Attending Cannes Film Festival is like watching Mad Max: relentless, breathless, and giddily exhilarating. The festival ended last Sunday, with the French film Dheepan by Jacques Audiard a dark-horse Palme d'Or winner, and it makes sense now to look back at the world's premier cinema showcase after a few days of recuperation from the madness, where things can be put into a better perspective.
First off, the winner. Dheepan is competent, engaging, and addresses a hot-button subject of immigration, assimilation and the spectre of war in various guises, but I don't think it presents any of the audacity or vision that Cannes is supposed to champion — it's not even Audiard's best work (see Read My Lips or Prophet). In the film, Dheepan is a Tamil Tiger militia (played by Jesuthasan Antonythasan, giving the film a rich presence) who fakes his passport and emigrates from war-torn Sri Lanka to France with a woman (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and a teen girl (Claudine Vinasithamby), both posing as his wife and daughter. Resettled in Paris, this artificial family struggles to adjust into a new life in a suburban ghetto populated by gun-toting gang members, and soon finds that they've fled one war only to be smack bang right in the middle of another. The film's proposition that violence is inevitable — even to those who're determined to change their way — comes across not as healthy fatalism, but as half-cooked sentimentalism.
Dheepan is eventually a bland example of what we can induce as a theme from some of the more accomplished films at Cannes this year: a narrative of a country or history through cinematic re-imagination. Contentious of all is the Hungarian film Son Of Saul, which will certainly spark historical, theological and aesthetical debates when this Holocaust thriller rolls out in cinemas around the world (or a festival in Bangkok, hopefully). Technically, I'm impressed by what Laszlo Nemes has done here — Son Of Saul won the Grand Prix, the runner-up prize — though I deeply question his approach and the look-at-me attitude that's impossible to overlook.
A friend puts it well: this is a film that imitates a video game point of view. Saul in the title (Geza Rohrig) is a member of the Sonderkommando, or Jewish prisoners in concentration camps who're forced to help the Nazis in their death industry (for a separate reflection on a Sonderkommandofuhrer, read Martin Amis' novel The Zone Of Interest). In this film, the camera follows Saul very closely; we look at everything from behind his head as the Hungarian Jew wanders the horrifying warren of the gas chambers and the death camps, trying to solve one snag after another in his attempt to find a rabbi to bury a boy he believes to be his son. From the very first shot, the camera uses an extremely shallow focus that blurs everything else in the background, including piles of naked corpses, and forces us to live and breathe with our leading man.
As a thriller, this is tense. As a piece of art that uses a monumental tragedy as a backdrop for a thrilling effect, it is dubious. And while the film uses a visual language that feels striking— its formalism borders on spectacularisation — we can always feel the ghost in the machine: the technical aspect of the film is assertive, almost conspicuous, and we can see all the effort Nemes has poured into the frame. Some have said it is a narcissistic film — I wouldn't go that far, though I see the point why the film is very off-putting to a number of people, despite the praise Son of Saul has elicited from perhaps a larger camp of journalists at the festival. I will leave out the Judaism/Christianity debate regarding Saul's supposed revelation— we'll hear more of that from experts in the following months.
What Son of Saul has evoked, however, reminds us of the importance of a festival like Cannes, where cinema makes its bid to find relevance as art and as social reflection. In Dheepan, that of-the-moment immediacy is explicit. Likewise, and deeply felt, in the French film The Measure Of A Man, from which Vincent Lindon won Best Actor for playing a husband struggling to find work in France's deteriorating economy. But it's in the best two films of the festival that the constant grappling with contemporary anxieties find its luxuriant artistic outlets: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery Of Splendour and Miguel Gomes' Arabian Nights.
We've written extensively about the Thai film, a tender reflection on life, death and dreams under which boils the foreboding undercurrents of present-day Thailand. In Arabian Nights – which is not, as the film proclaims in bold letters at the beginning, an adaptation of Scheherazade's 1,001 tales — Gomes captures Portugal's economic woes through stories of small people, using his mode of offbeat, honest, angry and strangely touching blend of humour, documentary and fantastic tales. Scheherazade herself appears briefly, though the film is about port workers, bird hunters, apartment dwellers, immigrants, a folk bandit, plus a horde of mythical men and women revelling in their decaying empire. In the original Arabian Nights, Scheherazade tells the endless tales for her own survival (she stops, she dies). Here, the ode to survival is for people struggling in the post-austerity blues.
Gomes' film — which is divided into three parts, totalling six-plus hours (still much less than 1,001 nights) — played in Cannes' sidebar, and yet it presents the kind of runaway imagination that has its roots firmly planted in the real word. Like all good stories, this one seems like it could go on for much longer — maybe longer than the transient glory of any empire.
Arabian Nights.
