CANNES, France — Midway through the 68th Cannes Film Festival,
and the critics are restless. There have been good and great movies,
and even triumphs; almost tout le monde has gone over the moon for
“Carol,” Todd Haynes’s exquisitely directed and acted drama about women
in love in 1950s America, starring the well-matched Cate Blanchett and
Rooney Mara. Yet as the disappointments roll out, including “The Sea of
Trees,” Gus Van Sant’s hostilely received male weepie with Matthew
McConaughey, the jeers and chatter have deemed the main competition —
that roster of high-profile, star-crammed titles eligible for the Palme
d’Or — the weakest in years.
That
at any rate seemed true until the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien
blew the roof off one of the biggest theaters here with “The Assassin,” a
staggeringly lovely period film set in ninth-century China. Shu Qi, the
star of several of Mr. Hou’s more recent films (and the first
“Transporter” movie), plays Nie Yinniang, who returns to her provincial
home after years of being trained in the murderous arts by a
nun-sorceress. Filled with palace intrigue, expressive silences, flowing
curtains, whispering trees and some of the most ravishingly beautiful
images to have graced this festival, “The Assassin” held the
Wednesday-night audience in rapturous silence until the closing credits,
when thunderous applause and booming bravos swept through the
auditorium like a wave.
Such highs make more painful lows like “The Sea of Trees,”
which centers on an American, Arthur (Mr. McConaughey), who journeys to
a remote Japanese forest that’s a suicide hot spot. There, amid the
creaking trees, bones and maybe some ghosts, his plans are waylaid by a
stranger, Takumi Nakamura (Ken Watanabe), whose bloody wrists suggest
that he too is another would-be suicide. The perennially, wildly
unpredictable Mr. Van Sant (when he’s good, he’s very, very good, etc.)
produces some striking images but never transcends the banality of
Christopher Sparling’s script, particularly in flashbacks featuring
Arthur’s boozing, hectoring wife (a badly served Naomi Watts) kicking
him around the house for some cut-rate George-and-Martha hilarity.
Far
more favorably received, “My Mother” finds the Italian director Nanni
Moretti fluently moving between buoyant comedy and affecting tragedy.
The humor comes from the efforts of a director, Margherita (Margherita
Buy), to make a movie about a labor protest with a comically miscast
American star, Barry (John Turturro), a difficulty she shares with more
than a few real directors at Cannes this year. The heartbreak, in turn,
is provided by Margherita’s dying mother, Ada (Giulia Lazzarini). Mr.
Moretti tends to be better at laughs than tears; here, though, despite
the perils of pathos in the autobiographical material — his mother died
in 2010 — his touch is as delicate as the moment when a reflective
Margherita, standing before her mother’s desk, pushes in the chair one
final time.
This
has been one haunted festival, and not just by the ghosts of auteurs
past. A few days after Mr. Van Sant’s movie played, another Japanese
ghost story — Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Journey to the Shore”
— had its premiere. Playing outside the main competition, Mr.
Kurosawa’s movie involves a piano teacher, Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu, all
minor keys), whose husband, Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano), materializes
several years after his death. He looks great, as does his vibrant
pumpkin-colored overcoat, which both gives the movie a splash of color
and suggests the dead man is more alive than his grieving wife in her
gray jacket. Together, like Orpheus and Eurydice on a holiday, Mizuki
and Yusuke visit several other characters, some of whom have not yet
crossed over either.
Mr.
Kurosawa, whose films include “Bright Future” and “Tokyo Sonata,” has
long been known for his intensely eerie thrillers and horror films.
“Journey to the Shore” is more wistful and plaintive than strictly
unnerving, with an emotional force that edges in like an afternoon
shadow. One of the most meaningfully beautiful and moving images that
I’ve seen in the festival so far is of a darkened bedroom wall that
slowly brightens to reveal a mural of vibrantly hued flowers. The house
belongs to an old man, who, you learn through Mr. Kurosawa’s spare
dialogue, was cruel to his long-gone wife. Now the old man spends his
free time cutting out pictures of flowers, as if collecting blooms for a
bouquet that will convey the longing and regret he can no longer
express to his wife.
Little in the main competition has elicited the kind of excited attention and debate that has greeted “Son of Saul,”
a Hungarian movie set almost entirely inside Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Directed by Laszlo Nemes, making his feature directing debut, this
radically dehistoricized, intellectually repellent movie tracks the
title Sonderkommando, one of the Jewish prisoners whom the Nazis forced
to help run their death machines. The story largely involves Saul’s
desperate, perhaps mad attempt to find a rabbi to deliver the funeral
prayer for a boy who, rather miraculously, had briefly survived being
gassed only to be killed by a Nazi.
Like
a death camp Virgil, Saul guides us from one circle of hell to the
next, from the gas chamber to the crematory to the edge of the pits
where prisoners are shot and then fall into a mass grave amid shooting
flames. Mr. Nemes’s technical virtuosity is evident every meticulously
lighted, composed and shot step of the way, which means that your
attention is continually being guided as much to his cinematic abilities
as to the misery on screen. Strikingly, he tends to use
head-and-shoulder close-ups and shallow focus, as if to suggest how
drastically narrowed Saul’s world has become: He’s surviving, and that’s
about it. Yet these filmmaking choices also transform all the
screaming, weeping condemned men, women and children into anonymous
background blurs.
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