Father Geek here with Grozilla's final report from this year's Festival of Cannes... But before we get to his swan song this time around Father Geek has the following festival WINNERS for you...
55th Anniversary Award -one time only award... Bowling for Columbine
Jury Prize... Divine Intervention
Best Screenplay... Sweet Sixteen
Best Director... Im Quen Tek - Chiwaseon, and P.T. Anderson - Punchdrunk Love
Best Actor... Oliview Gourmet - The Son
Best Actress... Kati Outinen - Man Without a Past
Grand Prize... Man Without a Past
Palme d'Or... The Pianist
Now here's our guy in Paris, Grozilla...
Well time to pack and get goin' back home. Can't say this was a very good Cannes edition. Too many good films and too many good auteurs unable to express something else that they didn't already say in previous films... But by screening several films (I didn't have the time to tell you all about all of them) coming from countries cinematographies believed to be buried from some idiotic western point of view (latin-american, african, eastern-europe), or quite never seen here in Cannes (Bollywood)it's very promising for the future of the fest. Of course you will hear almost only about the films who were in competition, but the most buzzed about were in fact films like Mexico's Japon, Bollywood's Devdas, Hungary's Occident or Brazil's City of God. That's very encouraging as an alternative to the eternal stuff we can see all along the year...
Le fils
The Dardenne brothers went back to Belgium three years ago with the golden palm in their luggage. Rosetta was a knock out film about some loner girl lookin' desperately for a job, shot as in a state of war. This year the Dardenne are back with another story : a carpentry teacher gives lessons to a young adult who happens to have killed his son six years before. The teacher knows who he is, the boy doesn't. Good story, brilliant acting by Olivier Gourmet as the teacher. But as many films made by auteurs well known and screened here this time around, quite nothing new in the Dardenne filmmaking : same handheld camera, following very closely the main characters, same moody made tension. Those brothers are for sure talented, but for anyone who saw their two previous films, it's déja vu. For others this is a à la Bresson film, avoiding to put on screen what's not essential, using at best the actors, especially in its final quarter, only with two characters dealing with their inner feelings. In some ways it's like some European answer to Sean Penn's The Crossing Guard.
Dark Water
I never was very fond of the Ring stuff. Felt it efficient, but not really very scary. Everyone who has seen the latest Hideo Nakata's film in other festivals praised it to me. So I went to its market screening here. And still stayed on my original point-of-view after seeing it. This tale of a divorced woman trying to raise her daughter but assaulted by some ghost child living in the flat over her's failed to be really convincing by being too slow in its first hour, using well known, often used tricks like sound effects to try to scare. Until ten really gripping minutes in the end, that's just classic ghost story, without any surprise. Fun to watch but not enough to pretend to be a revolution in the genre.
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance
Far more breathcatching is this new film from Park Wook Chan (JSA). A blind and deaf guy wants to help his sister who needs an urgent kidney transplant. His blood type isn't compatible. He gets in touch with some organ dealers, they screw him by stealing his money and one of his kidneys. Then with his girlfriend, he decides to kidnap the young daughter of a rich factory owner to pay for the transplant with the resulting ransom money. Of course things won't go as expected. Telling more would be betrayal to this amazing epic, probably the meanest I've seen from Korea. But its definitely not some category III film.
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is very violent, but just for the fun of it. It depicts the brutal and desperate social condition this country is in right now and expresses it by being very dark. Besides the shocking violence, the more disturbing thing here is in the way Chan gives a cruel look at his country, or defuse any hint of humor (just for the record of the mood here, there is a scene where kids are jerking off hearing a couple making love in the apartment next to their's until suddenly the audience discovers that what they thought was the sound of joy is really a cry of pain.). After ten days watching and watching films, I'm too exhausted to explain in English how powerful and dark this film is, even if it's not fair to you, and it has nothing to do with John Woo style, at the end of the screening, I was as devastated as I was after my first vision of Bullet In The Head.
Irréversible
To put an end to these Cannes reports for this year, let's speak a bit of what anyone here was waiting for. Before the screening all the Croisette was buzzing about some perfume of scandal about Gaspar Noé's second feature. Saying how unbearable a rape scene might be, and one of a killing also. Well, that was just buzz.
Irréversible is indeed a disturbing and provocative film, but can't be reduced to just those two scenes. The main trick here is a Memento-like structure, a story told in reverse, except that here it really does begin at the end of the story and closes out at its beginning. A timetravel in reverse is the dark journey of Marcus, Pierre and Alex from hell to heaven. Yes, this killing and this rape are very difficult to watch, but if they're powerful it is because this tale of vengeance is told backwards : you see the revenge before the rape, the rape before what leads to it. The purpose of Noe is apparently to say that all humans have an animal part that can take the control of mind. Some very kubrickian theme (in fact this film has many hints of Kubrick's influence). Anyway I've seen more hard to watch films in my life. Irréversible ain't Pasolini's Salo or Peckinpah's Straw Dogs or Kargl's Schizophrénia.
It's sometimes irritating by using repetitive M.O.s, but they are to acknowledge a true point of view, some true purpose to Irréversible. This ain't at all some bullshiting eye for an eye stuff, apologetic, like many morons critics have already written it. I can't blame those who will be angered by this film. I was also for some minutes, but because I was prisoner of my own sense of voyeurism. In this sense, making me face my own dark side, Irréversible fulfilled Gasper's goal. On the other side I hate what appeared to me as some lurking puritanism when I felt the moral issue here was : if you don't do anything wrong, nothing wrong will happen to you. This is, to my opinion, the real scandal in this film. It makes you think about your own internal demons.
Grozilla out, for this year.
