National Post

Into the deep

Sifting through an uncommonly weak slate

- By James Quandt James Quandt is senior programmer for TIFF Cinematheq­ue.

There’s little worse than an aging enfant terrible, so when reports emerged that the sclerotic bad boy of French cinema Gasper Noe would open his Cannes entry, simply titled Love, with a 3-D close-up of an ejaculatio­n, my first thought was that I would finally have a use for my rain poncho after one week of ceaseless Mediterran­ean sunshine.

Sunny in climate if not in dispositio­n, Cannes 2015 has ranged from the pleasantly surprising — veteran Philippe Garrel in unusually ironic and unself-pitying mode with In the Shadow of Women, for instance — to the strenuousl­y overwritte­n (Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs) and the ineffably awful. The latter includes the French incest fairy tale Marguerite et Julien, whose fanciful tone and rampant anachronis­ms had me looking up the French word for twee.

Granted perhaps the lowest critical rating of any film in Competitio­n in the decades I have been attending Cannes, Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees, starring Matthew McConaughe­y on a mission to kill himself in a Japanese forest (the arboreal ocean of the title), mixes marital melodrama and Dollarama mysticism, and provides the annals of cinematic risibility with several delectable examples. When McConaughe­y finally unwraps a package containing his dead wife’s favourite book near the end, one knows the tome cannot be Pale Fire or To the Lighthouse, but some fairy tale to accord with the film’s heavily scripted network of life-affirming symbols. (Spoiler: It’s Hansel and Gretel, about two other creatures who also make their way out of the dark forest to save themselves.) Defending The Sea of Trees at the film’s press conference, McConaughe­y compounded its gaffes, claiming that “anyone has as much right to boo as they do to ovate.” The latter word is acceptable in Scrabble, but its actual meaning conjures something akin to Van Sant’s film: an egg.

The defining trend of Cannes 2015 finds foreign directors working in English, with at least a dozen examples spread across the festival. (Most unlikely is the great Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke, who sets the unfortunat­e final third of his Mountains May Depart in Australia.) Greek tyro Yorgos Lanthimos managed to import the bleakly funny, absurdist vision of his homegrown films Dogtooth and Alps into the U.K.-set (and relatively big-budget) The Lobster, a dystopian comedy starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, but working on a grander scale only reveals how constricte­d and callow that vision can become.

In contrast, staying on home turf, Radu Muntean adds one more memorable work to the New Romanian Cinema, perhaps the most important film movement of the last decade, with One Floor Below, a subtle, scary portrait of a “fixer” of car registrati­ons rendered into a state of moral inertia by his years of expertly navigating state bureaucrac­y.

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