At the closing stages of this year’s Cannes film festival the guests gather to watch Under the Silver Lake, a shaggy-dog tale that sends Andrew Garfield reeling across an LA suburb in thrall to cults and comic books and movie-star memorabilia. He has some urgent questions relating to a missing girl, the subliminal messages on his records, and some parrot-related mystery the exact details of which I’ve already forgotten. “But what does it all mean?” he wails at one point, and the line sends ripples of laughter through the cinema.
Ostensibly the audience is laughing at Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to his excellent It Follows), which finally doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. But they’re also giggling at themselves and at the great, pressing question suddenly bellowed down from the screen. What does it all mean? Cannes grows weird during these dying days. The films turn confusing and the punters start flagging, and the boundaries between art and life have a tendency to break down. Every other old man on the street looks like Francis Ford Coppola, and the soldiers with assault rifles might possibly be actors in a publicity stunt. The programme is no help; it keeps messing with our heads. In one 36-hour spell it lays on screenings of a film called The Angel, a film called Angel Face and a third called Sorry Angel. If we catch the wrong one, will we even notice?
What a curious, fascinating festival this has been – a stumbling first step on the road to redemption – away from the old guard, belatedly into the new century. Gallons of fresh blood have been poured into competition, while the organisers are at least recognising that they need more women in the lineup. So the direction of travel has largely been decided. It remains to be seen how far and how fast we can move.
What does it all mean? Don’t ask Jean-Luc Godard, the chain-rattling ghost from Cannes days gone by. Appearing at a press conference via FaceTime, he was asked about his decision to include a clip from Michael Bay’s 13 Hours inside The Image Book, his predictably perplexing latest film. Godard, it seemed, was at a loss. Not only was he unaware of the clip’s inclusion, he claimed to have never even heard of Michael Bay.
What does it all mean? Surely the films have the answer, although some of this year’s crop were found wanting. Hopes were high for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (about an African American cop who joins the KKK), but it’s an underpowered, complacent affair that only explodes into life with its closing footage from 2017’s Charlottesville protests. Elsewhere, Ash Is Purest White was a gorgeous state-of-modern-China romance with too much fat on its bones, while Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun (about a female Kurdish combat unit) split the audience down the middle. Personally, I found it heavy-handed and cheesy. The fact that a woman can make a big, crude, Hollywood-style war movie might be progress of sorts, but Kathryn Bigelow has trodden similar terrain to better effect and, anyway, it isn’t in and of itself radical.
What does it all mean? Never ask Lars von Trier; the man can’t be trusted. Ejected from Cannes back in 2011, the one-time enfant terrible returned to serve the festival with its one bona fide shock film. The House That Jack Built stars Matt Dillon as a clench-jawed psychopath (and would-be architect) who claims to have murdered upwards of 60 people. Its gleeful bloody violence provoked mass walkouts. Those who remained found themselves dragged through hell. “Jesus Christ!” yelled the man in the seat behind mine. But not even the messiah could save us from Lars.
There were no British titles in competition and so we clambered upstairs to catch sight of Whitney, Kevin Macdonald’s devastating portrait of the pop superstar, apparently beloved by Nelson Mandela and Saddam Hussein alike. Watching Whitney Houston’s decline was like witnessing a slow-motion car crash. The driver swings heedlessly into traffic and is hit again and again until everything’s been knocked loose and scattered. Except that Macdonald brilliantly manages to trace the root of Houston’s problems to her Baptist childhood, uncovering a long-buried tale of familial abuse. One comes away with the sense that the woman might have been doomed from the outset.
Outside the Palais is where Cannes almost meets the real world. The red carpet hosts a protest by 82 women calling for more female representation in film; another by 16 BME actors highlighting institutionalised racism within the French film industry. Yet both protests play out behind steel cordons, with the crowds kept at a distance. Security has been tightened and tension runs high. Not long ago this place was a free-for-all. There were street vendors and rookie film-makers screening their product inside a van. Representatives from the Troma movie studio would march past, invariably dressed up as zombies and screaming into loudhailers. These days the main drag is largely out of bounds, given over to police bikes and sleek black limousines. The new, improved Cannes would benefit from some zombies.
Best in show at this year’s festival? Happily there are a number of titles to choose between and the closing stretch saw the arrival of some tardy instant classics. Keep an eye out for The Wild Pear Tree, a windblown bildungsroman from the Turkish film-maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, in which an arrogant graduate shuttles between a series of mentors and muses, and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, which spins a Murakami short story into a simmering thriller spotlighting South Korea’s underclass. I also adored Shoplifters, which follows the fortunes of a makeshift family of rogues before bowing out with a heartpiercing finale. Few directors seed their stories with as much subtlety and grace as Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. His films initially look rather bare and spindly, only to burst into flower like late cherry blossoms.
Other pictures screen early and then cling to you for days. It’s now a week since I caught Cold War and I still can’t shake it off. Paweł Pawlikowski’s postwar love story is strung between the eastern bloc and the west, hotwired to the sounds of Polish folk music and seductive American jazz. Cold War isn’t cold; it’s positively burning with passion and its lead player, Joanna Kulig, is a star in the making.
And then there’s Happy As Lazzaro, Alice Rohrwacher’s time-bending rustic fable; roughage for the soul that comes sugared with magic realism. This plays out in a crumbling village mired in a semi-rural past before a sudden reveal pulls the stage-flats away and sends us off in a completely different direction. It might not be the greatest film in the lineup, but its rich humanism seems to speak to the moment – the right film for right now. Maybe that’s enough.
In the middle of the week the Cannes heavens open. There are violent cloudbursts across town and forked lightning out over the Med. Then, when the rain has abated, comes more rolling thunder as wheelie-cases are dragged down through town to the bus-stop. One by one, the festival’s guests have begun packing up and shipping out. In the dog days of this festival, there is no sound more melancholic than the rumble of plastic wheels on tarmac. It means that the circus is closing and it’s time to go home.
Cannes 2018 – the best and worst
Cannes controversy
Gaspar Noé played up the coast with his nightmarish Climax and won the best reviews of his career. Lars von Trier played inside the Palais with The House That Jack Built and came away with his worst. Lars wins by a mile.
Hollywood hits and misses
Ramin Bahrani’s Fahrenheit 451 proved idiotic and heavy; Ron Howard’s Star Wars prequel, Solo (below), was light, noisy and zippy. So we’re voting with the Wookie.
Inappropriate musical cues
Bad enough that a gathering of 82 female protesters on the Palais steps is accompanied by Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman. Still worse when fearsome Cate Blanchett is ushered on to the strains of Just Like a Woman... “but she breaks just like a little girl”. Yeah, right she does.
Films in the market
We’re obviously intrigued by A Dysfunctional Cat and Help, I Shrunk My Parents. But our Marche Palme d’Or goes to the gloriously titled Snake Outta Compton.
Quote of the festival
“Keep away from the pool, the fucking pump’s gone insane!”: yelled from the garden at Lars von Trier’s rented villa on the far edge of Cannes. XB
