It may seem like many moons ago, but we still have lots of thoughts about Cannes 2017. Following on from Jo, Jonny and Kenny's takes on this year's festival, our Marketing & Communications Manager, Duncan Carson, shares his experience of the festival and his top 3 films.
This was my first time attending Cannes in its second week,
leaving the hefting
of promotional bags to my esteemed colleagues. The first week – all
anticipation, glamour and jostling to be the one to anoint the first
masterpiece of the festival – lapses
into something altogether different in the latter half of the fortnight. You
collide with friends who have been there since the outset, bewildered that you
have just arrived, that any time or place exists outside the routine of five
screenings a day and a harried baguette between them. Anything that happened
prior to the previous screening is now a remote memory, wiped clean each day like
the Croisette pavement.
This year especially there is a definite fatigue in the air:
those titles that reignite one’s passion and attenuate the relentless
succession of screenings have yet to arrive. It has not been A Good Year, and
as much as watching films and talking about them for a living is a professional
dream and privilege, it has begun to curdle by day nine. I arrive on the
saddest of winds from the UK, with any bridling against Cannes’ ever tightening
security silenced by the horrific bombing in Manchester the night before. While
nothing can remove the feeling of triviality of being in these surroundings
given the circumstances, the Cannes team capture the spirit of why we continue
in the face of this tragedy: ‘Yet another attack on culture, youth and
joyfulness, on our freedom, generosity and tolerance, all things that the
Festival and those who make it possible – the artists, professionals and
spectators – hold dear.’
Having been thinking a good deal about what makes a festival
succeed while working on our Developing Your Film Festival course, this year
only highlighted the unique aspects of Cannes among other festivals. Both
succeeding beyond other festivals' wildest dreams, and also dropping clangers
that would tarnish any other festival’s reputation, Cannes sits alone on its
own shelf. However many obdurate
and infuriating interviews Thierry Fremaux gives, this is still the
beginning of the film year, where careers are made and destroyed. Does that
mean it is beyond question? Absolutely, positively not and there’s been some great
writing and talking
this year that highlights Cannes' many blind spots. All that said, it’s
still a great place to see new films. Here’s my rundown of my three
favourites.
Image: Jeune Femme
After a run of bad screenings, I slouch into Un Certain
Regard contender Jeune Femme (its
ungainly English-language title Montparnasse
– Bienvenue will hopefully be shed by Curzon Artificial Eye when they bring
it to UK audiences). A debut film with a title that promises exactly the kind
of May-September romance that is excruciatingly overfamiliar on the Croisette,
I have to say I’m not expecting much. Yet what follows is a hilarious, humane
and scabrous picture of just the kind of ‘difficult’ woman that cinema is
begging for (the type of character men have been given licence to for decades). Laetitia
Dosch’s Paula is first seen shouting through her estranged lover’s door before
knocking herself unconscious trying to headbutt her way through it. This proves to be
an apt metaphor for the ensuing narrative, as we watch Paula variously flit between the obsessive
stalking of her partner and absolute diffidence. Our first real introduction to the character
is watching Paula's unnerving, direct to camera monologue denouncing her lover in a
highly digressive manner, before destroying a generic portrait meant to
generate tranquillity in patients. The story rolls along in freeform
fashion, but never feels shapeless or self-indulgent. Instead, we’re at the
mercy of Paula’s whims as she rehomes her cat, becomes an au pair, takes a job
selling lingerie and mangles opportunities thrown her way. Without Dosch’s
unflinchingly honest performance this would be an excruciating watch,
but instead it’s a delight to cringe along to – it's a genuinely unflattering portrait, though also
painfully relatable.
Fans of Lena Dunham’s Girls,
Todd Solondz’s early work, Drew Godard’s See
You Next Tuesday among other tales of girls gone wilfully wild will find
this a real treat. It also has one of the great cat performances in cinema if
that tips the scales...
Image: Good Time
Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good
Time attaches the authenticity of their last outing (acclaimed heroin drama Heaven Knows What) to an
aching, propulsive crime story. Seeking a pastoral idyll, brothers Nick (Benny Safdie)
and Connie (Robert Pattinson) rob a bank wearing black-face masks. The robbery goes
awry, with the majority of the film dedicated to Pattinson retrieving his
brother and pursuing nefarious and bungling means to return to the financial
starting line.
Pattinson is impressive, skilfully scaling his performance
to match the rest of the mainly street-cast actors. His film star looks add
needed believability to the character’s improbable journey, enabling him to sociopathically
charm any person who proves an obstacle. The happenstance madness of New
York is a great fit for Pattinson, whether he’s defrauding his girlfriend
(Jennifer Jason Leigh, sadly underused), charming an underage girl, facing off
against another petty hood or impersonating a security guard.
The film is not without tonal issues: at times it
urges us to view the brothers' criminal downfall with caper-esque delight, at other times as
the epitome of white privilege. Yet there is something propulsive, honest and
unsettling about the film that is irresistible. Its drive is partly generated
by the fantastic score by electronic artist Oneohtrix Point Never and the
sickly, neon and washed out 35mm visuals by US indie wunderkind cinematographer Sean Price
Williams.
It isn’t a straightforward entertainment, but should
win considerable attention. Like his Twilight
co-star Kirsten Stewart, Pattinson has sought out projects that his star
cachet can bring attention to (The Lost
City of Z, Cosmopolis). This is the first time that fronting an auteur-driven
project has proved a winning formula for the actor, and the combination of a
crime thriller with this kind of grit and pace - along with his star performance -
should ensure success on its UK release.
Image: You Were Never Really Here
Lynne Ramsay’s film arrives on the final day of competition
like a balm, winning exhausted critics over with its rigorous 85 minute run
time. Although produced for the festival absolutely down to the wire (the
version that debuts at the festival does so without credits), the time has
clearly been spent honing it to its absolute leanest.
The core of the story is almost laughably familiar to genre
fans: Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe, a contract killer damaged by his past,
carrying out a series of cold-blooded killings in order to retrieve the
kidnapped daughter of a politician. But Ramsay’s execution justifies retreading
ground covered by Scorsese (Taxi Driver),
Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai),
Luc Besson (Leon: The Professional)
and many more.
You Were Never Really
Here is a major achievement for the Scottish-born director, but one that
audiences will need to steel themselves to commit to. Having a
critically-acclaimed star like Phoenix in an awards-contender performance, as
well as moving into more established narrative modes, will serve the film
when it comes to release. That said, it is a painful watch, for exactly the
reasons that also make it worthwhile: it reinvigorates familiar tropes with a
morality and reality that standard treatments gloss over or aestheticise; it’s
also unflinchingly about its lead character’s desire for suicide,
and about the child sex trade. As a killer, Joe’s specialism is in
murdering the abusers of children (watching this film following the debut of
Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story
proved a queasy counterpoint), and it’s a credit that this sensational subject
matter never feels contrived (perhaps fuelled by Joaquin Phoenix’s research
into a real life equivalent of his character).
Hitman stories mostly offer character background as a
justification for the violence that provides their true raison d’etre. The formula is reversed here, with Phoenix’s past
showing that his present brutality is a mere echo of past trauma and the film seeking to
negate the present, just as Phoenix himself is engaged in a regime of
self-harm. The editing, which conceals moments of anticipated violence, hints
at Joe’s process of hiding from himself and also creates a lingering feeling of
hiatus, of irresolution that makes it distinctly memorable. Jonny Greenwood’s score
does much of the heavy lifting here, continuing his run of superlative scores.
Elsewhere in the festival there is a procession of unearned
images of violence, injected either to sustain narrative interest or to assure
the viewer of the sobriety of the subject matter. Ramsay’s skill is in braiding
her remarkable images (a jellybean crushed between fingers, teeth vacuumed against
a suffocating plastic bag, dinner eaten with bloodstained hands) into a scheme
that entirely justifies them, rather than retroactively seeking for an excuse
to thread provocative imagery into a narrative arc.
It’s a shame that Ramsay’s film only manages a (very
deserved) acting prize for Joaquin Phoenix rather than any of larger gongs, but
there’s every chance that this film will be drawing major attention from
audiences and awards when STUDIOCANAL release it in the UK.