THE 1995 CANNES PROJECT

Updated thoughts now that it's over: Thanks so much to Nick for putting all of this together! I don't suppose I'll have as many chances to do such high-volume movie watching come the end of summer, and I'm tremendously happy to have started off my last summer of pre-grad school freedom with such a crazy, totally rewarding and surprisingly instructive project.

Whip-smart film writer and all-round good human being Nick Davis makes a habit every year of celebrating the Cannes International Film Festival by spending some time exploring a previous edition of the festival, and this year, he's made it a 20th anniversary party, by digging into the films of the 1995 festival. And for the first time, he's invited some folks along to join him in forming a sort of alternate jury and critics pool. One of whom, I'm happy to report, is me.

Every day, I and the rest of the "jurists"shared our capsule thoughts on the films that premiered in 1995 years ago on that date, in the main competition at Cannes and some of the sidebar selections. And I'd urge you all to keep tabs on the developments at Nick's place, since that's where I and several others had our big conversation about the movies as well as announcing our own, two-decades-of-hindsight-later picks for what should have won the big Cannes prizes.

Here's the index for all my own individual thoughts on the movies, day by day.

Day 1: 5/17 (Opening Night: The City of Lost Children)
Day 2: 5/18
Day 3: 5/19
Day 4: 5/20
Day 5: 5/21
Day 6: 5/22
Day 7: 5/23
Day 8: 5/24
Day 9: 5/25
Day 10: 5/26
Day 11: 5/27
Day 12: 5/28 (Closing Night: The Quick and the Dead

Roundtable Discussions (at Nick's site)
Roundtable #1, 17-21 May
Roundtable #2, 22-24 May

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CANNES 1995: CLOSING DAY

About the project

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD (Sam Raimi, USA/Japan)
Screened out of competition

The revisionist Western wouldn't exist without star and co-producer Sharon Stone, who hand-picked the director and two of her three co-leads; but it barely survives her (and that "barely" is me being more generous than the movie deserves). Her shallow, anachronistic performance is grating enough that even a rarely-worse Russell Crowe seems good in comparison. It's not right to lay all the blame on Stone, though: Simon Moore's screenplay is a nightmare of clattering dialogue and a tediously repetitive structure with no dramatic momentum. Raimi does what he can to spike things with his usual cartoon flair, and the opening quarter-hour is a marvel of camerawork, weird characters, and comic energy. He even manages to make the endless series of gunfights all feel meaningfully different. But he mangles the tone as the film goes on, turning a playful satire into a leaden, straightforward slog. At least cinematographer Dante Spinotti and production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein make sure that things stay pretty, and three years after Unforgiven, Gene Hackman makes a terrifically hissable Old West villain. 6/10

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CANNES 1995: DAY 11

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LA HAINE (Mathieu Kassovitz, France)
Screened in the main competition

A snapshot of urban race relations that, in its youthful rage, its mixture of quotidian life and political urgency, and elements of its style, is easy to summarise as the French Do the Right Thing. The film's brazen success at message-slinging even lives up to that comparison, though it also suggests, rightly, that La haine isn't the most original thing out there. Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, and Saïd Taghmaoui are magnificent as the three buddies whose casual wanderings form a window into life both as a playground for bored twentysomethings and an impoverished hell where institutional violence and ethnic tension are constantly present, while the razor-sharp black and white cinematography (while it risks putting a glossy, romantic spin on the material) pays off far more often than not in accentuating the rough textures of the banlieues. The juvenile energy sometimes leaves the film stranded in go-nowhere scenes and the ending is overdetermined, but this is potent enough that Kassovitz's premature Best Director nod from the jury is easy to understand, if not endorse. 8/10


DEAD MAN (Jim Jarmusch, USA/Germany/Japan)
Screened in the main competition

I'll own up to my biases: this was my first Jarmusch film and perhaps for that reason has always been my favorite. I'd also readily declare it the best film I've seen from the whole of Cannes 1995, sidebars and all. A fatalistic fable about America's love of mythic violence that finds a mortally wounded accountant traveling through the Wild West in the best cinematic approximation of Pilgrim's Progress I've ever seen. Robby Müller's freakishly great cinematography - maybe the best work of a legendary career - uses silvery metallic black-and-white to strip the landscape of its romance and amp up the feeling of otherworldly spirituality; Neil Young's blanched-out guitar riffs that service as a score lend a jarring contemporary touch that beautifully accompanies Jarmusch's rancid humor. It's top-notch anti-Americana, and the only revisionist Western you really need; you can count on your hands the number of movies, irrespective of genre, that do a better job of lacerating Hollywood's beloved cultural myths while replacing them with new myths and metaphysical philosophies all its own. 10/10


HARAMUYA (Drissa Toure, Burkina Faso/France)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

There aren't enough sub-Saharan African films that get any kind of meaningful exposure in the Euro-American cultural sphere for it to make any sense to call any of them over-familiar. That being the case, Haramuya is not by any means an adventurous game-changer in its story or its technique. It's a low-key slice-of-life story of a Burkina Faso town uncomfortably balanced between tradition and Westernised modernity, with a particular family being caught up in the tension between honoring the old ways and knowing when to abandon them as unworkable and choked off. Toure's direction is exceedingly, winningly generous, refusing to blame any of the characters for latching onto the worldview that seems right to them, and presenting the frayed attitudes of the townspeople with observational warmth that feels apart from the community but also speaks to a great comfort and familiarity with them, or real-world people like them. The overall effect is much too muted to pretend that this is, by any imaginable definition, "essential cinema", but it's insightful, humane work even so. 7/10


THE ENGLISHMAN WHO WENT UP A HILL BUT CAME DOWN A MOUNTAIN (Christopher Monger, UK)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

The title has more of a personality that the film it's attached to. It's your basic genial and utterly generic exercise in letting Hugh Grant do his Hugh Grant thing against a backdrop of Colorful British Eccentrics, a form that was just about to launch into the stratosphere. Visiting a Welsh village in 1917, an English surveyor declares to the zany locals that their beloved "mountain" is in fact just a 984-foot-high hill, leading them to enact a plan to... well, I can't hardly spoil the movie any more than it already has. As the leader of the indignant Welsh, Colm Meaney (who is Irish, we are compelled to point out) provides a much needed dose of live-wire prickliness, and I admire the dry irony of the bedtime story narrative framework, but that's pretty much all that the movie can claim for itself. Removed from that early moment when he as still just a new transatlantic curio, Grant's bumbling and stuttering has lost most of its charm, but there are worse examples of the form. 6/10

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CANNES 1995: DAY 10

About the project

UNDERGROUND (Emir Kusturica, France/Germany/Bulgaria/Czech Republic/Hungary/Serbia)
Screened in the main competition

The Palme d'Or winner, and it's easy to see why: the film's study of war's effect on the 20th Century is spiked with humor, black as the heart of a collapsed sun, that repeatedly knocks it around the head with a psychotic carnivalesque flair. Everything from its use of music (which is pure genius) to its frequently inexplicable blasts of almost surreal touches in the characters and mise en scène make it the one film in competition that truly feels like nothing else. On the downside, the film is not short - the easiest version to find is 164 minutes, a half-hour shorter than the Cannes cut - and it tends to repeat its points enough that even the whiplash swings from one tonal register to the next aren't enough to keep it from feeling bloated. I also feel like my knowledge of Balkan politics makes it hard for me to honestly judge it (it was the locus of enormous controversy at home). But misgivings aside, this is a deliriously watchable movie, sober topic and all. 9/10


ED WOOD (Tim Burton, USA)
Screened in the main competition

A tribute to one of cinema's most disastrously inept oddballs from one of its most successful, and one of the two possible correct answers to the question, "What's Tim Burton's best movie?" An unrestrained love for old movies and the gaudiest kitsch of the '50s permeates every set, performance, and note of Howard Shore's superlative score, leaving it less a straightforward biopic of the notorious low-budget director Edward D. Wood, Jr, than an inside-out journey through his dementedly sunny worldview - the movie about Ed Wood that Ed Wood would have made if he had all the talent in the world instead of none whatsoever. It's also a bittersweet reminder of the days when Johnny Depp's quirky excesses served to finding shockingly real character truths, and when he and Burton fed off of each other's creativity rather than indulged each other's laziness. Energetically and stylistically, it's one of the most flippant and giddy entries in its genre, but its dopey frivolity is the very reason it's more honest and insightful than damn near all of them. 10/10


THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD (Gary Fleder, USA)
Screened in Un Certain Regardx

An especially pure early example of that most quintessentially '90s cinema, the Bald-Faced Tarantino Knock-Off. Interesting primarily in that it possesses what might be the single most sedate performance ever given by Steve Buscemi, this story of five career criminals led by Andy Garcia is marred by forcibly eccentric dialogue and inorganically weird characters, on top of the more obvious shortcoming: the story the film tells simply isn't terribly compelling and outside a few individual scenes, it doesn't have any opinion, either artistic or philosophical, on the events it depicts. Though I do admire Fleder and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg's willingness to let the story develop at its own pace and through its own side channels. Warped title notwithstanding (a lift from Warren Zevon), the film lacks the bent humor of even the most flailing wannabe Tarantino pictures, and it has barely a trace of visual style or filmmaking energy, which not merely permits but practically begs us to notice how little substance it has as a story. Hopelessly bland through and through. 5/10

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CANNES 1995: DAY 9

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THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE (Nicholas Hytner, UK)
Screened in the main competition

Alan Bennett's drily sarcastic screenplay and Nigel Hawthorne's delectable turn as the imperious, then terrified, then deeply confused George III of Great Britain are the clear justifications for a movie that does a great job of exploring the nasty world of 18th Century British politicking, and not such a great job of populating it with characters worthy of it, His Majesty notwithstanding. It meets my cardinal rule for costume dramas, making the period it depicts feel tethered to living human emotions rather than locked away for our stuffy, privileged edification; but Hytner's somewhat choked direction and the largely one-note performances of most of the cast some don't make the humans themselves feel all that lively (very nearly including Helen Mirren, the recipient of a frankly baffling Best Actress citation from the Cannes jury, and I say that as an unrepentant Mirren fanboy). It's thoroughly entertaining, witty, and historically literate in the best way, but nobody who isn't already in the bag for British period pictures will be swayed by this particular example of the form. 7/10


THE CONVENT (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France)
Screened in the main competition

Unconventional, at very least: American professor Michael Padovic (John Malkovich) arrives at a Portuguese monastery so excited to find the documents that will prove his theory that Shakespeare was of Spanish-Jewish descent that he all but abandons his wife Hélène (Catherine Deneuve) while falling for his research assistant Piedade (Leonor Silveira). Alas, but this plays right into the plan of Baltar (Luís Miguel Cintra), the monastery-keeper who also happens to be, probably, the actual embodiment of Satan, and has Faustian pacts lined up for both of the Padovics. I am incapable of being unmoved by any project so unafraid to look completely ridiculous, or one that's so willing to grab right on to the Biggest Possible Themes of good and evil, all the more so when it's being shepherded by a fearless 86-year-old director with nothing to prove. But damn, is it a muddle, with the actors going every which way, the ill-chosen music queues insisting that an Italianate portal-to-hell extravaganza is right around the corner, and far too much obvious coding of its themes. 5/10


DON'T FORGET YOU'RE GOING TO DIE (Xavier Beauvois, France)
Screened in the main competition

This somewhat inexplicable recipient of the Prix du Jury (the festival's third-place award, essentially), is more than anything a routine slice of realist-adjacent European art cinema. That means long, slow shots; a showy lack of clear story development; joyless explicit sex; and a general sense that everything is more or less awful. It is, by all means, a sturdy example of that genre, assuming that genre is your bag, but it's certainly not enough of a stand-out to feel like it earned a Cannes berth at all, let alone an inordinately high-profile prize. The movie is a series of elliptically-linked anecdotes centering around Benoît, a young bisexual man with HIV played, not terribly well, by the director; the script (by a five-member writing team) wins lots of points for refusing to clarify what it can deftly imply, but there comes a point where opacity about the main character's psychology outside of a general background radiation of suicidal ennui feels like an unnecessary wall between the film and the viewer. 7/10


DESPERADO (Robert Rodriguez, USA)
Screened out of competition

It's probably an overreach to suggest that Rodriguez was already starting to go wrong in just his second feature. I do think, however, that for all its eager style and filmmaking brio (it positively oozes "you're going to let me have how much money?" in its conception of the action sequences), those things different between Desperado and El Mariachi, to which it is sequel and remake, are exactly the things that tend be most problematic with the director's films. The desire to make a slick, cool impact in the moment is so intense that he doesn't do much if any work to stitch those moments into a greater whole with its own building momentum and sense of purpose; it's really not much more than a clip reel with an excessively great soundtrack. That said, some of those clips are mighty good, and for every moment that's patently an unnecessary indulgence, there's a better one that's B-movie cartoon zaniness at its freest. That climactic shootout centered on guns built into guitar cases covers a lot of sins... 7/10

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CANNES 1995: DAY 8

About the project

ULYSSES' GAZE (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece/France/Italy)
Screened in the main competition

God bless anybody who can make it through all three hours without their attention faltering at least once. Angelopoulos's immodestly slow-moving cinema of languid shots and low-key performances isn't for everybody, and Ulysses' Gaze is a particularly extreme version of that. It sends Harvey Keitel as Greek-American film director "A" on a mission to find the oldest piece of cinema made in the Balkans, and straight into a heavily symbolic meditation on the oppressive weight of history and violence in that region, in which enormous dismantled statues of Lenin gaze out coldly at the world, and oppressive fog demonstrates the confusion and obscurantism of human perception. Individually, it's made up of almost nothing bu striking images and meaningfully slow moments, but long before the movie was even thinking about ending, I was cowed into submission more than transfixed by the gravity of every moment. Angelopoulos was aghast at receiving "merely" the second place Grand Prix, but even that seems more a nod to the film's important politics than its artistic effectiveness. 6/10


SHANGHAI TRIAD (Zhang Yimour, France/China)
Screened in the main competition

The recipient of a special "Technical Grand Prize", which basically equates to a Best Cinematography award, given to DP Lu Yue, production supervisor Bruno Patin, and color timer Olivier Chiavassa. It's absolutely a film that deserves a cinematography award, too, though it's also the kind of film for which your first thought upon exiting it is, "that definitely deserves something for its cinematography!", if you understand my meaning. Filtering its tale of gangland warfare through the perspective of petulant nightclub singer and gangster's moll (she's played, terrifically, by Gong Li), and then filtering her through the eyes of a teenage boy from the country (Wang Xiaoxiao) who can barely articulate his impressions through all of it, the film has a point-of-view problem, staying at arm's length from its story (which is a bit overly routine) and characters. It's far livelier in its last thirty minutes, when it moves to a rural island and starts to complicate Gong's character, and the beauty carries it through a lot. But this is not one of Zhang's deeper works. 7/10


THE ARSONIST (U-Wei Bin Haji Saari, Malaysia)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

The first-ever Malay film to play in competition at Cannes, and the first I have seen; I wonder if the UCR jury was as blindsided by it as I was. Fluidly moving the very particular milieu of William Faulkner (it's based on his story "Barn Burning") into the very particular milieu of the Javanese immigrant minority in Malaysia, the film is at once a symbolic microcosm of class and ethnic resentment and a transporting family drama. It depicts the thorny relationship between a boy and his sometimes admirable, sometimes beastly father, with actors Khaled Salleh (the father) and Ngasrizal Ngasri (the son) offering up devastating performances based almost entirely in silent reactions and body language - a late moment that finds Ngasri clapping his hands over his ears and scrunching up his face to block out his father's actions ranks among the great images from Cannes '95. The aesthetic is casually naturalistic but with a poetic attention to darkness and color; the social insights are smart as they are quiet. And all in just 67 minutes! 9/10

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CANNES 1995: DAY 7

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THE NEON BIBLE (Terence Davies, UK)
Screened in the main competition

Years later, Davies would confess that he found this, his third feature, a failure whose value was chiefly that without it, he wouldn't have been able to make The House of Mirth. And I am not one to disagree with a gifted filmmaker: it's hard not to regard this as the reigning low point of Davies's otherwise unblemished career. Which isn't the same as dismissing it as totally without its own merits: it's dazzling to look at, recasting the U.S. South of '30s and '40s as a dreamy, theatrical space, full of impenetrable black backdrops against which the characters move as haunting abstractions of human behavior. The proportion of gorgeous, heavily thought-out shots that burn into the brain is high with this one. But that cuts both ways: the stagey stylisation robs all the humanity out of an already whispery scenario, leaving even as reliable an actor as Gena Rowland unable to make any real impression. It's not unmemorable, but it's chilly as hell, to its extreme detriment as a memoir. 6/10


NASTY LOVE (Mario Martone, Italy)
Screened in the main competition

The film has the misfortune to peak in its first ten minutes, a freewheeling introduction to the characters and the film's overriding theme of weird sexuality that's so vigorous in its lack of clear connective tissue between thoughts that it borders on surrealism. But even if it grows somewhat less evocatively deranged as it moves along, and its climactic reveals have a certain "ho-hum, people are depraved the world over" feeling, it's always a pretty unique, even oddball trek through the realms of bleak family drama and increasingly unresolved murder mystery. Anna Bonaiuto does fine work as the daughter soldiering her way through half-formed clues and a host of insistently unhelpful rogues to find out what chain of events led to her mother ending up dead on a beach; it's thanks almost solely to her flintiness that the film is able to land its final declarations about the ways that hurt begets hurt and ancient sins can keep battering us in the present. A giddy blast of offbeat bleakness through and through. 8/10


RUDE (Clement Virgo, Canada)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

A watershed moment in the Canadian film industry: the first feature made by an entirely black crew and with a mostly black cast. It's the kind of film that makes one feel tremendously bad to dislike it, especially since a defense of many of its seeming deficiencies can be sketched directly from its outsider perspective: the film is literally finding different ways of looking at its subjects from the norm. But that only excuses the awkward shots and shabby mise en scène up to a point, and it doesn't include the stilted performances of underwritten characters at all. There are highlights, chief among them the lacerating, sexually aggressive performance of Sharon Lewis as the pirate radio operator of the title, and one of the film's three plotlines - a newly-released convict trying to find a way back to his son's life - is as piercing and well-observed as the other two are generic and underfelt. Mostly, though, this is a well-meant amateur misfire, the kind larded up with irritatingly fussy shots and dopey symbolic lions. 6/10


KISS OF DEATH (Barbet Schroeder, USA)
Screened out of competition

The obvious question is "what on God's earth led to a David Caruso crime thriller getting a Cannes slot?", it seeming from all the ingredients that this had to be nothing whatsoever other than a generic mid-'90s gangster movie. Which it kind of is, and it's no wonder based on all the evidence here that Caruso's leading man career was snuffed out almost before it started (I still have not seen Jade, the movie that delivered the killing blow). He's simply too generic an actor to support the largely run-of-the-mill moral and psychological questions posed by the script, though Schroeder makes good use of his off-kilter looks. What actually saves the film - almost - are the fascinatingly bizarre supporting characters played by Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Rapaport, Stanley Tucci, Kathryn Erbe, and especially a blustering, mad Nicholas Cage. It feels like dropping a vanilla everyman into a cage of cartoon zoo animals, and damned if it doesn't give the film a tension that manages to justify its existence in an overpopulated genre. 6/10


SAFE (Todd Haynes, UK/USA)
Screened in Directors' Fortnight

Nothing less than one of the key English-language films of the 1990s. Its dissection of material society, spirituality, self-definition, and the dis-empowerment of women at first looks barbarically simple in its "allergic to the environment" metaphor, only becoming more fluid, nuanced, and unnervingly applicable to seemingly every aspect of modern life as you try to reduce it to its essentials. Every frame of Alex Nepomniaschy's cinematography could be cut out and hung on the wall, as he and Haynes present David Bomba's ingenious, deceptively naturalistic production design in ominously squared-off images that present the script's suggestion of contemporary life as a house of untraceable horrors with an intuitive precision far beyond words. In the center of this miraculously cryptic and blunt story, Julianne Moore gives the best performance of a legendary career as vivid blank slate, a collection of impressions and responses seeking a center around which to coalesce. So brilliant that it must be difficult and dense, yet so keenly cinematic in its singular aesthetic that watching it is a totally intuitive experience. 10/10

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CANNES 1995: DAY 6

About the project

LAND AND FREEDOM (Ken Loach, UK/Spain/Germany/Italy/France)
Screened in the main competition

Solid historical agitprop, examining with a fair degree of evenhandedness the political aspects of the left-wing resistance to Franco's regime in the '30s, as experienced by a young man from Liverpool driven by the idea of international solidarity to fight with the Republicans. It's clearly a subject close to Loach and screenwriter Jim Allen's hearts, presented with clarity and sophistication, though the attempts to mix political history and personal drama are inconclusive: the character-driven elements have a tendency to feel sticky and artificial. Loach's later The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which finally netted him a Palme d'Or after several at-bats (Land and Silence was his fourth film in the main competition) is much sturdier as a history lesson and a work of narrative cinema. That said, Land and Freedom is hard to fault on its own terms, with the director's customary arch-realism serving to keep the story hard and focused, give or take a syrupy rendition of "The Internationale". A pity, too. about the totally unnecessary modern-day frame narrative, but we can't have everything. 8/10


GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Japan/Taiwan)
Screened in the main competition

A hair shy of Hou's top tier, in my opinion; it has a rough time drawing links between its biopic of Chiang Bi-Yu, a Taiwanese resistance fighter against the Japanese in the 1940s, and the story of Liang Ching, an actress trying to muddle through life and deal with an odd stalker while she prepares to play Chiang in a movie. But each half is equally brilliant on its own terms, with the director's typical long takes and slow development reaching some particularly strong crescendos including a scene at a karaoke bar that's one of the director's most striking moments. As both female leads, Annie Shizuka Inoh is tremendous, juggling two entirely different and equally challenging sets of emotional demands so effectively that it almost doesn't register that we're ultimately watching the same woman. The director's heavily formal minimalism is somewhat impenetrable for a non-fan, and stonily refuses to tell you what to think about it; but for what it's worth, this was one of the movies that made me a Hou fan to begin with. 9/10


KIDS (Larry Clark, USA)
Screened in the main competition

Empty-headed provocation that lingers pruriently over the naughty behavior of its teenage cast while acting shocked at their sordidness and mourning the broken-down world that encourages their excess. Clark and 19-year-old screenwriter Harmony Korine present this in the clucking tones of a Reefer Madness-style cautionary tale, as though the audience they claimed to be targeting would have any use for a virtually plotless slice-of-life drama destined for the art house circuit. But its lapses of taste and, arguably, morality aren't nearly as aggravating as its demented, off-putting artlessness; this is a preposterously ugly film, attempting to paper over its repellent cinematography under the banner of vérité-inflected rawness and urban grit. The effect doesn't have the ring of physically present truth, though, just the aimless, grainy camerawork of amateur-hour theatrics. The overworked, unnatural performances complete the package; first-timer Rosario Dawson is the solitary bright spot on either side of the camera. Whatever interest this might have once possessed evaporated along with its controversial moment in the sun. 3/10


HELLO CINEMA (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

Elsewhere in this grand Cannes event, host Nick Davis praised "Iranian art cinema minus the fussy meta-levels". I understand why somebody would frame an argument that way, but my long-term readers know that fussy meta-levels are my favorite kind. Which is why this defiantly unclassifiable movie about making movies about movies in pre-production hits me right in the gut. Makhmalbaf, as himself, is casting for a movie celebrating the centennial of motion picture exhibition; something like a riot breaks out when he can't handle the number of applicants who show up. It's cinema stripped down to its barest elements: actors in a single featureless room feeling emotions and playing characters, and for that alone I'd greatly admire it as an experiment. It declares itself a work of genius because of who and what those characters and emotions are, becoming a tribute to individuals deprived a loud voice in the broad artistic and cultural discourse seeing (or not seeing) stories like their own onscreen, and absorbing (or not absorbing) more dominant strains of pop culture. 9/10

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CANNES 1995: DAY 5

About the project

CARRINGTON (Christopher Hampton, UK/France)
Screened in the main competition

Hampton's directorial debut, a passion project he created with the leverage provided in part from the massive success of Dangerous Liaisons in 1988, definitely doesn't hide the fact that it's you know, a debut. Denis Lenoir's camera rarely does anything surprising, and while Hampton's bright pace and dashed-off tone are utterly beguiling (all the better to bite us on the ass in the endgame), the direction generally seems besotted with the screenplay and eager to foreground it at every opportunity. Where he lucked out but good was in securing Emma Thompson as the titular painter and Jonathan Pryce as her older homosexual boyfriend, both of them providing effortless performances that flit between classic theatricality and naturalism, giving the whole film a boost of spirited energy and plumbing the mysterious ways of romance and sexual desire with a delicate insight that even Hampton's literate, crisply-constructed screenplay hasn't come up with. Its unprecedented "official fourth place" prize is maybe a bit overstated, but this is rich and human without being showy, infinitely fresher and freer and truer than a pre-WWII 20th Century biopic has any reason to be. 8/10


BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA (Marion Hänsel, Belgium/France/UK)
Screened in the main competition

A drama about a sad sailor and a wise-beyond-her-years little girl who gives him a sardonic window in the life of the Hong Kong poor. To its credit, its austerity makes it less hokey and twinkly than it sounds from that description, but this is pretty far from sophisticated filmmaking. Hänsel makes no points delicately when they can be hammered home, whether it's the literalisation of metaphors, or close-ups to clarify that the characters feel feelings, or the shameless use of kittens and babies as ironic counterpoints. Now, it helps a lot that the kittens and babies are adorable; and as the girl, amateur Ling Chu has a knowing world-weariness which helps situate the film's tone in a more secure place than the writing or directing. But casting Stephen Rea as a Greek-Irish man with Chinese ancestors, and then requiring him to play every scene like he just found out his whole family died in a plane crash undoes all of that. When people talk shit about Very Serious Art Films, this is exactly why. 5/10


The main competition film STORIES FROM THE KRONEN, directed by Montxo Armendáriz, is not currently available in an English-friendly form

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CANNES 1995: DAY 4

About the project

JEFFERSON IN PARIS (James Ivory, France/USA)
Screened in the main competition

The first James Ivory/Ismail Merchant/Ruth Prawer Jhabvala joint after the pinnacle achievements Howards End and The Remains of the Day is nowhere near their equal. Jhabvala's screenplay suffers from some jarring attempts at slave vernacular, particularly in the massively unnecessary framework narrative. And it's obnoxious for a movie whose primary theme is that the Great White Men of history could be led by their maleness and their whiteness into morally dubious dead ends to show such little interest in the inner lives of anyone who isn't Thomas Jefferson himself. But it's not half-bad, even so: this was Merchant Ivory near its peak ability to recreate long-gone European culture as a living thing without needlessly modernising it, and the period trappings are totally absorbing. Better yet, the seemingly miscast Nick Nolte is a fine Jefferson, articulate and dignified even as he's increasingly wracked by the gap between his place in history and his limitations as a human being. It is, however, at its worst when it's at its most socially conscious, which feels exactly wrong. 5/10


LISBON STORY (Wim Wenders, Germany/Portugal)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

Pridefully straddling the line between “way too damn pretentious” and “just the exact right amount of pretentious”, Wenders’s opaquely self-referential film follows a film sound recordist to Lisbon, where he finds a director has gone missing, leaving behind a series of fragments that begin to coalesce into a project as he finds more of them. Though a project describing what, exactly, is hard to say. Lisbon Story is something of a misnomer; a giddy valentine to Lisbon’s architecture, street layout, and music scene it certainly is, but a “story”, not quite as much. Rather, it’s a formal self-examination of how sound and image communicate in cinema, particularly as it pertains to music being used as a free way to score some emotional points; and also of the way that all movies are made out of disconnected pieces collected without the participants being able to tell what’s going on. It’s not always successful, but it’s boundlessly ambitious. If that sounds too heavy, it’s also a gorgeous travelogue that makes Lisbon as visually enticing as any European city in modern cinema. 9/10


TO DIE FOR (Gus Van Sant, USA/UK)
Screened out of competition

Two decades later, the revelatory central performance - ohmigod, the model-gorgeous Nicole Kidman, trophy wife of Tom Cruise, can act???!!! - isn't remotely as revelatory, which does harm the project's overall sense of cutting insight. Even in 1995, the idea that people would do anything to be famous on TV, up to and including inventing their entire personality and arranging the murders of those close to them, wasn't exactly fresh, and while Kidman's brightly acidic comic turn makes that message feel a bit sprier and nastier than it might, we've seen her do many better things since. That all being said, it's still nice to see a black comedy that pulls so few punches, and the saucy, heavily ironic structure, with its reiteration of the primacy of television news as a sacred totem even for the people most actively damaged by it, adds a layer of smart cruelty. It is, at any rate, still the most satisfying of Van Sant's studio pictures, sacrificing neither a sense of genre experimentation nor intelligently applied style. 7/10


3 STEPS TO HEAVEN (Constantine Giannaris, UK)
Screened in Directors' Fortnight

"The made-for-TV erotic thriller that played Cannes" is one of those phrases that you don't expect to have to whip out, but here we are, with one of the 1995-est movies ever. Suzanne (Katrin Cartlidge) is convinced that her boyfriend Sean has been murdered, and she dons a series of disguises to track down the individuals who were with him the night he died. Often enough that it would feel disingenuous not to mention it, we see large portions of her nude body. There's certainly all the tackiness you'd expect from this mix of ingredients, though the filmmakers put some discernible effort into blasting the scenario apart through an application of erratic, curiously effective style: time-lapse and speed-ramping, startling camera angles, and the representation of the protagonist's mind as a découpage-like spread of photographs. None of this overcompensating makes the film less tawdry (or bizarrely gay-baiting), and Cartlidge is a black hole where the film needs a heart, or at least a brain. But the snappy energy keeps it from being an absolute bore. 5/10


The main competition film THE SNAILS' SENATOR, directed by Mircea Daneliuc, is not currently available in an English-friendly form

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CANNES 1995: DAY 3

About the project

BEYOND RANGOON (John Boorman, UK/USA)
Screened in the main competition

Hypnotically clumsy editing and a lead performance that finds Patricia Arquette looking as glazed as a porcelain cat are the most overt problems with this message movie about the 1988 democratic uprisings in Burma. Its particularly galling embrace of the "this story about third-world suffering matters because it affected a white American" trope is another. The most troubling, though, might be the way that Boorman and his cinematographer John Seale, giving unchecked rein to his love of picturesque landscapes, are so busy making the war torn cities and jungles of Burma look like full-page spreads in a travel magazine that they forget to pay sufficient tribute to their dramatic scenario or the real-life torments that inspired it. It's hard to completely dismiss any film that had the real-world political impact of this one (it forced the Myanmar government to release a high-profile political prisoner), but it would be dishonest to let that be a reason to ignore the pile-up of things going severely wrong in the directing, the scoring, the writing, and the acting. 3/10


ANGELS & INSECTS (Philip Haas, USA/UK)
Screened in the main competition

The central organising metaphor does, admittedly, start to get a bit overly precious as it moves along: the upstairs and downstairs of a 19th Century English country household contrasted (usually unfavorably) with various insects and other small invertebrate creatures that skitter and crawl. But everything outside of its unfortunate tendency towards overplaying its symbolism is absolutely terrific, from the way that the screenplay by Haas and his wife Belinda, adapting an A.S. Byatt novella, uses the characters' fascination with the newly in-vogue science of taxonomy as a cue to treat them with similarly divorced intellectualism, to the exquisite use of color in Bernard Zitzermann's cinematography and Paul Brown's deservedly Oscar-nominated costumes. And yet for all its icy formalism, a ragged, sometimes ugly humanity forces its way up to the fore, as the film depicts the various stages of sexual desire in a repressive culture with sympathy and unblinking fleshiness. Kristin Scott Thomas triumphs in a role that saves all of its depth and shading for a powerhouse final 30 minutes. 8/10


SHADOWS OF THE RAINBOW (Sushant Misra, India)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

A mirage-like study of gender roles and social order in a town deep into urbanisation, presented with long stretches of almost total silence in which we do nothing but watch as the characters move through their actions quietly and purposefully. Misra and cinematographer Jugal Debata never run out of new ways to present their locations with an overdose of physical texture, evocative camera movement in three-dimensional space, and a hard contrast between the two main settings: an old family villa that resembles an ancient ruin, and the streets of a burgeoning suburb. Everything down to the movement of clothes across the actors' bodies adds to the sense of presence and reality, communicated through poetic images that lend it the diffusion of an impressionistic painting. It's haunting and gorgeously crafted; the one real problem, if you'll forgive this laziest of all critical cop-outs, is that it's kind of boring. There's a point at which elusiveness and ellipses threaten to slide off the screen entirely, and I wouldn't blame any viewer for thinking this film passes that point. 8/10


UNSTRUNG HEROES (Diane Keaton, USA)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

A story of the fluidity of mid-century Jewish-American identity that finds Diane Keaton directing Andie MacDowell in the top-billed role: but I promise, it's not nearly as terrible as it has every reason to be. For one thing, John Turturro's presence makes everything better, and this film finds him in especially good form as the panicked husband to MacDowell's cancer-struck mother. For another, Keaton shows a superlative gift for directing children, bringing 11-year-old Nathan Watt to a place of surprising tetchiness and frantic internal turmoil. For a third, Thomas Newman's score is fanciful and off-kilter in some vivid and unpredictable ways giving a sense of sharp weirdness to a script that keeps fighting a losing battle with just plain kookiness. Taken as a whole, it's a little bit too cloyingly Rockwellian in its overdetermined emotions, it suffers from stiff directorial choices throughout, and it fights hard for a sense of childlike naïveté that's mostly just embarrassing. But there's enough going right that it's not possible to discard it outright. 6/10


THE USUAL SUSPECTS (Bryan Singer, USA/Germany)
Screened out of competition

The film that made game-changing twist endings the flashiest trick of movies from every genre in the mid-'90s and for years beyond, and... and that's just the thing. And what? Screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie's chronological hopscotching showcases an admirable degree of difficulty executed with flair, but even in the moment of watching it, I've never managed to convince myself that structural card tricks are enough to cover for how much the meat of the film is a generic post-Tarantino crime picture that thinks it knows more about film noir than is the case. Singer and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel know how to put an interesting angle in to keep the thing from ever getting visually stale, and there's some terrific lighting in the night scenes, but the style openly serves as a calling card, and there's no real substance to anything outside of Bencio Del Toro and Kevin Spacey's top-notch performances. Frankly, the best thing about it is that it won Singer a chance to make X-Men. 6/10

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CANNES 1995: DAY 2

About the project

SHARAKU (Shinoda Masahiro, Japan)
Screened in the main competition

The first hour is the best part of this unconventional "what if" biopic about an artist whose identity has never been uncovered. For during that time, the film's slippery approach to its subject leaves it less a straightforward story of Tonbo (Sanada Hiroyuki, marvelously precise in his creation of an elusive, retiring personalty), the crippled actor who'd become the great caricaturist Sharaku, and more of a fantasia on the way society appreciates or fails to appreciate art as it changes, stagnates, challenges, and titillates. The flow of scenes at times feels like a dream set in Tokugawa-era Japan with Jazz-age orchestrations providing the ragged spine for a series of impressions that only vaguely imply a plot. It's heady, clever stuff, which does somewhat disappointingly turn towards conventional artist biopic beats - the triumphant creation of the biggest hits, the angry admiration of the rival. It's a good, surprisingly funny version of the genre, mind you, and its heights are so uniquely special that the film as a whole benefits from their aura. 8/10


GEORGIA (Ulu Grosbard, USA/France)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

A tale of two sisters, the mercurial wannabe rocker Sadie Flood, and the talented folk singer Georgia, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham as the best matched set of female performances in American cinema of the 1990s. The film doesn't slot into easy codes of sibling rivalry or reconciliation; it's a prickly and at times unforgiving depiction of how families are supportive, antagonistic, and undermining. Written by Leigh's mother Barbara Turner, it's a deep plunge into the kind of specificity that comes from people who are totally comfortable together helping each other into ever richer states of emotional expression, typified by the shockingly intimate, utterly present song performances leveraged by Grosbard into the film's most powerful moments. This is neither generically nor aesthetically my type of movie, so my great affection for it it is all the more testament to its strength and truth. Dismayingly unknown among anybody but the self-selecting audience that seeks out Best Supporting Actress nominees, and Leigh's inability to swing a Lead nod alongside Winningham is a black mark on the Academy. 8/10


The main competition film WAATI, directed by Souleymane Cissé, is not currently available in an English-friendly form

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CHILDHOOD DREAMS

A review requested by Vianney B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. This was the opening film of the 48th Cannes International Film Festival, on 17 May, 1995 - more on the 1995 Cannes Festival project.

The two biggest problems with 1995's The City of Lost Children are that Delicatessen came out before it, and Amélie came out after it. And I concede that this is the least-fair way to go about the business of film criticism, but it's still hard to shake the sense that everything the film does well - and it does many things well - other films by the members of its directing team also do, as well or better (it's also heavily indebted to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but if we're going to start shitting on all the movies that crib from Brazil, we might as well not even bother having movies with production design).

The film is the second and last movie directed by Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, before the lure of Hollywood's Alien: Resurrection drew Jeunet to America and broke up the team (though Caro did help with the visual design of that film). And while the thinness of animator & comic book artist Caro's film career in the 20 years since leads a lot of us into the habit of acting like there's a straight line between this and the rest of Jeunet's career, that's a mistake, particularly in this case. There's a profound tonal difference between Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children on the one hand, and everything Jeunet made by himself on the other. A kind of nightmare veneer covers the first two, not in the sense that the films are horrifying or disturbing, but that they present places which feel mean and dangerous in ways that can be neither predicted nor redirected. While Jeunet's solo work is more boisterous, carnivalesque, and sentimental; even his Alien film is more chipper and upbeat than Delicatessen, a pitch black comedy about cannibalism, or City of Lost Children, a movie about a child kidnapping ring whose plot leaps around in such arbitrary bursts that it comes close to Surrealism, the aggressive sort where we're meant to be in a constant state of mental disarray while we're watching it.

What can never be said is that it's not exactly the film that Caro and Jeunet intended for it to be, or at least so I assume. There are no moments in The City of Lost Children that feel accidental, and the film's mise en scène is so hermetically sealed off that every single thing we see onscreen has to be regarded as a deliberate choice. The result is a movie that is first and foremost an exercise in design. Not just the production design, by Caro and Jean Rabasse, though it is impossible to see the movie and not first notice this; nor the character design, and it does seem that "character design" is the more correct term to use than "costumes and makeup", given how much the film starts from the ground and goes up in making its human figures feel like extensions of the world they inhabit, with Jean-Paul Gaultier's striking costumes defining the shape of the wearers as line objects, growing out of the lines of the set design and erupting in the comic grotesques of the faces of all the characters in the story. I swear it's not just knowing Caro's background in cartooning that leads me to suggest that The City of Lost Children resembles French comics come to life; not the soft, kid-friendly kind like Asterix, but the more graphically sleek and otherworldly sort drawn by artists like Moebius.

It's this sense, that the film has been assembled according to the principles of graphic art rather than movie directing, that most sets The City of Lost Children apart from all the movies I started off by comparing it to, and makes it a genuinely important film to hunt out and watch. It feels like concept art come to life, in way that's arresting and genuinely exciting to look at. But you'll notice that other than the phrase"kidnapping ring", I haven't said a word about the plot, and other than vague handwaving about the way it subscribes the narrative logic of a nightmare, nothing about the way it feels. Which is exactly "the problem", though I don't know that the movie labors on believing that this is something it's doing wrong. Still, it's the reason that I prefer Delicatessen, with its clear command of tone throughout, and its straightforward narrative development, or Amélie, which in some ways is just as self-contained as The City of Lost Children, but is light and sweet-natured enough that it doesn't seem so locked away from us as viewers. There's a story here, written by the directors & Gilles Adrien, and it's even a bit of a complicated one that's interesting to follow with, even though it doesn't really make sense until the last thirty minutes or so start to provide the whys behind all these weird beings we've been following. The approximate shape of it is that there's an oil rig outside of a port town, and on this rig lives Krank (Daniel Emilfork), a balding mad scientist who's all lab coat and gangly limbs, the little woman Mlle. Bismuth (Mireille Mossé), six dimwitted clones (all played by Dominique Pinon, who has been in every one of Jeunet's films), and Uncle Irving, a brain in a tank (voiced by Jean-Louis Trintignant). Krank has been kidnappign children from the town to steal their dreams, and one of his latest acquisitions is the adopted brother of One (Ron Perlman, speaking French phonetically), a strongman who sets himself to the task of finding the lost children, aided by the little girl Miette (Judith Vittet), an escapee from a ring of orphan thieves controlled by a cruel pair of conjoined twins (Geneviève Brunet and Odile Mallet).

Straightforward enough, though the way the story develops is so heavily based in innuendo and mysteries that don't pay off for half the running time that it's all much more of a "just go along for the ride" experience than it sounds. It's the kind of film that doesn't make the smallest attempt to win you over to its side; if you aren't immediately grabbed by the demented look of its world, there's nothing in the first ten minutes that's going to convince you to stick with it. And this is by no means a world that tries to be inviting: it's made up suffocatingly close buildings that all feel like they're about to collapse and villains who are queasily bio-mechanical, like the abandoned concepts from a David Cronenberg children's film. Darius Khondji shoots all of it in a patina of mouldering greens that makes even the decayed look of his other 1995 film, Se7en, seem cheery. Now, I happen to find the look of the film utterly captivating, even as I wish that the film attached to that look had a bit more oxygen. If the visuals don't work for the individual, then the whole thing is done: Delicatessen is a better nightmare, even if it's less audaciously visual, and the visceral reactions it provokes are more sustained. Still, there are so many utterly unforgettable images here - the storybook illustration feeling of the sea and the oil rig, the flea's-eye view of the damp alleys of the town, the opening scene in which the clones stage a travesty of Christmas to attempt to cheer up the child they're kidnapping - that I'd still have to urge the movie on everybody I could. It's not always successful at being a thoroughly sui generis demented dreamscape and bedtime story bone dark, but it always tries to be, and that kind of unrestrained commitment is a precious thing.

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