Cannes puts focus on haves, have-nots
Class divides the theme of several films
If there is a theme emerging from the early days of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it is that class consciousness is alive and well on the French Riviera. With only a handful of films screened in competition thus far, battles between haves and have-nots are rampant on the big screen.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in I, Daniel Blake, a new film from 79-year-old, socially active filmmaker Ken Loach. The story, based on research done by Loach and his longtime writing partner Paul Laverty, tells of two unemployed people in Newcastle, England, Daniel and Katie, and their struggles against the dehumanizing bureaucracy of the modern welfare state.
At the news conference for the film, the usually lighthearted banter took a turn for the political as British journalists, who had turned out en masse, asked Loach about his feelings on the future of Britain. The director called for a united front of left-wing thinkers within Europe, where unemployment, erosion of the welfare safety net and the rise of the precariat are on par with, if not worse than, in Britain.
The U.K., he said, stands a better chance of fighting for the rights of workers from within the European Union, “but it’s a dangerous moment. It’s how the far right rises.” (A referendum, set for June 23, will ask British citizens whether to stay in or leave the EU.) Added Laverty: “My fear is that if every country goes it alone it could be a race to the bottom.”
Alain Guiraudie’s competition film Rester Vertical (Stay Vertical) also features homelessness and poverty — though distinctly less realism — as an itinerant screenwriter fathers a child and then tries to raise it on his own.
A much lighter take on the topic of class was evident at the Friday the 13th morning press screening of the competition film Ma Loute (English title: Slack Bay), from French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. The film, set in 1910, pits a group of daft aristocrats (imagine Monty Python’s upperclass twits in translation), against a family of poor mussel-gatherers, with a pair of dopey, middle-class police detectives caught in the middle.
No one escapes satirically unscathed.
There are also laughs in Woody Allen’s out-of-competition Cafe Society, which opened the festival on May 11. Jesse Eisenberg plays an impoverished New Yorker who moves to L.A. hoping to find work and make something of himself; he winds up finding success back home managing a nightclub run by his gangster brother, who makes his way up in the world through a mixture of violence and cement.
The film is set to open in Canada in July.
For a more modern version of the eternal Marxist struggle, check out Jodie Foster’s Money Monster, which screened out of competition on May 12, and opened across Canada on May 13. George Clooney plays Lee Gates, a slick TV pitchman with an investment-advice show, also called Money Monster. Jack O’Connell shows up as a poor schmuck made poorer by taking Lee’s advice and putting his nest egg into a company whose stock then suddenly went south. Armed with a gun and an explosive vest, he wants answers from Clooney’s character and from Walt Camby (Dominic West), CEO of the company in question.
Foster was happy with the way she was able to wrap a thought-provoking idea in the guise of a thriller.
“You don’t have to choose between being a mainstream film and being an intelligent movie,” she said. “You can be both.”
Clooney, asked about the possibility of a right-wing triumph in U.S. politics, replied: “There’s not going to be a President Trump. Fear is not going to be what drives our country. We’re not going to be afraid of Muslims or immigrants or women. We’re not actually afraid of anything.”
And that’s just Day 3. Still to play at the festival: Brillante Mendoza’s Ma’ Rosa, about an impoverished mother in Manila, Philippines, who sells drugs to make ends meet; Sean Penn’s The Last Face, a tale of romance and strife between two foreign-aid workers in Liberia; and Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, adapted from a novel about a maid who is hired to defraud a wealthy heiress.
Coincidentally, language has a large part to play when films depict class divides. In Money Monster, Clooney’s TV-perfect Midwest accent contrasts sharply with O’Connell, who sounds like he comes from deepest Queens, in New York City.
I, Daniel Blake is set in Newcastle, with Daniel’s “Geordie” accent and Katie’s south-London dialect setting them firmly on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. (The film played in Cannes with English subtitles for the benefit of international audiences who might not speak Geordie.)
Even in the French films, accents are used as class markers, and subtitles follow suit. In Ma Loute, a line that sounded to my ear like standard French was translated as “It’s me name, like,” to indicate a rough, rural tone.