At Cannes 2019, it’s all in the mind
CANNES, FRANCE — Almost every morning during the Cannes Film Festival, I’ve lined up before a sign in front of the Palais des Festivals pointing to an 8:30 a.m. “seance” within. The word in French means “session” or “screening.” But I always think of it as the English meaning of the term, often spelled as séance, in which people gather to communicate with the spirit world — which is kind of what cinema is, if you think of its ghostly flickering images appearing like magic in the dark.
Movies are also something very much of the mind, since we all receive and process these images in our own way, with no two viewers of a film having exactly the same response to it. We each conduct our own personal séance with a film, if you will.
And as Cannes 2019 begins to wind down — the Palme d’Or and other prizes will be awarded at Saturday’s closing ceremony — I’m reflecting on how many of the films had themes relating to the mind and to human perception of a world that increasingly defies logic.
Quentin Tarantino used the world “unfathomable” to describe the horrific Manson Family slayings of August 1969 that are the backdrop for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, his L.A. story starring Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie, which has become the hit of the festival and which may well prove to be the Palme winner, Tarantino’s second after Pulp Fiction in 1994.
Tarantino is right: There’s no way to grasp, then or now, how supposedly peace-loving hippies could have been led by their cult leader, Charles Manson, to butcher and kill seven people over two nights in the summer of ’69. It explains our ceaseless fascination with the murders, 50 years on, which Tarantino addresses in ways both wistful and visceral.
Several of the most buzzedabout films here deal with direct cranial control with variations on the horror genre.
Jim Jarmusch’s droll gala opener, The Dead Don’t Die, stars Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny as smalltown cops attempting to cope with an invasion of mindless and ravenous zombies who are bent on creating more zombies.
Jessica Hausner’s hothouse horror, Little Joe, which plays like an early David Cronenberg movie, tells the cautionary tale of scientists breeding a Franken-flower that is designed to make people happy, which it does, but it also seizes control of their brains.
Mati Diop’s Atlantics, the first Palme contender by a Black female director, pairs reality with folkloric fantasy for a romance that challenges perception. Mama Sané, a revelation, plays Ada, a woman in Dakar who refuses to believe the love of her life is lost at sea. She’s convinced he’s still present — and perhaps he is, in ghostly form.
Over at the Director’s Fortnight program, down the Croisette a short walk from the Palais, Robert Eggers has been winning raves for The Lighthouse, his followup to the horror hit The Witch. It’s 1890, and Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are manning a remote New England lighthouse that seems to have a mind and life of its own. Or are the two lighthouse keepers going crazy?
Three of the films that critics here have judged most likely to win a prize on Saturday tell stories of people attempting to reconcile the worlds they desire with the reality of their circumstances.
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite begins as social satire, as a family of grifters in South Korea connive to blend their lives with those of an unsuspecting rich family whom they’ve infiltrated. The film becomes something else entirely, as satire morphs into a savage underclass morality lesson that recalls the home invasion tales of Michael Haneke and Jordan Peele.
Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar has the blues (and reds) with Pain and Glory, his most personal movie to date. It stars Antonio Banderas, a likely winner for Best Actor here, as a Madrid filmmaker named Salvador who is a lot like Almodovar. He’s a man of ailments and contradictions: an atheist with Catholic guilt, a taskmaster acquiring a heroin habit. It’s a film to savour like a fine bourbon, watching how Salvador (and Almodovar) wrestles with demons of the mind and heart.
Céline Sciamma’s swoonworthy Portrait of a Lady on Fire is one of the most beautiful and seductive of this year’s Cannes contenders. Set in 18th-century France, Noémie Merlant plays Marianne, an artist hired by a wealthy woman to paint of portrait of her reluctant daughter Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who has just come out of a convent. Héloïse refuses to sit for a portrait, so Marianne is obliged to use stealth to paint her, even as both women find themselves inexplicably drawn to each other.
The film could be considered Exhibit A for essays on the female gaze, as it contemplates the meaning of art, love, obsession and seduction. And there’s an ending, set to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons that summons comparisons to the finale of Call Me by Your Name, another film about sexual obsession. The Palme jury headed by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu may find itself inspired to award Best Actress honours to both Merlant and Haenel.
Sometimes the heavy thinking in the films of Cannes 2019 proved to be their undoing. Two of the biggest disappointments of this year’s Palme competition were Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life and Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime, because neither film managed to really get into the minds of their locked-down protagonists.
A Hidden Life is the factbased story of Franz Jagerstatter, played by Austrian actor August Diehl, who refused to support Hitler during the Second World War and who paid a heavy price for his conscientious objections. Malick falls prey once again to the poetic voice-over whispering he uses way too often. It drains the film of real human drama over the course of its nearly three-hour running time.
Matthias & Maxime, meanwhile, is a departure for Quebec filmmaker/actor Dolan, who was a Cannes regular even before his recent 30th birthday. His characters normally engage with each other with passion and volume.
Yet his title friends, Matt and Max, played by Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas and Dolan, spend most of the movie avoiding a discussion about a kiss they are goaded into sharing and which may or may not mean anything more than just a kiss. We can tell they’re both in distress — especially Matt, who seems unsure of his sexual orientation. The film, however, fails to fully connect with them on any level, logically or emotionally.
But not all of the movies at this 72nd edition of Cannes require cranial exertion. In fact, the best way to engage with Chinese director Diao Yinan’s well-received The Wild Goose Lake, the story of a gangster on the lam and the woman sent to find him, is to cease attempting to figure out its convoluted plot.
The film bypasses the cerebral cortex and delights the eye, with expertly staged chase and fight scenes and a propulsive sense of mystery. It’s an exercise in pure cinema, a séance like none other.