Playing with Fire: The Craziness of the Quinzaine des réalisateurs

By Christoph Huber

“The absurdity of it all,” concludes the seemingly autobiographical protagonist near the end of Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Les anges exterminateurs, which premiered in this year’s Quinzaine des réalisateurs. It’s not only a fitting punch line to Brisseau’s outstanding, off-the-rocker flirt with disaster, but pretty much sums up a feeling very familiar in Cannes this year: while suffering through one of the most underwhelming competitions in recent memory, it was often the Quinzaine films that kept one going. In hindsight, even the three competition films that have left a lasting impact about a week later and continue to grow, albeit in very different ways—Guillermo del Toro’s chef d’oeuvre Pan’s Labyrinth, Pedro Costa’s monumental and mysterious Colossal Youth,and Richard Linklater’s mostly misunderstood (especially by Europeans) Fast Food Nation—would have been much more in tune with the parallel festival’s selection, since they felt similarly alive and curious. It’s telling that, according to the dailies, it worked the other way round, and that one of the most fatally contrived competition entries was poached from Quinzaine to the Official Selection, the tangle securing it the only debutante slot in the Palme d’Or race: Andrea Arnold’s atmospheric but utterly unbelievable Red Road. And still, the Quinzaine offered the only unanimously liked film of the whole fest with Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host, as well as Corneliu Porumboiu’s Romanian Camera d’Or-prized 12:08 East of Bucharest, whose extended central talk show sequence elicited comparably unequivocal agreement, and the section’s surprise FIPRESCI prize winner Bug, a crazy theatrical comeback for William Friedkin. For reasons of demented scheduling and work obligations, I managed to miss all three (plus Julia Loktev’s suicide bomber film Day Night Day Night, which also drew positive responses), but that still leaves me with five other Quinzaine features I’d gladly exchange for the entire competition, save the three mentioned above.

The first crazy Quinzaine sighting was reported the morning after the parallel fest’s opening. Just as the view of a field of windmills near La Mancha in Pedro Almodóvar’s innocuous perfume piece Volver conjured misguided references in hundreds of critics’ minds in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the real UFO of recent Spanish filmmaking—and an actual Cervantes adaptation to boot—crashed in the Quinzaine’s ever-smelly Noga Hilton. “Chivalry is the reasoning of action,” may be the very last of the very few insights Don Quixote shares with his Sancho Panza in Albert Serra’s flabbergasting first feature, Honor de Cavalleria, but it’s also a motto for this strange film, a detached meta-re-reading of Cervantes’ novel executed in a starkly materialist manner: basically, it’s just an observation of two figures in a changing landscape. Which already indicates how the whole enterprise is a marvel of staggering paradoxes: Serra’s interpretation of one of literature’s most verbose masterpieces is near-wordless, and its wilful eccentricity is clearly at odds with its unwaveringly serene tone. Moreover, its radical reliance on its two main actors and the Catalan countryside is offset to a certain degree by its being shot with two DV cameras. (The visuals are beautifully composed and the landscapes, especially the skies, are often dramatically charged, but film-stock purists will wait in vain for celluloid-space epiphanies similar to Apichatpong’s jungle fever or Benning’s concentrated contemplation.)

There is an air of a rarefied stunt haunting the proceedings, maybe amplified by the press notes, which not only state that “Honor de Cavalleria is an aesthetic and conceptual synthesis of the most pure influences (including Lancelot de Lac, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, The Flowers of St. Francis, Ozu, Sokurov), the innovative, eccentric cinema of the ‘60s (Paradjanov, Godard) and the personal mythology of the author,” but also point out that apart from using deliberately unpopular scenes from the novel which “are short and marginal to the plot, but very powerful poetically,” other sequences are freely adapted from Chrétien de Troyes, the Cervantes-presaging, old-Catalan chevalier classic Tirant lo blanc, and historical studies of chivalry by Martí de Riquer. I can make sense of the cinematic references—especially the similarity to Ozu’s strategy of accumulating seemingly mundane moments to powerful effect—but will admit frankly that the literary ambitions sailed past me. Still, one has to love the press leaflet’s declaration that “no man-made construction appears in the film,” while similarly irresistible achievements ultimately ground Serra’s work, despite all lofty audacity, as an “adventure of a narration (and not the narration of an adventure).”

Most palpable is the depth of feeling supplied by the two nonprofessional leads, who fit the popular conception of Cervantes’ characters, but also imbue them with a rare, otherworldly depth. Lluís Carbó, ever so slightly crazed and unkempt in appearance as a wildly white-maned Quixote, comes across as simultaneously hyper-alert and deeply immersed, whereas Lluís Serrat is the sublimest of Sanchos and the most pensive of Panzas, indelibly capturing the corpulent squire’s stridently akinetic but unquestioningly deep devotion. Their warm interplay injects genuine emotion into Serra’s heady contraption (even before a lovely guitar piece is pulled out in the final reel for an unexpected extra-diegetic boost), rendering it legible as an original and modern visualization of Quixote’s attempts to bridge the gap between reality and idealistic illusions. The growing friendship between the two anti-heroes serves as affectionate heartbeat. The first ten minutes or so describe Sancho’s dedicated search for a laurel crown per his master’s advice, but not far past midpoint, after some more sparse debate on chivalry (which, Quixote shares, “is civilization”), and other matters spiritual as well as practical, the knight declares: “I love you, Sancho. God loves you.” Only a stone could remain unmoved, and it exemplifies Serra’s profound employment of minimal reasoning for maximum effect.

Equally minimalist, mute, and modern—not to mention meta—Lisandro Alonso’s hour-long Fantasma warranted a Quinzaine Séance spéciale. Clearly an in-between-films-project (and easily dismissed as such by some), it nevertheless shows the auteur of La libertad (2001) and Los muertos (2004) moving on, albeit in a curiously hermetic way: Antonio Vargas, nonprofessional ex-con protagonist of Los muertos makes his rounds though a labyrinthine Buenos Aires cinema to a screening of that feature, while Misael Saavendra, nonprofessional woodcutter protagonist of La libertad, gets completely lost. The cinema is on the tenth floor of the sprawling multi-functional art complex Teatro San Martin (well-known to attendees of the Buenos Aires Film Festival), which has innumerable possibilities for detour—and which Alonso dutifully explores. Framed with the same preternatural precision as his previous works, Alonso’s new film literally celebrates cinema (and its adjacent territory) as a place of mystery and boredom, and the complaints that it leans towards the latter ignore that there’s plenty of wacky yet deep humour in its seemingly stick-straight execution. (The most priceless bit comes when Vargas, after the screening’s other viewer inquires how he liked it, comments that he very much enjoyed “entertaining and watching myself.”) Even if it were only an homage to Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), Fantasma is completely stripped of that film’s sentimental nostalgia. What’s more, it moves beyond the rural settings of Alonso’s previous films, putting two archaic figures (neither of whom have ever before entered a movie theatre) into archetypical modern architecture. The resulting alienation is familiar to a certain degree (the soundtrack, awed even by toilet flushes, is especially meticulous in its plodding process of discovery), but new as well, if extraneous layers of reflection compensate: to what extent does Fantasma qualify as a comment on the situation of (Argentine) cinema and its audience?

Brisseau’s Les anges exterminateurs, on the other hand, couldn’t seem much clearer. Despite a rapturous viewing experience, I was at first somewhat let down, as the film seemed to amount to little more than an apology for the “Brisseau affair” of 2003, when the director was charged with sexual harassment by actresses he ultimately didn’t cast for his previous nudity-filled wallow in sex and power relations, the masterpiece Choses secrètes. The new film follows an obvious Brisseau-stand-in, 50-ish director François (Frédéric Van Den Driessche), as he proceeds with the trademarked Brisseau method of “exploring taboos and pleasure” by looking for hot young girls willing to disrobe and arouse themselves and each other for his camera (and naturally, in order to determine whether they’re suited, at first just for him); similar legal results ensue. Only afterwards did I find out that Brisseau has insisted that he wrote the script before the charges were laid (and can prove he shot the film before his trial in autumn 2005). There’s still no mistaking this for anything but blatant self-justification, but the knowledge illuminates the brutal, self-mocking honesty at the core of Brisseau’s filmmaking, however sleazy some may find his vision. “An odd mixture of intelligence and foolishness,” somebody comments on alter ego François, and Brisseau’s own Cocteau-like voiceover might serve as further proof, this time gravitating to his cryptic mystical side (other touches in that vein include the murmuring titular black-clad ghosts—more hot young women, of course!—who ultimately decide François’ fate).

The whole film seems designed as a kind of demented multiple-choice test to determine which side of the personality will reign supreme (not just the director’s, but also the viewer’s). A key shot allows one to decide between “foolish” sexual instinct and “intelligent” distance, throwing sex and suspense into the frame: to the left two girls make out enthusiastically in a hotel room with the door deliberately open, while to the right is the empty hotel corridor, where voices draw closer. In a way, Brisseau sets himself up as a modern Don Quixote who is caught in this dilemma himself (and is unfairly judged for it: “I take no pleasure in transgression,” François insists). The amount of compassion for his quandary may vary, but Brisseau’s pronounced and heartfelt comedy of passionate embarrassment is top-notch (pathetic, horny-yet-sincere François can’t wait to come home to his wife after too much girl-group session), ending in a grandiose and ridiculous shot of the director rolling on set in a wheelchair: bruised and beaten, but indefatigable, very much like the knight of La Mancha.

Even the most “normal” of the superior Quinzaine features, Summer ‘04, an excellent Chabrolian study of bourgeois morals by the German Stefan Krohmer (who had previously shown his knack for rich ensemble pieces in 2003’s less elegant They’ve Got Knut), has an ending so unexpected that it disturbed some advocates. Superbly acted, Krohmer’s film meticulously details how the idyllic countryside holiday of a free-spirited pair with a teenaged son goes off the rails when the boy’s accompanying girlfriend, a sensual 12-year-old, starts flirting with an adult ex-pat American; soon enough, the mother’s interest is also piqued. After much ambivalent regrouping, the situation inevitably leads to a death highlighting the equivocal ethics of the characters—yet without so much as a ripple in its smooth style, the film then moves on to a final stunner, whose reverberations are much more primal in their questioning of relationships and responsibility.

Strangely enough, the weirdest film of the entire festival (and my last Quinzaine discovery) serves as a perfect counterpoint. Set against an actual raging brushfire, the finale of Claire Simon’s Ça brûle is half an hour of pure madness, yet makes all the strange things that happened before seem, well, perfectly normal. It’s the story of an unruly 15-year-old girl who compensates for her anger by riding her horse over fences and into other people’s gardens and lives. After falling off one day, she’s put on her feet again by a fireman, with whom she becomes obsessed. After her attempts at seduction prove ineffective, she embarks to the woods for sexual role-playing with other teenagers, then sets the forest on fire to be saved by her white knight. There is something perplexing and inscrutable about Simon’s choices in sketching her protagonist and the world around her. The style and some of the material are clearly rooted in documentary (Simon started in documentary and shot Ça brûle near her hometown), yet this is upset by consciously mythic imagery, which hints at something more universal beneath the carefully captured, alternating high- and low-intensity specifics of this day. To make good on the promise hovering in between the two modes (and the girl’s mind undoubtedly resides in the same elusive territory), it needs a hell of a fire. And when it comes, for once it’s really like a force of nature cutting its way onto the screen.

Articles in this Section

Spotlight: CANNES 2006

A Conspiracy of Dunces
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Playing with Fire: The Craziness of the Quinzaine des réalisateurs
By Christoph Huber

The Wind That Shakes the Barley
By Richard Porton

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