my kind of thing—I fully would have expected to like Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales but somehow, no magic there whatsoever, I saw an absolutely deliberate construction and elements put together in a particular recipe. And perhaps worse in a way, was Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster. I loved Dogtooth and the one he made before that, Kinetta—they showed a genuinely strange sensibility. And this one just felt like it had been bolted together in a particular way, and it felt very deliberate and labored, and there was just some sort of tonal thing about it that stopped it from going up a bit further and acquiring that spark. It’s very disappointing. GS: Was that a universally disliked film or is there anyone here who will speak up for it? SF: Oh, I’ll speak up for it a little bit but I’ll agree that on paper it sounded like a love letter to Jonathan Romney. [laughter all around] SF: I didn’t care for Dogtooth at all, for all the reasons Jonathan just said about this movie, because I felt it was so arch, it was so deliberate, everything was with a yellow highlighter over it. You knew that at some point this pristine environment of the film was going to be corrupted by some kind of explicit violence. And then I thought in Alps, he had kind of loosened his style of bit and he’d hit on a more interesting metaphor, with performance in life and performance in art. And this movie in the realm of directors trying to make a more accessible English-language film that’s still in their own style, he certainly does more successfully than most. It’s totally his film from top to bottom, but I think in a way he’s hit on his most interesting concept thematically, and then he doesn’t quite work it through all the way. Somehow the idea of exploring marriage as both this social construct that’s imposed on people but also kind of a prison, and all the ideas about what people look for in a partner and that kind of thing, it’s such a rich idea for a movie, and somehow he ends up not having enough ideas about it to keep the movie going. GS: I think there’s a bit of Gone Girl in that idea about marriage— SF: I thought of that, I said on Twitter I thought of a number of Marco Ferreri films that are centered around these ideas about a male ego and the domestic prison. There’s a lot of Dillinger Is Dead in this movie, although whether Lanthimos would ever fess up to it or not I don’t know, because apparently he doesn’t acknowledge any influences… GS: It doesn’t have the rigor of his other films.
The Lobster SF: But it’s a memorable film. Because you go, “Oh look, there’s Léa Seydoux, and there’s Colin Farrell, and there’s John C. Reilly…” SF: But Colin Farrell is wonderful in this movie, and you never see Colin Farrell play this kind of role. He plays a total dweeb, and he’s wonderful. And so, by the way, is Olivia Colman, as the head manager at this hotel… GS: What about Tale of Tales? That’s the one I was referring to where I had the impression it was universally rejected. TM: That’s not true. I would say both films that we’re talking about had something going for them in terms of style, but I think they were both all set up and had no real delivery at the end. I would say half of The Lobster was interesting, as long as they were at the hotel, but then it narrowed so much that it really withered down to nothing in the end, with no payoff. So it ended up being disappointing, but there was still something there. The Tale of Tales too, when you’re first figuring out what’s going on, all these different actors, and the art direction and all that, it was interesting for a while, but then it just sort of withered away. I think in both cases there was a certain degree of interest, but it wasn’t rewarded by the second half of either film. JR: I think there’s a narrative problem: certain films are great as long as you’re thinking, “Where are you going with this?” And then as soon as you figure out where it’s going—end of story. SG: I would like to strongly defend The Lobster, even though I agree it’s too long by 20 minutes or so, because once we’re in the woods, it becomes a bit repetitive. But it’s still wildly original. It’s a very quirky film. You can hate the eccentricities he puts on the table but I was still totally surprised by most of it, for the first 80-90 minutes. And Ferreri is an interesting reference point because I thought the whole time it had a sort of cynical surrealism… Surrealism is always cynical in a way, but, it was quite deserved. I think that’s the right tone. And the voiceover made me think of Kubrick in a way, because it has the coldness of Kubrick, Barry Lyndon in particular. It has the same sort of detached cynicism to it. So I enjoyed it. I think he’s one of the more intelligent forces of European auteurism. MG: Yeah, I agree. And I don’t think that Ferreri would have ever been able to film the space of the forest, like this place of freedom as more—how can I say—more narrowed down and more compelling than the concentrationary hotel itself, which is what Lanthimos does—it turns out to be one of the best things in the film. Basically there is the establishment, which is a strong constriction, but then it turns out that the absence of that constriction in the forest is even worse. It’s an overwrought film, of course, but I found it interesting how it conceptualizes the rule and the exception, and to find something else that doesn’t belong to the rule or the exception. And in this respect I think one of the perhaps better ways to enter the film is to try and think of it as a film that goes against the grain that it chooses to belong to, namely the Von Trier-ian, Haneke-ian pessimist film. At the beginning you think that you’re going to be in that zone, but then it ends up being an optimistic film. SF: It’s romantic in a strange way. MG: Anti-romantic but definitely optimistic. GS: I definitely prefer being in Lanthimos’s forest than Garrone’s, and this does seem to be the competition of forests, so logically we should now talk about Gus Van Sant’s film. SF: “Cannes 2015: Days and Nights in the Forest” [laughter]
The Sea of Trees SF: The Sea of Trees—what is there to say? It’s like kicking a dead horse. There seems to be one of these movies every year, that just baffles everyone as to how this film could’ve possibly been selected. Clearly this wasn’t a banner year for American films, just in terms of what was available, because a lot of, let’s say, the usual suspects of Cannes didn’t have new films this year. I think they were kind of scrambling just to get the three that they have. JR: But there is a problem with those selections, because there’s a very simple question that they’re clearly not asking, which is: can we ask people to sit through this film for two hours? Is it right to say to people—you know, it’s implied: we’re going to offer you something good, you’re going to like this, you’re going to have a good time, it’ll be interesting. But to actually ask people to spend two hours watching The Sea of Trees? I think it’s an appalling thing. Someone clearly has not thought about what it means to watch a film like that. So why are they giving it to us? SF: It’s a Gus Van Sant film. JD: I think it’s a Cannes-quality idea. And I think that they’re very obsessed with that. We are the festival who gives you people like Van Sant, and they belong to us. GS: No more so than the case of Naomi Kawase. TM: Do you think they actually watched that film and liked it? JR: Who knows? JD: Of course they did. TM: Because, for the record, I haven’t encountered anyone who has stood up for that film yet. Usually some film has a defender here or there, and I haven’t found a defender on this one. GS: I found one, but just one. SF: I think the press is slightly complicit in this, in that every year when Cannes announces the selection, you always have this immediate pre-criticism of the selection, based on no one having seen any of the films. And you have all of these—I wouldn’t even say critics—just these social media prognosticators and entertainment industry analyst types who will always immediately criticize that “There aren’t enough big names in the competition. There’s nothing to look forward to. Why didn’t they take the new Jeff Nichols film?” Or whatever. So I think that there is an implied pressure on the selection committee to take some big Hollywood-type names so that they aren’t pre-criticized for having too obscure of a selection, even if that means taking a film that’s as bad as The Sea of Trees. GS: Is Gus Van Sant a really big Hollywood-type name? JD: Not really. JR: But people see it. SF: It’s like the Atom Egoyan film last year—it’s in the same position. TM: These are pre-approved, Cannes names that have won things in the past, so they can be justified on that level. You always come to the festival with good will, and you say, “Well, they picked this, so there must be something worthwhile about it.” But then you look a little deeper, and there are one or two people on the committee who are real champions of these people, so these directors are going to be at Cannes no matter what. GS: So there’s a sense that the committee says, “This person won the Palme d’Or 10 years ago, so they’re in our club.” TM: That’s what was interesting in the festival this year. Some of these people were “demoted” to Un Certain Regard. Or in Desplechin’s case, went over to the Directors’ Fortnight. GS: But Desplechin hasn’t ever won anything, has he? SG: No. SF: But I think one interesting thing is the fact that you have Apichatpong and Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Naomi Kawase all in Un Certain Regard does suggest one thing: that Venice has now declined in importance to the point where directors of this level are willing to come to Un Certain Regard to be in Cannes rather than go in competition in Venice, which always used to be the model when films by directors of that stature, who were either regulars in the competition or had won prizes in Cannes, didn’t get selected. I think you could say the same thing about Desplechin or Miguel Gomes. All these guys could’ve waited to go into competition in Venice, very easily, but it means more to be somewhere in Cannes than to wait for Venice at this point.
Cemetery of Splendour SG: I think that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour should’ve been in competition. He’s just as much a name in cinephilia as Van Sant—actually, a much bigger name. It’s another one of those films that constantly surprise you. It has a particular blend of the everyday and the fantastic, which nobody else does like him. I thought it was richly textured and brilliantly realized, and reflected on cinema and the act of seeing and dreaming, both states that we associate with cinema. It’s a wonderful film. MG: I found it a rather cheap reproduction of what he’s always made with a more linear, legible narrative, which doesn’t amount to much in the end. TM: I am too. You really have to think about the audience: he has a lot of fans, but if you’re considering filling a theater built for 2,000 people? And what’s wrong that’s being in Un Certain Regard? You just have to admit that it’s smaller or more specialized film. You’re still in the club. Sometimes, you hit a home run, sometimes, it’s going to be something less. I don’t think it’s such a shame. SF: But I think what makes a difference is that the most mainstream press, or the press writing for the biggest outlets, tend to follow the competition predominantly and see other films as they’re able to fit them in. And when the festival does take a chance and puts something like, let’s say, Colossal Youth by Pedro Costa in competition— GS: —they’re never gonna do anything like that again! SF: —it forces a lot of people to be exposed to that who ordinarily would never see the film. GS: Name a film since Colossal Youth that’s been of that caliber. SF: Let’s just say that Tropical Malady had a pretty violent reaction when it was shown in competition with a lot of walkouts. But then when they showed Uncle Boonmee, it was very well received. I think there’s something to be said for gradually exposing the larger audience to a more radical kind of cinema. They may not take to it at first, but by the second or third time that director comes into competition, they know how to enter into that kind of film. If you put Lav Diaz at Un Certain Regard, you’re more guaranteed to only get the people who are already interested in seeing the new film by Lav Diaz. GS: So if you were Thierry Frémaux, you would’ve put it in competition? SF: In that case, yes. But this becomes a question: Shame was shown in competition. You had the year of Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth. It wasn’t shown in competition, but everybody said it should’ve been. I think in this day and age where you have this very fine line between long-form TV series and feature films, and you have all these filmmakers going back and forth, you have to evaluate it on a case-by-case basis. I know Jonathan and I are both big fans of Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights that has been showing at the Directors’ Fortnight, where the third volume shows tomorrow, and that is another film that very, very much deserves to be— GS: —it would’ve been a very daring thing to do, and a real statement, to put it in the competition.
Arabian Nights SF: It would’ve also said that narrative cinema can take all kinds of forms. But this is not a difficult film to— GS: —but there’s no red carpet life in , unfortunately. The audience wouldn’t have had it. TM: You have to be realistic: how do you show a film like that to the black tie evening audience? It’s six-hours. That’s impossible. Plus, they’re presented as three separate films. JR: As far as the red carpet factor goes, what do people feel the logic was for choosing the opening night film? Because I could see them not wanting to do a big-budget, prestigious clunker like Grace of Monaco again. Still, Standing Tall is a very odd choice. GS: Catherine Denueve is in it. TM: I found the film insufferable because it’s so full of itself, self-justification for the French legal system: we don’t let anyone slip through the net, there’s always someone there to catch them. I think it probably made the French audiences very happy for that reason, whether they acknowledged why or not. GS: As the French insider, what do you say? JD: I don’t think that’s fair. I think that they thought they were making another kind of Truffaut film about this lost boy who they were trying to humanize. TM: But it’s all about the system and Marianne, Catherine Deneuve, who’s at the center of it all. GS: She’s the Truffaut figure in the film. TM: But she’s the symbol of France. JD: I don’t think it was about France. SF: The important thing to point out is that this is already a massive hit at the French box office. It’s like a new record in first weekend ticket sales. On paper, it looked like a strange film to put in the festival, but it looks good for the festival to have it. In the year where the Coen Brothers were the head of the jury and Mad Max was showing the next night, I think there was a certain pressure to find a French film. Of course, you could say that they could’ve shown a film with French stars—there was a Jean-Paul Rappeneau film that was apparently under consideration with Nicole Garcia, Mathieu Amalric, and a lot of other people like that. But they decided to go in the direction of something more like The Class, which won the Palme d’Or a few years ago.
The Measure of a Man GS: Maybe we should wind up with the other notable French film in competition, the Stéphane Brizé film, which seemed to be very well received, and another film that’s attempting to wrestle with contemporary France and its problems. JR: You talked about the problem of images in Son of Saul, and for me, the most interesting thing about Brizé’s film is what it says about the abuse of images in society. It’s about economic collapse, how people are forced to do whatever they can to make money, and thereby enter into this system of the oppression of others. The most interesting aspect of the film was the use of images, not only surveillance system in the supermarket—which is absolutely terrifying. Who would’ve thought that the most amazing tracking shot you’ll ever see is from the ceiling of a CCTV system in the supermarket!? GS: I thought that was kind of a wink to Tout va bien. JR: Exactly, yeah. But there’s another moment where they’re looking at his interview footage— GS: Oh my god . . . JR: —and every aspect of his physical, vocal comportment is being monitored. And there’s a really interesting French documentary called Rules of the Game about young people being trained to enter themselves for job interviews in which every aspect of their behavior is monitored. GS: Not monitored, but critiqued. JR: So unless you conform to a certain code of social behavior—physical, social, vocal, dress—you’re screwed. GS: Posture, too. I say that as I’m slouching a bit. JR: Which is why we’re all film critics, because none of us would ever pass that test in the real world! But the idea of his image being critiqued in that way really frightened me. I think it hit a very painful note. MG: I can’t say that I liked this film, but it’s still interesting the way in which the film finds this abuse of images by overindulging with ellipses: you don’t see when the main guy is hired, you don’t see when the woman who is fired kills herself, and probably a few other things I didn’t notice. SG: Cinema is the art of making images or images in motion, or the illusion of motion, so the self-reflexivity of films at this year’s festival seems really high. We have photographers all of the place— Isabelle Huppert in Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs, Rooney Mara in Carol—and we have two filmmakers—Margherita Buy in Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre, and Philippe Garrel’s In the Shadow of Women. They all seem to be talking about the same thing. SF: The Iranian film in Un Certain Regard, Nahid, has an important plot revelation that is conveyed via a surveillance camera, which puts it back in conversation with The Measure of a Man.
Inside Out JR: Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario has another important use of surveillance cameras too, with the bank. TM: We haven’t talk about the two big American films, Inside Out and Sicario, and I think they’re both quite interesting. Inside Out seemed to be hugely well received, and in my mind it’s a Sixties head-trip packaged as a mass-audience film in a very clever way. JR: It’s also kind of a lesson in how Pixar films work on us. I find the best Pixar films completely emotionally effective, and I mean that they’re very manipulative: I know that something’s going to make me laugh or cry. It always happens, even when I try and distance myself. But this film actually shows you how it works: you see when they’re pressing the joy button or when they’re pressing the sad button. SF: More self-reflexivity. JR: But it’s reflexive in a way that’s incredibly enlightening about how all films work. On one level, it’s going to be a very joyous experience for kids who will see it—younger kids will see it as an adventure story—but it also uses those more juvenile elements, such as the funny elephant, which 2-year-olds will like. But it says, “This is the image for 2-year-olds, and this is what it means to 2-year-olds.” It’s a really self-analytical film, even in terms of the plasticity of the image, the way it uses colors, the way it uses textures. There’s that strange, trippy moment where it deconstructs the image and basically shows you how CGI works. It’s an extraordinary film that’s given me more intense pleasure than anything else here. I didn’t even feel the same level of pleasure with Arabian Nights. SF: I’m sure that someone’s probably written their dissertation on this by now, but the Pixar films are so formally daring and so full of this kind of self-deconstruction: Wall-E, with the long, silent opening, or Ratatouille, with the Proustian childhood flashback and the synesthesia of eating food and seeing colors and shapes. There are all these very heady concepts in these films that are ostensibly for children, and it’s something that when live-action filmmakers try to do it, the studios run in panic. Including, quite frankly, a lot of the tension between Warner Brothers and George Miller throughout the making of Mad Max is all about ways to make the film— GS: You keep bringing it back to Mad Max. It’s like an obsession with you. MG: He spent three months with George Miller, he can’t get it out of his head. SF: But that film is just in a class by itself. GS: As it should be. Do you have anything to say about any of these films? What about Sicario? I heard a lot of people dismissing it as run-of-the-mill after the screening. SG: It has a dark, gloomy quality to it. It’s a very commercial film. If any of us would’ve lost someone in the drug war there in Ciudad Juárez, we wouldn’t be so excited with the suspense things that they do with it. It has an obscenity to it as well. TM: And it has the obsessive main character. SF: I think it’s easy to write off Villeneuve as a high-end genre filmmaker because his technical filmmaking is so good. But I do think in this film and Prisoners and the one before, Incendies, he is asking some interesting questions about revenge, the morality of violence, who’s on the right side, and is there even a right side, whether it’s in Lebanon or suburban America or this drug war— GS: But they’re not very deep questions. They’re very obvious questions that are resolved very effortlessly in the film. I don’t think you’re really left pondering the moral dilemmas afterwards. SF: I think a lot of people will leave wondering if there’s a hero in Sicario at all.
Sicario JR: I found this one essentially banal. I’m quite happy to watch Emily Blunt frowning for two hours, which is basically what she does. The idea that she’s the moral center to this film, saying, “Should we be doing this?” So what? Is that all they can come up with? I found it very laborious and sub-Michael Mann. I could see that topic, and indeed that script, could be given a different dimension somehow. SF: It’s like pre-digital Michael Mann. GS: There is something in that film in addition to Emily Blunt frowning, which are the scenes involving the cop and his family, and that’s the residue that’s left behind after all of the action of the film has been worked through is the wife and the son. That’s kind of an interesting device to insert into the film, because you could easily see a studio executive saying, “Do you really need this stuff about the guy’s family when we don’t even know who he is? Does it really matter?” JR: It felt like it owed a lot to Soderbergh’s Traffic, but Soderbergh would’ve made more with that character and would’ve been smart enough to realize that he’s actually kind of the central story. Villeneuve sees him as a marginal device. GS: It is a device. SF: I liked the abstraction of the film. You don’t really know what’s going on for a very long time, and you never really know what everyone’s motivation is. Think about his last film, Enemy, which was about a guy who had a doppelgänger—Villeneuve seems very interested in this idea of multiple identities. Everybody in the movie, except for Emily Blunt, says that they’re one thing, and then turns out to be someone else and have a hidden agenda. TM: I agree with Scott on that, but I think in terms of set pieces, when they go over the border in Mexico, that’s as good as it gets with this kind of thing. SF: The movie literally starts with a bang, and you think that it can’t possibly sustain that level of tension for two hours. I felt on the edge on my seat in a way that I haven’t felt since Prisoners, which managed to do that for two and a half hours. GS: I feel that Prisoners is a much lesser film. You haven’t seen it? How dare you! You’ll get to see it. We’ll stop now. Thanks, everybody. JR: We should utter a prayer that the next few days will give us something major… Read the second roundtable
title: “Cannes Roundtable 1” ShowToc: true date: “2024-04-07” author: “Jonathan Ridder”
Gavin Smith: Let’s start with introducing everybody: Scott Foundas, chief film critic, Variety; Todd McCarthy, chief film critic, The Hollywood Reporter; Wesley Morris, Grantland; and Marco Grosoli, www.spietati.it. I’ll begin with a general question: would you say there have been any surprises so far this year? Todd McCarthy: Well, the biggest surprise for me is that Cannes seems much slower and not as crazy and crowded this year. And that could be an economic thing; a lot of people are trying to analyze that. But I would say there’s a different pace and a different feel to it this year, and we’ll see if it’s an aberration or if it continues, because everyone’s made a point of how expensive it is to come here, film companies pay so much to come if they have a film. So we’ll see. There could be change in the air. Hard to tell. Scott Foundas: When you say slower, do you mean— TM: Everything. SF: To me, there were a couple of screenings already that I was surprised how difficult they were to get into, like the press screening of the Atom Egoyan film, where even 20 minutes before, they were sending people with white press badges up to the balcony, and the Nuri Bilge Ceylan film was a similar kind of mob scene, and even last night with Cronenberg. I don’t know, to me though that’s nothing different than usual. TM: Well, I can testify that certain screenings like the daytime public screenings at the Palais are not full at all. I just don’t detect the frenzy and the kind of madness. Wesley Morris: The pandemonium is definitely different this year. I feel like the energy is still there, but it’s down. There used to be mornings where it was like Godzilla was coming. The sprint to venues… Marco Grosoli: Many theaters get crowded even in the morning, so it’s quite normal. I mean, I guess the Egoyan affair was the mistake of the organization, related to that particular screening. They might have messed up something with the queues or something. SF: And it was very, very crowded. WM: It was almost as crowded with people trying to get out at the end, or before the end. GS: Did it get the boos? WM: It got some. Nothing overwhelming. No applause. Nobody tried to defend it. MG: Any other boos? WM: There was a little teeny tiny bit of booing at the end of the Alice Rohrwacher [The Wonders]. GS: From a film point of view, what would the big surprise be this year? TM: On top of all my subjective feelings about the crowds, I also think there haven’t been as many flashpoints in terms of absolutely hot films. Maybe one or two, but it’s not the same in terms of star power and directors making key films of their careers. It just doesn’t seem like that’s happening as much this year. And that’s the luck of the draw perhaps as much as anything. But I just haven’t felt the heat and excitement to that extent. In terms of surprises, I haven’t been that surprised—well, I’ve been surprised by how bad a couple of the films were… But in terms of terrific surprises, I haven’t been particularly startled by something being much better or much worse than I expected. SF: Yeah, I would say a lot of people seem to feel that one of the great surprise discoveries this year is the Argentinean movie in competition, Wild Tales by Damian Szifron, who’s a guy who made a few films that didn’t really travel very much out of Argentina, because he’s more a commercial director than a sort of trendy festival or art-house director. But to me, the film is completely mediocre, and I don’t understand what the fuss is about it. WM: Really? So far it’s the best thing I’ve seen. And the only film in competition I haven’t seen is the Sissako [Timbuktu]. TM: The Argentinean film is about something that’s so of the moment. The attitude, even though it’s erratic and it’s not sublime filmmaking by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s got an energy and spirit to it and it’s about the modern world in a way that many films aren’t. So I don’t see how you can deny the topical excitement. SF: Well, I would say there’s been so many films from Argentina dealing with this kind of tension in the air coming from the economic crisis and the political problems and so on. None of that felt particularly new to me, and I think that the director has a glib take on all of it. It’s an episode film in the classic tradition. Some people have been comparing it to Dino Risi or Vittorio De Sica, all of which is completely out of proportion with what the movie actually is. I also personally feel it makes you think a lot of Amores Perros, which did the same kind of thing for Mexico but with much more skill and much more complexity. I mean, this movie, by the time it got around to the fourth episode, I just felt exhausted by it. GS: It’s interesting that you say that because I was sitting next to you and you were laughing heartily. Though I fundamentally agree with you—it’s flashy, skillful filmmaking, but I think it’s very superficial, and by the end it really lost me. Winter Sleep MG: I confirm that the only surprises are bad surprises. I was rather disappointed by the Sissako and the Ceylan. I liked Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. But basically you get the point of Winter Sleep after 15 minutes. Basically it’s about an old cynical man being human again. I liked the choice of handing the film over completely to dialogue and he basically develops a style that’s almost Tarantino-esque in its relaxedness. I don’t think I like the new visual approach he chose. He works far better in exteriors than in interiors and I didn’t quite like the way he used light this time with windows and sources of light inside rooms and so on. It’s been the weakest Ceylan in years, I’m afraid. SF: It’s by far my favorite movie that I’ve seen here. I totally disagree with these guys. To me it’s as great a film as Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, but it’s in a completely different fashion. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is this exterior road movie with a fair amount of dialogue but nothing compared to this, a movie in which you’re not ever entirely sure what’s happened because it’s quite cryptic in solving the mystery. And this movie is more like Ceylan’s first two films, which were both very indebted to Chekhov, as this is, and it’s kind of, I think, part of another branch of his work. But to me, yes, you sort of know what you’re getting early on, but that’s sort of like saying 15 minutes into King Lear you know what you’re getting. It’s a very rich work full of memorable characters. He has probably a dozen major characters who all are developed with great complexity and humanity, who have their own storylines that are held in a very interesting way. He starts with an episode having to deal with the tenants of the main character and the child who throws a rock at the car of the main character and then the story sort of drifts away from that and then it comes back to that in an interesting way. This is a move that’s three hours and 20 minutes long—and I think for me, it was the least boring film I’ve seen here since the festival started. TM: I disagree, I was disappointed. For me, it was a simple matter. Engrossing here and there, but I felt I was required to put far more into it than I got out of it. I simply didn’t feel it was a good investment of my time and intellectual attention for the duration that was demanded of me. GS: What’s your reaction to Scott’s take on the film? WM: He boxes himself into a corner with this philosophical question, this moral question of — SF: Forgiveness versus charity. WM: Right, and first of all it’s not an interesting enough question— GS: Well, what’s the difference between forgiveness and charity? SF: Well, it’s different approaches. The idea of how does one treat one’s enemy, or one’s perceived threat? WM: But the question is along class lines, which is slightly more aggravating because the tenants never get to ask any questions. They hold no philosophy. SF: I don’t think that’s true. The father of the child clearly holds some very strong philosophy… WM: Right, but it’s not an exploration of what he thinks or feels. He is like a primitive person. And he clearly understands what the object of the resort owner and his wife’s boss are, but he himself doesn’t articulate or espouse one. SF: He’s a supporting character. I mean yes, it’s pulled from the perspective of the rich bourgeois characters. MG: And as such, precisely because it is shot from that point of view, it’s a bit too easy probably to turn the primitive one into the one who knows it all, because in the penultimate part of the film it is the primitive guy who ends up knowing it all and giving lessons to, the second or third person giving lessons to the poor partner of the main character. GS: One of the films that I was most anticipating was Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner. A French critic said to me afterwards that she loved it because she though it was a self-portrait of Mike Leigh himself, which I thought was a lovely way of looking at the film. What are your reactions to it? TM: I think there’s something to that; I think there’s a reason that it’s a dream project. But frankly, I got a handle on Mike Leigh for years, and I’d rather learn about Turner, I don’t want to think about it in terms of Mike Leigh particularly, and I found it a very interesting character study and good as far as it went. For me it didn’t go all the way, it didn’t get to the root of his artistic drive, why he painted the way he did, what separated him from everyone else who was painting during that period, what made him so great, as opposed to just good. So I missed the real interior discovery of Turner that I was looking for. But that said, I think some of the peripheral characters were needlessly caricatured, which I found annoying. GS: That’s a common complaint with his films. TM: Yeah, but why? They didn’t need to be that one-dimensional. GS: I didn’t notice the caricaturing this time particularly. TM: The housekeeper was lurking around almost like a Mel Brooks character on the edges. GS: Well, she’s a very strange figure, but I didn’t think she was a caricature. I don’t really feel like I’ve seen a performance like that before. TM: The one he ends up with, the woman from Margate, was wonderful, so he’s capable of that, so why caricature? And the guy who’s always complaining he’s being ostracized, the artist who owed money all the time, that was just one-dimensional. By and large, I thought it was a good job but it wasn’t everything that I was perhaps looking for… GS: Do we think Tim Spall’s a hot contender for the Best Actor prize? SF: Absolutely, though I think after this morning all bets are off because Steve Carell is so impressive in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher. Even if it’s a performance that would probably at the Oscars be considered a supporting performance, Cannes doesn’t have a category for that. TM: He’s the lead. SF: Oh, I don’t know about that… Foxcatcher TM: I was going to say the Turkish film draws on Chekhov and to me there’s a very strong Dostoevsky element in Foxcatcher, because it really probes the depths of human motivations and what people do in a very dark and wonderfully complex way. I was very taken with this film, very surprised, stunned by Steve Carell, I never knew he’d do something like this, and Bennett Miller, who’s been good all along, tops himself here, and gives a very interesting look into the wealthy class in a superb way, into the deep dark motivations of people and the repressed instincts which factor in it very clearly… WM: You mean repressed homosexual instincts? TM: Also with his mother, all the things. Also he resents the success of the Mark Ruffalo character, with his ability to be apart from him, so it’s not just the sexual part, but it’s everything. MG: It’s actually a bit underplayed, the homosexual part. TM: Because it’s so deeply repressed, I think. MG: Yeah, I mean it doesn’t surface a lot actually. SF: I think you see it the most in the late-night wrestling scene, with the close-up of the clearly unpleasant look on Channing Tatum’s face when Steve Carell has mounted him from behind. MG: But that’s actually pretty much the only time in the film that it comes out. TM: You feel it from very early on. He’s keeping it absolutely down, but it was part of the motivation for bringing him there in the first place. SF: Well, maybe it’s even a part of his fascination with wrestling, because it’s never really— WM: It’s sanctioned physical contact with another man. MG: The feeling’s in the subject but not really in the film. The film was facing this choice of whether to emphasize that aspect or not— WM: Whether to consummate it or— MG: It didn’t need to actually be consummated to be emphasized more than it was— TM: There’s one scene where he’s kind of on top of him from behind and you’re supposed to imagine, well, whatever you want to imagine… GS: Weren’t you a high-school wrestler, Scott? SF: No, I did Judo, but it’s similar. GS: I better never mess with you in that case. So, is Foxcatcher considered to be one of the better films then? I didn’t see it. WM: I like it. It’s good. It’s smart. I grew up in Philadelphia and this was like a super shocking— SF: It was a big story everywhere. WM: I mean, I have relatives that worked at the DuPont Company. And it was like “Oh, Mr. DuPont is batshit crazy.” TM: Before or after the murder? WM: Oh, they knew before that the family was a mess, but not a tragic mess—they were just strange. And I think what they did that was so smart with the script was to make it about the characters and not about the murder. A lot of movies would have started with the murder and then walked you all the way through to how they got to the point where John DuPont is shooting Dave Schultz, but instead it makes it first about the one wrestler, then about the brother relationship, then about the father, the son, and the mother. And you have all of this repression as you mentioned Todd, and then just dysfunction and a guy who really is sort of mentally ill and rich and therefore feels that nothing applies to him in terms of— GS: For non-American viewers of the film or people who aren’t familiar with this case, will the way the movie plays out be a surprise? Marco, you’re a good guinea pig for that. MG: I didn’t know these facts at all but it doesn’t come out as a surprise as the character had been described that way. So I would even say that the murder at the end was kind of a dramaturgic easy way out. I’m not saying easy way out in a dismissive way because it’s actually one of the strengths of the film, but you have this film where it’s one strong point of view at the beginning which then, willingly or not, loses itself in a kind of plurality of points of view. At a certain point, the whole section before the murder is quite confused about what point of view we espousing. Then the murder comes out loud and clear in the situation. SF: I noticed the film had three credited editors and I think it’s probably a film that was very tricky to find in the editing room because you do have three main characters, and even as you say, to determine where you would enter into the story, I wouldn’t at all be surprised, because even with the footage that’s there, you very easily could’ve had a version of the movie that opened with the murder and then flashback. Maybe they tried that at one point, maybe they tried opening with DuPont, instead they open with the Channing Tatum character and you’re with him alone for quite a bit before the other characters are introduced and I think it’s quite, quite impressive how they keep all of this in balance both on the writing level and in how the film’s actually put together. It’s one of the strengths, I think. Saint Laurent GS: One of the highlights in competition for me is Saint Laurent. How do people generally feel about that? SF: I like it quite a bit and I’m surprised how poorly it seems to have been received here, even by the French critics, some of whom are very enthusiastic. But I think it’s probably been less well received than the last film by Bonello, House of Tolerance, which was here a few years ago. I’ll admit I haven’t seen the other Yves Saint Laurent biopic that was out in France earlier this year, which was a big hit that The Weinstein Company is releasing shortly, but I found a lot of affinities between Saint Laurent and Mr. Turner actually, in that I think both are very smart in how they approach the biopic, which is a kind of genre that’s full of booby traps that people fall into all the time. Both of these movies are focused on a very specific time period of their subjects’ lives, they don’t try to tell you their whole story from childhood to death, they’re not full of those phony moments you get in a lot of biographical movies where you see somebody having their flash of inspiration. In Mr. Turner there’s relatively few scenes of him actually painting and in Saint Laurent there’s a lot of attention to the detail of the people who work for him producing the clothes— GS: Which was fascinating. SF: Which was really well done. What I liked about it was the way it suggested Saint Laurent as somebody who was the embodiment of his times or the spirit of his times. GS: There’s a comparison to be made between those two movies, but it’s less about the degree to which they fulfill the biopic mission, and more to do with how they’re centered on very singular individuals who are very peculiar examples of creativity, and how they function within their insular social circles. MG: I would take the title literally, I would think of it less as a biopic than as a hagiography—the life of a saint, basically. Because the man that is shown there is a man who withdraws progressively from life and basically— SF: Ascetic, kind of— MG: What is being shown is a kind of Viscontian play with enjoyment of the lack of enjoyment. SF: Reinforced by the presence of Helmut Berger as the old Saint Laurent, which to me is a total stroke of genius, because when this guy comes into the movie he’s bringing his own iconography along with that of Saint Laurent. MG: The scene we see on his bed is genius. I think it’s Visconti’s The Damned, which Helmut Berger starred in. It basically faces a choice at the beginning, whether to choose the Warholian side or the Visconti side. And he chooses the Visconti side. SF: But there’s also a very strong Proustian streak in the movie, the movie’s full of allusions to Proust, but then in the last 40 or 45 minutes, Bonello resolves to actually do the life of Saint Laurent as though it were Proust, and he has the old Saint Laurent in this delirium flashing back on different things from his life, and the way that was structured and edited was really beautiful. The way that was put together and the transitions between scenes in that part of the film I found really spellbinding. TM: I’m surprised it was not well received, because I enjoyed being there. It was a mosaic, and I enjoyed the scenes just as much where they were hanging out at parties and moving around, and as you said, when they’re actually working and you see the whole support system, I thought it was great that Bergé was an important character, you really could see that he was running the show and making it happen. But I think most of all, it was just the scene, and the two girls he was with, and he’d be running around and he looked so great, I completely bought him and I loved being immersed in the scene. The last part, I think structurally frittered away a little bit, but still I enjoyed the experience. MG: I loved one of the main points he makes which is why should you have Louis Garrel when you can have a dog? This is what the film says at a certain point. WM: I don’t know. I was with it for an hour. And then came the shifts in the tone, the shifts in the ideas. They were abrupt but then I didn’t feel like he was exploring any of the allusions he was making, or he would explore them but there was no connection among these things. The point about choosing between Warhol and Visconti is smart, but I would have liked him to have made that choice before the movie, not during the movie. Just give me the Visconti and not the Warhol half. The thing I don’t need in this movie is another story with the gay sex and the drugs and the disco and the clothes and the whole thing. GS: What’s wrong with it? WM: I don’t need to see another movie where that happens! It’s such a cliché at this point and not even filmmaking that’s that good. And I don’t think you can make it that much more interesting. And I think to treat Loulou de la Falaise as a bracelet, basically, and to have Louis Garrel, as much as my heart beats for that man—it doesn’t rescue the movie. The thing you need more of is the craftsmanship and the relationship of the clothes to the women who buy them. There’s that one great scene where Valeria Bruni Tedeschi comes in and tries on that suit, and that is such a magical moment. She puts it on, she doesn’t think she understands what the clothes are about and he says to her: “We don’t do that. We don’t do fashion, we do style.” MG: Mainly the dresses are there as an autobiographical tool, a point which is repeated quite a few times—it’s always between his own clothes—between art and clothes… Maps to the Stars GS: How about Maps to the Stars? SF: Alright, I enjoyed it. I don’t think it’s a major Cronenberg film, but it’s inimitably a Cronenberg film. I mean five minutes in you know there’s no one else who could have made this movie. I think that it’s quite funny. And we’ve seen countless satires on Hollywood, from all kinds of people, Robert Altman, Christopher Guest… I think this is one of the rare ones that really isn’t afraid to bite the hand… because Hollywood has never really fed Cronenberg. I mean with the exception of The Fly he has hardly made studio movies. GS: This is supposedly the first movie he has made in Los Angeles… SF: And I think that there’s a very clever idea in the movie of the lives of the people in Hollywood sort of imitating the machinery of the Hollywood business. That everyone’s lives are constantly remaking themselves. GS: It’s interesting because that conceit just seems banal to me. It seems like it’s already kind of an established fact that in Hollywood people’s lives are the industry. That aspect felt standard to me. SF: Well again, would I put it on the level of The Player? Would I put it on the level of Blake Edwards’s S.O.B.? Probably not. But I think it’s of a piece with Cronenberg’s other virtual-reality movies. You know, Hollywood is a giant simulacrum, basically. And I especially enjoyed Julianne Moore. I think it’s a very gutsy performance. GS: That was, yeah. MG: It’s a very dense film in psychoanalytic terms. It tries to develop what was in Spider, developed in A Dangerous Method, and here it reaches a level of thickness that really deserves, I guess, multiple viewings. I’ve only had one so far, but I’m looking forward to seeing it again. WM: I think the thing is that all the major characters in this film are either responsible for or the product of bad parenting. I think the tone more suits those dynamics than the Hollywood satirical ones. So some of the jokes aren’t as funny… I think Bruce Wagner might’ve been interested in getting those jokes to pop, but Cronenberg seems way more interested in the sort of toxic dysfunction among all of these people. SF: But I think it’s tied to what they do for a living, that’s the thing. WM: But I think they’re extricable. I mean, they work together, the Hollywood dysfunction… SF: Yeah, well I mean the movie probably could’ve been set anywhere to an extent. WM: Not quite, but I do think that the mocking of Hollywood is secondary to the kind of parental farce/tragedy… GS: The problem for me is Bruce Wagner’s script, I don’t think it’s very good, and I think all of the strained attempts to inject obvious humor into it weren’t necessary. I think it might’ve been a funnier film and a more interesting film if he hadn’t gone for humor. MG: But Cronenberg tries from probably minute one to ditch the script. And he manages to reduce the script to a very abstract system of correspondences. So basically you have no development whatsoever but you have this horizontal system of symmetry, a cobweb, basically. WM: Even more than in Spider. TM: Well as someone who’s lived there for many decades and been involved with the industry for a long time, I find a shotgun approach and an exclusively cynical approach, quite tiresome at this point. I’ve been tired of Bruce Wagner since he practically started his career, having read his stuff, Force Majeure, back in the Eighties. I was disappointed in that collection and I’ve been disappointed ever since. He’s kind of the consummate insider/outsider who likes to show that he knows what it’s all about and still be a card-carrying member of the Hollywood club. But it’s a very tired routine at this point. Just to create the most cynical possible view of Hollywood. I mean, it doesn’t say anything anymore. GS: To me that approach seemed a little tired even by the time of S.O.B. TM: But here’s what I want to add. I made a documentary years ago about the history of movies. About Hollywood, basically. And the ones that were made in the early Seventies like Myra Breckenridge and Alex in Wonderland and a few others were the ones that were the most cynical and the most negative—understandably, perhaps, for that moment. And the ones that are the best are the ones that are mixed. In other words, the ones that can really use a scalpel, like The Bad and the Beautiful and Sunset Boulevard, and yet acknowledge what the allure and the value is about the place, too. And so I find a mixed, more complex film infinitely more rewarding than something that’s just taken a shotgun to the whole situation. That doesn’t tell me anything. I mean, it has its moments, the Justin Bieber stuff is hilarious, Julianne Moore is very out there in a wild performance, and there are some good lines here and there. Cronenberg is certainly talented, but I do find the whole approach pretty useless at this point. The Homesman GS: Let’s end with each of you picking out one film that we haven’t talked about that you feel like should get some mention. SF: Um, I don’t know, what haven’t we… GS: Scott Foundas, lost for words for the first time in history! MG: I’d say Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja, which as far as I’m concerned fulfill’s his promises. I mean, these six years of not making films have been well spent, I guess, because this film has a rich texture. It shows Alonso’s cinema as being the only Griffithian cinema that you have now, because it really focuses on the very basics, and it does so with a very compelling narrative and a very achieved scheme behind the film. And also great cinematography. SF: Griffith meets David Lynch in this case. WM: Yeah, I haven’t seen that. And you know how it is, there are always the things that you didn’t see that people say you should see. Like everybody says see Red Army, everybody says see the dog movie [White God]. Wild Tales is the only thing that I’ve seen that I feel like I want to run and tell people to see. I like Mr. Turner, I like the Cronenberg, there are things I like, but not anything that I feel is a major discovery. And I like Whiplash and Eleanor Rigby, but they showed in North America before they showed here. SF: It probably is worth mentioning Eleanor Rigby because this is a quite curious film that was originally shown at the Toronto Film Festival as a “work in progress” that consisted of two films tracing a couple who’ve lost a child and the aftermath of that. One film from the perspective of the man and one from the perspective of the woman. They were subtitled “Him” and “Her,” respectively, and then here in Cannes they’ve premiered a third version of the film called “Them,” which cuts together the two other versions— GS: Synthesizes the dialectic. SF: Yes, with some additional footage, but mainly just to patch things over, and I personally find the film interesting in all three of its now-existing versions. And apparently The Weinstein Company, which is now distributing the movie, is going to release all three versions in various ways, both theatrically and on VOD, and I think it’s certainly something that they’ll be looking at in film schools for decades to come. GS: Well, apart from the interest value of the three versions, is it intrinsically interesting? SF: Yeah, it’s interesting on two levels. I mean I think the death of a child as a dramatic launching point is maybe the most overused narrative conceit in movies today, so I had my guard up against that. But I think what’s interesting is the movie really is much more about things like how two people can be in love and then suddenly realize that they don’t want to be together anymore even though they still have feelings for each other. As a kind of generational portrait of admittedly very privileged thirtysomethings in New York feeling like they don’t know who they are and that they have to make a new start again. GS: You’re not selling me on this … SF: But mainly it’s the acting. The central performances of James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain are really superb, and it’s quite interesting that in a movie where they really only have maybe a half-dozen scenes together, you actually feel the whole arc of their relationship. You get some of it from those scenes and you get it from how they talk about their relationship to their friends, to their parents, and so forth. And there’s a strong emotional resonance about this fractured marriage. TM: Well, the best thing I’ve seen, the most satisfying thing is Foxcatcher. And other than that, you know, we’ve covered everything. I mean, I haven’t seen anything else that turned me on. What I did see, I was disappointed by, like Girlhood, the opening-night film in Quinzaine I wasn’t wild about. GS: And is everybody kind of disappointed by Sissako’s Timbuktu? SF: No, I think it’s actually quite alright. TM: I thought it was pretty solid, pretty good. I’m glad I saw it, but it didn’t go beyond that for me. We haven’t mentioned The Homesman, which I thought was a peculiar and nice, interesting film. WM: Until the thing that happens happens. SF: Yes, but I felt that was earned dramatically. WM: Oh, Scott! TM: There’s debate about that. I was with that too, but a lot of people aren’t. WM: I’m off the train. I’m off the train for two reasons— GS: No spoilers here. WM: I won’t ruin it. Well, I guess I have to ruin it to explain like—I won’t say what happens, but I was with it for a very obvious reason, because I’m a fan of the thing that happens to the thing. And then when the thing isn’t there anymore I’m off the train. GS: Meet me at that place where we did that thing that time… SF: I would say I think Hilary Swank is a fascinating case, because she’s so often miscast. And when she has the right role—and this is one, Million Dollar Baby was one, Boys Don’t Cry was one—she’s astonishing. You watch her and you think, is there any better actress in America right now? You know, when she’s on, she’s on, but she rarely has the right role. White God GS: Marco, you didn’t like Timbuktu? MG: Yeah, I prefer the other films by Sissako, by far. It seems to me that the lyrical openings that it makes here and there are quite decorative and pointless in the end, and that’s a pity actually. Because if you have to rely on the main storyline, you can’t, because I mean it’s too easy to bash the Islamic fundamentalists. GS: I don’t think he completely bashes them in the film. SF: I think it’s more complicated than that. Or at least, the way he does it is not so obvious, I mean because there’s some quite unexpected humor in the movie that’s about something very grave, and— MG: It’s the kind of things you always have to balance— GS: I don’t think everything’s black and white. MG: I think I prefer a far more messed-up film, like Kornél Mundruczó’s White God. WM: You mean formally messed up or morally messed up? MG: Definitely morally messed up. And in this respect I don’t think that the Fuller reference in the title is unintentional because you obviously think of White Dog. But also formally there is some lack of balance, but it’s a film that doesn’t decide if it should be a horror film or a Disney children’s film, and that’s part of the charm of it, actually. Because at the end you don’t really quite know from which position you are associating the other or the otherness with, precisely because he doesn’t make choices with regard to genre, and as such he can’t take a position. But this inability is actually interesting because it shows a symptomatic lack of position at a broader ideological level. GS: You’re sounding a little bit like Louis Althusser… MG: Yeah, I mean that was part of the intention of the film. I mean, the moment you make an anti-racist parable using dogs you’re pretty much going in that direction, I would say. SF: I would just say at least one brief thing about a movie we didn’t mention, which is the cover of the current issue of Film Comment, The Rover, which is showing at midnight here. I think it’s an impressive second film by David Michôd, who did Animal Kingdom. And I think that it’s a bit surprising that it was placed at midnight, because even though it’s sort of nominally a genre film, it’s probably not what people will be expecting if they’re told it’s a post-apocalyptic movie screening at midnight. It’s a kind of measured, contemplative movie, and I think it’s vastly better than several of the films that are in competition, and I think it’s very surprising after the reception of Animal Kingdom, and the fact that Michôd as a director was part of the Cinéfondation at Cannes, that this film was given this kind of slightly déclassé slot here. GS: The response to that film has generally been disappointment, hasn’t it? TM: Well, it’s not as full-bodied, it’s not as big a meal as Animal Kingdom is, that’s for sure. It’s much more spare, it’s stripped-down, it’s intense. It’s also the first movie, including the Cronenberg, that I’ve seen in which Robert Pattinson shows something that we didn’t know he could do. So that was of interest, and it’s very well made. One film perhaps we did not mention, and I think can be disposed of quickly but I think it’s worth mentioning, is Atom Egoyan’s The Captive, because it’s a perfect example of loyalty to an auteur, which in this case is absolutely ludicrous. WM: You mean on behalf of the festival? TM: Yes. In other words, if you’d shown this film to any group, including the festival committee, without the director’s name on it, forget about it. I think it was inexcusable. SF: And I think it hurts the film in the end. You know, the thing a lot of times festival programmers don’t even necessarily think about is that if this Atom Egoyan film, which is lousy, was just released commercially or on VOD or whatever is ultimately gonna happen to it, it wouldn’t have been quite as savaged by the press as when you give it a high-profile slot in competition in Cannes. And in a way it’s been so long since Egoyan made a really satisfying film that it kind of almost made people think that maybe this one was going to be the comeback. Because you say, why put Egoyan in competition in Cannes at this stage of the game unless he does something that’s a comeback? WM: Yeah, I don’t get that one at all, it’s a real mystery. Did anybody see the Ruben Östlund movie, Turist, or Force Majeure? I don’t know how you guys felt about Play, but this one’s worth seeing. I mean, even if you don’t like it, it’s something. And I think that it does a similar thing to Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet. It’s a similar premise but it’s taken in a totally different direction, and I think it’s a really interesting, very smart, philosophical movie about human instinct. SF: If there was an avalanche here, Wesley, I would just throw you in the path and run.
