CANNES 2006: Conspiracy of Dunces

By Mark Peranson

“There’s shit in the meat”—Fast Food Nation

“How was Cannes?” For about two weeks after the Fortnight, that’s the question a returning Cannes cavalry soldier receives from whomever he comes in contact with on the homefront. They might as well be asking, “How was the root canal?” Yet all us vets agree that there are certainly worse ways to spend two weeks than watching movies in the south of France. Cannes surely remains essential—an energizing force of movie bulimia, appealing and appalling in equal measure. It is a place where careers are made, elbows are thrown, egos pulverized. It is the place we love to hate, and hate to miss. And it’s never as good as it looks on paper, but that’s why the wars are actually fought.

When in Cannes, the idea of being “in Cannes” occupies too much brainspace. Thus, each film in competition inevitably takes on metaphorical resonance for the traumatic experience of life in wartime. The press is poked and prodded into narrow aisles like cows led to slaughter (Fast Food Nation), stripped naked and held captive in dark rooms with no hope for escape (Buenos Aires 1977) before being pounded into submission (Shortbus). But in this pre-Iran zeitgeist, it’s fitting that war took centre stage, both metaphorically (what is Cannes if not the place where battles of interpretation are won and lost based on the volume of reviews, or the volume of the reviewer’s voice?) and literally—at times, very literally.

War was certainly on the mind of the Wong Kar-wai-helmed jury, but something struck me as sincerely feeble in each of the war films, whether it’s the schematic plotting of Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Rachid Bouchareb’s Algerians-at-war pic, the truly old-school Indigènes, which took a shared prize for acting; or the pat observations of Bruno Dumont’s zeitgeist-pandering Grand Prix winner Flandres, which actually features one character exclaiming, “War is hell.” The relative lack of complexity with which war was dealt with at Cannes reflects on the festival’s own nature. In these films, war is essentially seen as a necessity, part of the human condition, whether its roots are the oppression of the majority by the minority (Loach), or as a philosophical expression of the Nature of Mankind (Dumont). And yes, that was Oliver Stone and the cast of Platoon, looking older but no wiser, jinxing the Southland Tales gala by mugging on the red carpet in honour of a restored screening of their “Cannes Classic.”

War reigned throughout the divisive Competition, whether in the hackneyed idea of the war between the sexes (Climates); the domestic political battleground (The Caiman, Summer Palace, Pan’s Labyrinth); between those who have taste and those who do not (Paolo Sorrentino’s truly offensive The Family Friend, a film that will never again appear in the pages of this magazine). And untold brutalities, too, with the slaughterings of animals a prominent motif, along with voluminous vomiting, crime, murder (of course), and rape (as well as framed rape)—all of which, I’m pretty sure, make an appearance in Southland Tales.

It was one of the festival’s earliest competition (and most underrated) titles, Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, that provided the best shorthand for approaching this year’s festival, especially for a vegetarian. A handy nutritional critical taxonomy can be based on the presence/absence of two specific variables: shit and meat. After six years, a critic learns what not to bother with at eight in the morning, or when a sit-down meal is an option, and Cannes 2006 managed to do a decent job of letting the shit smell for itself; occasionally, the aromas are covered by a fancy press kit, too much caffeine, and nothing else to see. (Goddamn you, Sorrentino.) Thus, I managed to avoid the films from Señor Inarritu (in the words of Stephen Colbert, this man is dead to me), Moretti (likewise), Belvaux, anything French (I mean, French), and the bad Pedro—my cinema has room for only one Pedro.

There was a lot of shit and not enough meat, not just in the Competition, but also in the aptly named Un Certain Regard (nothing even approached Lazarescu-like levels this year) and Hors Competition, whose titles need not be mentioned (they will, however, haunt my dreams). One would do well to bemoan the state of world cinema, but there are three more specific reasons for the general malaise of 2006:

(1) The power of Wild Bunch, now clearly the strongest of French sales agents, and the type of cinema they seek to promote. With seven out of the 20 films in competition unfurling after their sizzling logo, their predominance has reached new levels. These dudes love that “provocative,” “button-pushing” yadda Irreversible yadda Gaspar Noeyadda. (I’m no prude, but one reason why Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth and Aki Kaurismäki’s late-style masterpiece Lights in the Dusk stood out is how little both films have in common with the current cinema du sexe). But money talks: one business story at the end of the festival announced that Wild Bunch had sold titles at the festival totaling between 16 and 18 million dollars. For that, they could make another Southland Tales.

(2) The Cinefondation. Yes, it’s a good idea: support young filmmakers from mainly developing countries, a program surely associated with a general trend in major festivals to appease their colonial guilt (see the Rotterdam Hubert Bals Fund). But in practice this is leading, and will lead, to a lot more first features appearing at Cannes: this year, there were 29 films in competition for the Camera d’Or, ten more than last year. Suffice to say, I would generally rather see a film by Manoel de Oliveira.

(3) Thierry Frémaux and genre cinema. A few years back, after what many saw as the Brown Bunny-spearheaded debacle of Cannes 2003, the calls for Mr. Frémaux’s head were fast and furious. (No wonder he liked Marie Antoinette.) A great sucking up to Hollywood has followed, leading to stuff like The Da Vinci Code, X-Men 3, and whatever Dreamworks animation played this year—and, frankly, that shit doesn’t bother me at all. Where the shift in favour of genre cinema over art cinema makes the difference is in the margins. In 2001, the final competition title screened on Saturday, the spot reserved for the film nobody thinks will win any prizes (unless there’s a Wong Kar-wai film that won’t be done in time), was directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien; in 2006, that slot went to Guillermo del Toro. (And the real capper: Frémaux still managed to turn down Bong Joon-ho’s much-beloved monster movie The Host.)

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“Why make it simple when you can make it complicated?”—Jacques Rivette, quoted by Pedro Costa

But as the saying goes, it only takes a few good men. Frémaux’s two most daring choices were the true stand-outs, and, inevitably, the films at the bottom of all critical polls. One bad review isn’t enough: at Cannes, when the press is united, the effect is akin to carpet-bombing. If, as the Hollywood Reporter supposedly opined halfway through the festival, this year’s competition approximated the sublime 2002 vintage, then this year’s demonlover is surely Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. (I say “supposedly” because I survived the Fortnight without reading this particularly egregious example of Yankee war propaganda.) As universally reviled as a film can get without being directed by Vincent Gallo, Southland Tales, over the course of a week, took on film maudit status, as its few, ardent supporters became more vocal when faced with a storm of insults from a hoi polloi that, not content to pummel a poor director when he’s down, had to knee him and those who dared defend him in the groin for good measure.

A film in which toilets are a primary element of art direction, Southland Tales is sprawling, abrasive, loud, vulgar, and something to behold—in its current form, at least. Here, the shit is the meat: to quote the film, it’s one possible vision of what will happen when the shit hits the fan (after Texas is nuked, when the Apocalypse is triggered by a baby’s fart). There are innumerable interpretations or tentative analyses of Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) follow-up (the amount of films cited is Godardian), but with its crazy names and cuckoo conspiracies, it strikes me as positively Pynchonian performance art—the entire film an approximation of Tyrone Slothrop’s plunge into the crapper in Gravity’s Rainbow, emerging in a semi-fascist, semi-recognizable near-future America. Its obfuscated, noir-tinged narrative style is of the conspiratorial variety beloved of Jacques Rivette (who will surely love this movie: it’s the new Showgirls), with constant double-crosses and shadowy, under-elucidated plots manned by a bevy of oddballs, both government and private. Southland is also a film internet propre, constantly condensing space, zooming about like a hyperactive, pre-Ritalined (silver) surfer: it’s a perpetual motion machine. The way the story is told is inseparable from the content, as the conspiratorial narrative style is an integral element to Kelly’s anti-status quo provocation. Will the kids like it—dunno, don’t care—but, irregardless, why does it all need to make sense? Despite what you may have heard (and are hearing, and will hear), Southland Tales is very much releasable at its current length. Sure, it might drag a bit in the third hour, but what Rivette film doesn’t?

To paraphrase Rivette, Southland Tales says that Los Angeles Belongs to Us. If you want a plot summary, go read Variety, but let me just say that the semi-improvised film has, in no particular order: neo-Marxist revolutionaries led by Nora Dunn; an evil German corporation named Treer (after Lars von?) that has found a way to harness the ocean’s waves as an alternative fuel; The Rock (maybe a few of them); a porn star version of The View (one of a number of vehicles for Sarah Michelle Geller’s Krysta Now to spread out something more than her legs, another being her single “Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime”); half of the cast of Saturday Night Live; Justin Timberlake as a scarred Iraq War vet/drug dealer; and, of course, time travel. Oozing over the viewer like a wave of mutilation from the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic, perhaps young Kelly’s folly cuts too close to the bone: Americans can be touchy, especially when it’s pointed out that they’re currently leaning towards a fascist dictatorship.

It’s also hilarious: my personal favourite moment is in one of the many throwaway gags, a small excerpt of Cheri Oteri’s ludicrous brand of “shout comedy” appearing on one of innumerable television screens, though I could list dozens of other anarchic zingers. Touches like that I’m sure will have vanished from view by the time the film (currently without an American distributor, and being shopped around by…Wild Bunch) shows again in another form. (It was barely finished in time, and screened in a pretty damned great digital projection.) Surely the drastically recut version will reappear in Toronto in September, Brown Bunny-like, and will be roundly fellated. But in this age, where there’s always a director’s edition DVD or two on the horizon, there’s still hope that the full Southland Tales will be seen by more than just an international conspiracy of dunces in a dinky French fishing village.

Equally misunderstood, Pedro Costa’s cryptic Colossal Youth has a similarly Rivettian narrative, with possible unmotivated flashbacks, probable ghosts, and drawn-out scenes that appear improvised (some may be, but considering that Costa rehearsed and re-rehearsed, then shot a total of 320 hours over 15 months, with each scene having as many as 30 takes, I expect that the words were carefully chosen). As opposed to Kelly, Costa lets these scenes play out very much in real time (a style noticeably lacking in most of the rest of the Competition, Ceylan aside). And he doesn’t try to connect them—the film is kind of like a Surrealist assemblage, where the pleasure is found in the coincidences between what appear to be random, unconnected episodes.

Want a plot summary? Don’t look to Variety. Colossal Youth is pretty hard to synopsize: the main character, the 50-ish Ventura, is new to Costa’s studio system. He was the victim of an accident that caused him to retire at an early age with a head injury; as the film begins, his wife Clothilde has left him and destroyed his belongings—maybe. Many of his friends, such as Vanda Duarte (now off the smack and with child), have been relocated from the demolished Fontaínhas neighbourhood to a housing block in Casal Boba, whose antiseptic spaces Costa shoots with ample headroom, deliberately juxtaposed to the remaining, cramped hovels, framed in expressionist angles and appearing like a run-down film set. Ventura, too, needs a new roof over his head, but is concerned that there will not be enough room in his apartment for his children, who, we come to realize, are either numerous or nonexistent. As he encounters them, he hears their deeply personal stories of struggle, and for one, who seeks to communicate with his family back home in Cape Verde, Ventura repeats an eloquent love letter he once wrote, exhorting his illiterate friend to memorize it. The past is in danger, and memory may be all that we have left.

The image, however, is very much present. A luminous glow caused by natural light reflecting from mirrors coats Ventura and his friends, revealing them as otherworldly presences, souls unable to find rest. Ventura’s haunted mien is that of the living dead; the zombies are walking again. The corporeal walkouts at Cannes, highly expected, began en masse during Vanda’s first scene, the camera unmoving in her doll’s house-like bedroom, as she engages Ventura in a seemingly endless conversation about diapers, or something; hacking up half a lung, she becomes trapped in some kind of loop (is it the methadone talking?), and to those not on her (or Costa’s) wavelength, I can easily see how it could be torture, especially on the ninth day of the festival. “That scene is in that place to get everyone out of the theatre who doesn’t want to be there, right?” I asked him. His answer: “Exactly.”

This is so out of the zeitgeist I don’t know where to begin—and defiantly political in a festival that has eschewed truly promoting Costa’s kind of cinema. (Even the Straubs settled for Un Certain Regard with Sicilia!.) Like Kelly, Costa says his film is made for the youth—who, in the film, are represented by Vanda’s young daughter—and it’s true, quite counterintuitively, that most of Costa’s supporters at Cannes turned out to be younger critics. Is the world changing? Maybe one way of looking at Costa’s domestic DV cinema is as a parallel to the worldwide trend of once-daring spectators retreating to the privacy of their own homes to watch films. In Vanda’s horrifyingly white room, the television is always blaring, sometimes Brazilian telenovelas, once, quite amusingly, a nature show—“No more Mr. Crocodile!” she cackles, as an animal (a cinema?) is engorged.

In Colossal Youth, as in In Vanda’s Room, Costa lets us hear the words, but the difference here is that they are clearly well-thought out, rehearsed, highly artistic presentations that are precise, penetrating, and overwhelming. The festival’s highlight occurs when one character, a homeless man named Paolo the Crutch, is in a hospital room for one of many operations on his leg, requiring a scaffold-like device to stand (immediately bringing to mind Ventura’s accident, where he fell from a scaffold). Lying curled up in the corner—the camera, of course, immobile—Paolo delivers an astonishing soliloquy to Ventura that explodes all of the prejudices any viewers might have about the poor, expressing his anguish at being unable to support himself financially (trained as a goldsmith, he’d love to work, but nobody will give him a job). He moves on to a heartbreaking story about the mother who refuses to have anything to do with him. All he wants now is the address of his daughter, who he hasn’t seen in 15 years—Paolo has heard on the streets that he’s a grandfather.

The other mother in this film primarily about fathers is, of course, Vanda, who, if you believe her kvetching, might not make it to the next Contracosta production. At one point Vanda proclaims she’s tired of suffering. Aren’t we all, I felt like yelling back, in what was another Cannes metaphor minute—not at this film, but at everything else that occupied time I could have spent writing, thinking, drinking, sunbathing, taking political action, anything. And the best thing about Cannes is that, despite it all, I take great solace in knowing that I’m not alone. I approached Costa on his way out of his typically eloquent press conference to congratulate him for his achievement, and even managed to get a smile. “So you saw the film already?” he asked, and I nodded. “No shit in there, is there?” No shit indeed.

Fast Food Nation

Articles in this Section

Spotlight: CANNES 2006

A Conspiracy of Dunces
By Mark Peranson

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

The Wind That Shakes the Barley
By Richard Porton

and in the magazine..

Flanders, Climates
By Robert Koehler

Lights in the Dusk
By Steve Gravestock

Shortbus
By Geoff Pevere

Marie-Antoinette
By Rob Nelson