Cannes Film Festival 2009

Was it just an accident of programming that the 2009 Cannes Film Festival climaxed with a film called Enter the Void?

Rumor had it that cinema’s annual grande fete would be underattended this year, though try telling that to anyone who waited two hours in line for the new Lars von Trier. There was, discernibly, a downturn in the number of American journalists fumbling through the Debussy balcony with our tortured excusez-mois. Many of those who attended went on their own time and dime, convinced that what matters as newspapers sink like torpedoed yachts are cinema, sun and croque-monsieur.

Fittingly for a post-bubble Cannes, the festival began with inflated expectations. The competition lineup seemed almost perversely promising. They’ve got von Trier! Tarantino! Jane Campion! Michael Haneke! Pedro Almodóvar! Tsai Ming-liang! And one after another, most bowed with blah retreads of past work, solid in execution but limited in ambition. Until late in the fest, it seemed indisputable that the Un Certain Regard sidebar was superior. (Among other revelations, it provided evidence that the Romanian New Wave is still strong, with Tales from the Golden Age—a terrific omnibus film spearheaded by 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days director Cristian Mungiu—and Corneliu Porumboiu’s festival find Police, Adjective, a playful and ultimately devastating look at the role language plays in bureaucracy.)

Is it a function of Cannes that audacity often seems preferable to polish—the kind embodied by the absorbing but familiar Grand Jury Prize winner, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet? It was difficult to fathom the praise for Campion’s Bright Star, which imposes Campion’s pet themes of self-expression and frustrated desire on the romance between Fanny Brawne and John Keats, and which is so anemic both as drama and literary criticism it inspires nostalgia for the director’s revisionist Portrait of a Lady. Rejected for Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee appeared with Taking Woodstock, a light true-life confection about a lad (Demetri Martin) who decides to host a little concert in upstate New York; pleasant enough, the movie seemed about as out of place at Cannes as Adventureland would have. Denied a competition slot, Francis Ford Coppola took revenge by opening the parallel festival Directors’ Fortnight with Tetro, an honorable, deeply personal misfire so studied that even Vincent Gallo seems subdued.

In the absence of vision, many critics sought refuge in scandal. On day four, Roger Ebert topped his own Brown Bunny superlatives by implying that Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay was the worst film in Cannes history. Repellent, yes; successful, not exactly—but you could see why the jury gave Mendoza its best-director award. Essentially a protracted buildup to the dismemberment of a prostitute, the film is politically charged, rigorously observed and in its own way, as concerned with process as last year’s Che.

The bar having thus been lowered (or raised?), the festival’s biggest flash point arrived a day later with von Trier’s underestimated Antichrist. Clearly designed to be received as the coming of the beast, the movie, like all of von Trier’s films, begs a double-edged reading. Is this story of a grieving couple (psychiatrist Willem Dafoe and occult researcher Charlotte Gainsbourg) grotesquely misogynistic—or is it a critique of von Trier’s reputation for misogyny? Fascinating to think about as an inversion of Breaking the Waves (in this case, the husband’s mind games lead to hell rather than heaven), the film ends with a dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky, which prompted as many cackles as Wim Wenders’s dedication of Palermo Shooting to Bergman and Antonioni last year. Yet it also made sense. Disaster or misunderstood genius, bona fide fright fest or laugh riot featuring a talking fox, the film prompted a debate that felt long overdue.

And even Antichrist was just a warm-up for Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (enshrined by an exiting colleague as “the stupidest film ever to show at Cannes”), conceptually moronic but rather mind-blowing as abstract filmmaking. Opening through the literal eyes of a drug dealer and culminating with a POV shot from his sister’s vagina, this bombastic, nearly three-hour sensory assault made clear, at the very least, exactly why it was in competition. (And unlike with opening-night selection Up, we can be grateful it wasn’t in 3-D.) The film prompted boos from some and five minutes of sustained applause from others—either because they had witnessed a historic Cannes moment or because every synapse in the room was fried.

Not everything could be designated a yawn or a firebomb. Park Chan-wook’s surprisingly fine Thirst brought an intriguing dose of Catholic guilt to the vampire genre, giving us an undead chaplain (Song Kang-ho) who feasts from his patients’ IVs. (Pity it goes schizo in its second half.) Old masters like Marco Bellocchio (with Vincere) and especially Alain Resnais (with Wild Grass) enlivened second-rate material with bold experimentation. Prompting a sigh of relief, Haneke swooped in late with the expectedly excellent White Ribbon, a story of repression and incipient fascism in 1913 Germany. A Caché–like enigma told in the idiom of a Bergman film, it was an obvious choice for the Palme d’Or by the jury (headed by sometime Haneke star Isabelle Huppert). He deserved it; let’s move on and save the debates about who sent the tapes—or in this case, who beat the disabled child—for Toronto.

There was less enthusiasm for Quentin Tarantino’s highly anticipated WWII flick Inglourious Basterds—along with The White Ribbon, the high point of competition and the only movie that, at least in the Cannes omniverse, looked like something resembling a classic. (For his performance as a multilingual Nazi colonel, instant star Christoph Waltz received the film’s only award.) The press complained it wasn’t commercial, presuming that QT fanboys would be shocked—shocked!—to learn that a movie set in Europe contains subtitles. It’s actually Tarantino’s most substantive effort to date, tracing parallel plots to blow up a Paris theater where Goebbels is hosting a premiere. One scheme involves igniting a stash of nitrate film, and indeed, Basterds extends the metaphor to portray filmmaking as an explosive act. Pastiching The Dirty Dozen, Sergio Leone and any number of vintage espionage films, it’s the closest Tarantino has come to making an old-fashioned movie-movie. The love-it-or-hate-it scene of the fest was an extraordinary half-hour standoff at a tavern, which some complained was digressive and talky to no end (a charge also leveled at Jackie Brown). Of course, if you mention that two of these characters are spies for the Allies and the rest are Nazis, then it sounds more suspenseful.

Speaking of homage, one artist’s tribute to another made for the best double bill of the festival. First Martin Scorsese (French pronunciation: “Scor–SEHS”) introduced a restoration of Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes, that transcendent ode to the power of creation. It was then possible to bolt from Moira Shearer’s ballet debut to the Fortnight for Pedro Costa’s Ne Change Rien, a kind of concert film documenting French actress Jeanne Balibar’s parallel career as a chanteuse. How would this notoriously minimalist director portray singing? Simple: lengthy repetition of specific phrases of song, shot at off-kilter angles with a gorgeous, high-contrast black-and-white lighting scheme. (In a possible jibe to people who can’t stand his films, Costa selects “Torture” as the opening number.) Performance is a matter of practicing a routine until it becomes second nature, and by defamiliarizing the rehearsal process, Costa forces us to consider it as entertainment in itself. More than any film at the festival, Ne Change Rien cut to the heart of what it means to make art—and in doing so, it illuminated the central question at Cannes.

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