In Cannes, things are hotting up. The throngs of ticket-hunters are getting ever denser outside the Palais; the weekend dog-walkers are out in force on the Croisette, their mutts ever tinier but the leads ever longer; and in a packed press conference room, Woody Allen is answering the now mandatory annual question about his globe-trotting habits. “When are you going to shoot in Rio, Woody?” asks a Brazilian journalist. (The year Woody Allen brings a favela movie to Cannes is the year I’ll decide to stay home.)
The Cannes film festival is in session, for the 68th time – and yet, it won’t really be properly under way until either the critics have swooned en masse over some blue-chip masterpiece, or something really outrageous gets us all flustered – and since Lars von Trier is no longer welcome here, we’ll have to rely on French scandalist Gaspar Noé and his reputedly ultra-graphic 3D sex film Love, screening later this week. Perhaps the Palais will relax its evening dress code for this one – glasses mandatory, raincoats optional.
Noé aside, it does look as if this year’s event is opting to be a little more sober than we usually expect. That was certainly the keynote set by opening-night offering La Tête Haute (Standing Tall), a very low-key, rather Loachian French film about a teenage boy and the juvenile justice system. OK, it does star the ever-regal Catherine Deneuve, but given recent razzle-dazzle first-nighters such as The Great Gatsby, Emmanuelle Bercot’s film seems a little downbeat to be raising champagne flutes to: an affecting though unsurprising social drama with Deneuve as a firm but motherly judge watching over a troubled teenager, played by newcomer Rod Paradot. One can only assume this choice was the festival’s way of distancing itself from the snobbish, hollow glitz of last year’s reviled opener Grace of Monaco.
So far, little has provided huge excitement – although it was a thrill to see the hyper-frenetic, genuinely inspired Mad Max: Fury Road, which felt like the festival’s real curtain-raiser. We’ve had a couple of blasts of eccentricity in competition, but I wish I could have liked them better. Tale of Tales is by Italian director Matteo Garrone, who made the intensely gritty Mafia film Gomorrah, but this English-language oddity is a quixotic misfire. Based on a 17th-century text, it features a mismatched international cast (Salma Hayek, John C Reilly, Vincent Cassel, Shirley Henderson) in a floridly baroque hotchpotch of stories about kings and queens, sea-beasts and spells – and a giant flea. A triumph of design and photography (it’s shot by Peter Suschitzky), it resembles a deluxe version of those cheap-and-cheerful East German children’s films, such as The Singing Ringing Tree that livened up BBC teatimes in the 70s. Yet what genuine magic Garrone musters is drowned out by the creaking of the English dialogue. As bloated as the flea that becomes King Toby Jones’s beloved pet in the film’s jolliest episode, this oddball epic is a brave venture – but in the self-aware, revisionist post-Shrek era, you can’t help feeling this fairytale is a little, well, ogre-ist.
Odder still was The Lobster, the first English-language film by Yorgos Lanthimos, whose sublimely skewed Dogtooth spearheaded Greek cinema’s so-called weird wave. Now, there’s outre and there’s outre, but The Lobster feels too strenuously odd: it has WTF hand-stitched all over it in fine silk thread. It’s set in a hotel where single people must find a partner or turn into an animal. Another heteroclite cast (Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux, John C Reilly again) give alienatingly affectless readings of non-sequitur lines – it feels like an extended Monty Python sketch with Peter Greenaway dialogue. There is some genuine inspiration to Lanthimos’s violent social satire, but overall this feels less like a coherent film than a laboriously executed conceptual art piece. The Lobster is fatally bound in the carapace of its own surrealism. Still, you do get hear Olivia Colman singing Gene Pitney.
So far, there’s one film I’d tip as a serious Palme d’Or contender, and that may prove the most challenging in the fest. Hungarian film Son of Saul is a Holocaust drama by first-time writer-director László Nemes, formerly assistant to maestro of super-slow austerity Béla Tarr. The film is as daunting as that suggests. It involves a prisoner in Auschwitz who thinks he recognises a dead boy as his son, and desperately searches for a rabbi to bury him. The taboo that once hovered over depicting Holocaust imagery in fiction films has been somewhat dispelled of late, for better or worse, by films such as Schindler’s List (better, arguably) and Life Is Beautiful (worse, much worse). But Nemes makes the singular decision to mount vast, detailed tableaux of the camp’s horrors, only to keep these images half-obscured and in the background, somewhere behind his protagonist (Géza Röhrig), whose haunted features fill the foreground for most of the time. The complex action, filmed in long takes, at once immerses us in events and keeps us at a distance, casting a disturbing slant on the story of a man who tries to make a profound symbolic gesture in the face of death, while seemingly blind to the slaughter going on all around him. It’s a terrifying, intellectually provocative work, audacious in its rethinking of Holocaust drama, and if it’s not the Palme, it certainly deserves to be seen and talked about widely.
Of late, watching the latest Woody Allen has become one of those annual Cannes chores you steel yourself for, but you never quite get used to how joyless the experience can be. Irrational Man is Crime and Punishment laboriously reimagined as a campus drama about a glamorously tormented academic (Joaquin Phoenix), who finds a new lease of life in planning a murder: “This is the meaningful act I’ve been searching for!” This is not Allen at his very worst, but it’s painfully mechanical. It feels like a bad student parody of Allen in his moral-philosophy mode, or like something he once would have sent up in one of his New Yorker squibs. Only Emma Stone’s ingenue vivacity survives uncrushed through lines like, “Despair is what Kierkegaard called ‘the sickness unto death’, Abe.” Irrational Man left me feeling if not sick unto death, at least – as Woody would once have said – a, a, a little nauseous.
While British cinema is conspicuous here by its near-absence, a standout documentary this year is Amy, Asif Kapadia’s chronicle of the brief glory of Amy Winehouse. The singer’s family has objected to the film, but whatever conclusions Kapadia might lead us to draw about her relationship with them, and with her self-consciously bad-boy ex Blake Fielder-Civil, the film eschews direct commentary to present a well-judged montage of clips showing Winehouse as a deeply characterful talent who simply wasn’t equipped for the temptations and traumas of sudden success. The tragedy of her fall is especially brought home by such material as an early Friday Night With Jonathan Ross appearance in which her joie de vivre and cheek fairly blaze out of the screen.
