By Patrick Z. McGavin
Cannes is as much of an endurance test as a film festival. The organizers have their own peculiar way of how to slot the 20 competition titles. After a less than audacious start and a permeating sense of disappoint, Cannes accelerated to another gear down the stretch, the propulsive finishing kick providing a jolt of excitement.
More so than any of the other 18 previous festivals I’ve covered, this year’s edition was marked by the absence of a consensus.
I left Cannes on Sunday morning and I was traveling when the jury, headed by Steven Spielberg, announced their awards of the 66th Festival de Cannes. After the first couple of days, the prevailing assumption was that Spielberg, politically liberal, artistically conservative, would opt for something fairly safe and accommodating. To that end, the betting money swirled around Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Like Father, Like Son, shown fairly early, on just the second full day of the festival.
The movie, about the severe disruptions and moral confusions of two children switched at birth, was problematic on a number of levels, artistically and intellectually. The director, so skilled and deft with the young performers, annihilated at pretty much every turn my resistance.
Of course, not every title is treated the same. The palace intrigue that surrounds all things Cannes is never more perverse than the morning screening of the festival’s final Wednesday. This is the acknowledged showcase of the festival. A couple of years ago, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds premiered there; last year, it was Walter Salles’s On the Road.
This year, Only God Forgives, the much-hyped new feature by Danish stylist Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive), was unveiled there. My friend Robert Koehler, writing here at Film Journey, thought it the favorite for the Palme d’Or, before the festival started. It was obvious, about ten minutes in, that the pretentious and lugubrious Thai-set thriller, featuring an inchoate Ryan Gosling and an overwrought Kristen Scott Thomas, was destined for the festival’s junk heap.
Where to go from there.
The breakthrough did indeed unfold that day with the first evening press screening of Abdellatif Kechiche’s extraordinary Blue is the Warmest Color. The Tunisian-born, French-based director turned heads with his exhilarating fifth feature, adapted from a highly-regarded French graphic novel, charting the emotional tumult and bracing sexual experimentation of a young woman whom, introduced as a fifteen-year old high school student, becomes enthralled with a slightly older college art student (in blue hair).
The remarkable young actress Adele Exarchopoulos is sensational, incarnating a sexual abandon and emotional fragility she makes terribly vivid and lucid. She has beautifully expressive eyes and lovely face, but it’s what she connotes through her body, power, pain, thrill and liberation, that carries the work. As her slightly older lover, Lea Seydoux achieves a glancing, wounding quality, the emotional result of spending so much of her life going against the tide of what is popular or easy. The scenes between the two are electrifying, tense and moody.
The movie’s French title, The Life of Adele – Parts 1 and 2, is preferable to the English. The movie secured American distribution, through Sundance Selects, a division of IFC FIlms, before the conclusion of the first press screening. The dissident crowd was complaining about the running time and some prominent women critics raised sharp objections to the alleged sexual objectification of the material. As is widely known, the film has three knockout graphic sex scenes, the first a 12-minute stunner that is volatile, intense and nervy. At the first public screening, some people fled the theater; otherwise, the crowd erupted in sustained applause. The limpid cinematography by Sofian el Fani is attuned to feeling, colors and shape. Some were calling for more discipline and order on the three-hour film. For me, the 179-minutes were just the beginning.
I never wanted it to end.
Spierlberg’s own movies I’ve always felt almost painfully ambivalent about, his intelligence and knowledge I’ve always been wowed by. His jury made the nervy, right and admirable choice of awarding the Kechiche the Palme d’Or.
The Coen Brothers won the Grand Prix, or second prize, with their new film about the bourgeoning folk scene in Greenwich Village, Inside Llewn Davis. Every jury produces one indefensible prize, and this year’s was the directing prize to the talented Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante for his Heli. It’s a shock film, artistically negligible. C’est la vie. Kore-eda captured the jury prize. The great Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke won the screenwriting prize for his A Touch of Sin.
The American James Gray, a highly-regarded figure in France, was thought the wild card with his excellent The Immigrant, with the superb Marion Cotillard as a Polish emigre trapped between a theater impressario (Joaquin Phoenix) and his cousin, a magician (Jeremy Renner), as she stakes out all manner of freedom, sexual and social, in 1921 New York. Cotillard speaks excellent Polish in several crucial scenes, and produces arguably the finest moment of the festival, her shattering confession. She deserved the best actres prize; the Spielberg jury went with Berenice Bejo (The Artist) for her role in The Past, the French-debut of emerging Iranian master Asghar Farhadi (A Separation).
The craggy, deeply enjoyable Bruce Dern scored something of an upset with his lead acting prize in Alexander Payne’s wistful road movie, Nebraska. When I suggested the scenario the night before, one of my dinner companions and friends, violently rejected the possibility.
That’s the kind of year it was.