Cannes 1995: Day 9: May 25

The Convent, Portugal, dir. Manoel de Oliveira

This third-to-last day of the Competition is a riddle to me, even more so than whatever syndrome is or isn't making King George III mad, or why Benoît does any of the things he does in Don't Forget You're Going to Die, or wtf is happening in the crypt or the church or the cave or the woods or the beach or the first reel or the second reel or the third reel in The Convent.  Just when the Palme race started to heat up with much more exciting contenders than we'd seen in the early days of the festival, Day 9 feels larded with puzzling, truncated, or frankly mediocre work, in and out of the Main Competition.  The things that make Beauvois's and de Oliveira's films frustrating to watch admittedly make them more interesting as time passes. Either might have been served by an earlier berth in the schedule, an idea we'll revisit when we land on Dead Man on the final day.  Most of the sidebar stuff could just as easily not have played at all, but I have to say, after so many unsatisfying narratives and inchoate statements, it was sure was fun watching Antonio Banderas fire away at bad guys with weaponized guitar case.

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Cannes 1986: Still in the Fortnight

I have four more films left to see in the docket of the Directors' Fortnight before I do some more reporting on the main Competition films. I was weak and let a little bit slip about one of my favorite Palme contenders so far, not yet reviewed, during my 1986-themed podcast with Nathaniel, but you'll have to listen to us gab about Aliens, Fool for Love, Kathleen Turner, A Room with a View, and Francophilia at the movies if you want to get the scoop.

Meanwhile, the last two movies I sampled in this sidebar both straddle the B/B– boundary, albeit in different ways. Cactus, where a young Isabelle Huppert plays a newly blinded French woman falling tentatively in love in the Australian bush is what the older relatives at your family reunion might call a "nice movie." I suspect the director, Paul Cox, might bridle at bit at that since the most interesting stuff in Cactus are the temperature-cooling long shots, the unusually high mixing of natural sound, the hilarious and totally lifelike group scenes at a public meeting and a private party, and some abstract montages that burrow into the characters' fears and memories. The jury is out whether he wanted to make a "nice movie," and sometimes he seems to actively avoid doing that, even at the expense of his own plot. But it is nice, in a refreshing range of ways, and if Huppert is your hook, you won't be disappointed. Check her reaction to bad news from her doctor. Meanwhile, my review is here.

Amos Gitai's Esther has no ambitions of being nice, staging the Old Testament tale in a series of painterly, flatly played tableaus with a Where's Waldo?-type narrator speaking directly to the audience. The effects are a little too weird for the suburban arthouse though not truly challenging, and they evoke urgency in the story without really drumming up much drama. Still, if Cox feels somewhat ambivalent about the vehicle and the genre he is working with, Gitai seems dogged and ecstatic about making exactly this movie, using these formal gambits, and registering these political convictions. The ending is a frame-breaking sleight-of-hand all its own, which may or may not "work" or shed new light on what you've just seen, but at least it makes a real impression, however ambivalent, and for that I give Gitai credit.

Films of the 00s: Late Marriage

If you were bummed that I ended the 2000 retrospective (at least for now!) with such a lukewarm review, I can doubly make it up to you. My first trip back to 2001 is not only an unqualified rave, it doubles as the next entry up, aka #27, on the Favorites countdown, which has been dormant ever since we checked in on Howards End last December; no question those Wilcoxes have got a splendid cottage there, but I didn't mean to slumber there for quite so long. Here, then, is a peek at what I have to say about another family's crisis of social conventions, class prejudices, and sexual mores in Dover Kosashvili's stark, punchy, funny, and humbling Georgian-Israeli dramedy Late Marriage:

"Even given its stripped-down style, the simply but sharply drawn characters, the bluntness of its sexual scenes and of its dramatic narrative turns, Late Marriage is apparently much more than meets the eye, or the English-speaking ear. I love knowing that even a familiar object contains so many unaccessed depths and complexities, but you have to hand it to writer-director Dover Kosashvili that his peculiar naturalism never pretends to be spelling out all of the meanings in the story or the currents between the characters.... Dramaturgy alternates, sometimes on a dime, from the casual ease of Zaza's scenes with Judith and her daughter to the sinister ritualism with which Zaza's extended family intrude into the apartment to the grippingly dilated reality of Zaza and Judith's love-making, amidst which Judith reveals a secret that ironically invites comparison to the character who is her most formidable antagonist." (keep reading...)

Because Sandra Bernhard's "smash hit one-woman show" Without You I'm Nothing rocketed up the chart after last winter's revised rankings, we're just now catching up to it at #26. Which means we've only got the very best quarter of my stable of prize pets to explore, plus, back on the 00s track, a handful of beloved films I haven't looked at in a while, some mixed bags that I've never stopped arguing about (think eyeliner and Izod dresses), and a sampler of titles I've never seen, ranging from boisterous epics to silly shenanigans to coolly received products from some of the world's most legendary auteurs. 2001: A Blog Odyssey.

London Film Festival: Waltz with Bashir

First, a note on obvious messages from God. Taking a break from the festival rotation but not straying too far from my movie-junkie habit, I decided to take advantage of London release dates and swing in for a late matinée of the festival phenom. Gomorrah. 45 minutes in, I was liking the movie but decidedly not loving it—given this material, I want some formal and visual finesse—but I had bigger problems. For the first time in at least five years, I had to go to the bathroom during a movie. I will do anything, I will twist in my seat or silently kick my feet or whatever to get out of doing this, even if the movie is long or boring, and even if it means sprinting out the door after the credits finish rolling. But it couldn't be helped. So up and out I go, feeling immensely guilty for this 60 seconds or whatever, and then, immediately as I walk back into the theater, Gomorrah burns up in the projector. In fact, the city of London experiences its first October snowstorm in over 70 years, which knocks out the cinema's power, which kicks on the emergency generator, which surges so powerfully that all three prints burn in their separate theaters at exactly the same time.

Clearly, I will never pee during a film again. Please let me know if there is any other possible way to interpret this paranormal sequence of events.

Happily, I was able to use the extra hour and 20 minutes that suddenly stretched before me to wrestle with Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, which has emerged from the last eight days of festival-hopping as the least vivid film in my imagination, even though I liked it better than most, and even though the whole point of the film is to resist amnesia and score a big point for personal and cultural memory. I have tried in my review to explain what I like about the film but also what I question about it and why I think it's not lasting well with me. Nick Schager's reservations about the film are stronger than mine are, at least at the moment, but it's not impossible that I'll wind up close to where he is, and I think he makes some very smart points.