The first rule of the Cannes film festival is that nothing exists except the Cannes film festival. The whole event is a gaudy soap bubble, swirling with stretch limos and red carpets, oligarch yachts and precise, clockwork screenings, all hermetically sealed off from the real world. Nothing matters so much as the next scheduled seance or that round-table junket with the cast of The Expendables 3. And if the luckless critic is unable to gain access to the new Brillante Mendoza, well, he or she might as well jump off the press-room balcony right now because, frankly, it’s all over; there is no point going on.
I once witnessed something close to a riot, first thing in the morning, asdelegates stormed the barricades and massed ranks of security bundled them forcibly back over the railings and into the street. We were that desperate to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The Tree of Life is about the soap-bubble world that we make for ourselves and about a private tragedy that dwarfs the moon and the stars and knocks the planet off its axis. Terrence Malick’s sublime, soaring drama leads the book of Genesis down Main Street, USA. It transplants the garden of Eden to small-town Texas and views its subsequent fall after a death in the family causes straight-back dad (Brad Pitt) to stumble and sensitive mum (Jessica Chastain) to suffer a crisis of faith.
The film is at once implicitly personal (Malick himself lost a brother when he was still a young man) and unashamedly expansive, in that it throws its wings wide to accommodate the creation of the cosmos, the era of the dinosaur and the arrival of those clambering amphibians who will eventually spawn us. This is the section that many viewers find too much to swallow, although I would argue that it is there for a reason and that the picture pivots on it.
Malick suggests that our very role as human beings depends on some tacit reassurance that we are part of some continuum – that we collect the baton from our parents and hand it to our children – but that a premature death rips up the contract and exposes the lie. And if that rule can be violated, then the whole ship goes down and we are left bobbing adrift in the cosmos, trying to construct a new story around it, or dreaming of an afterlife where everything might be set right. In the film’s dying moments, the bereaved adult son (Sean Penn) wanders on to a beach and embraces his brother again.
In selecting my favourite Palme d’Or winner, I’ve restricted myself to the run of 10 years I attended the festival. This shuts the door on such heavyweight contenders as Taxi Driver or Apocalypse Now, Viridiana or The Wages of Fear (if they try to vault the barricades, the security goons are on standby). Instead, I’m going with The Tree of Life - partly because it worked so perfectly in the moment, in the soap-bubble world of Cannes 2011.
This was the year in which Lars von Trier played Satan and was cast out of the garden, while Malick hovered godlike high above the fray. True to form, the director gave no press conferences and chose to speak to his disciples via the medium of his movie. He was boarding at a nearby hotel, reports said. Some claimed to have seen him strolling along the promenade. But – as with God – there remained some nagging doubt that he was present. The prizegiving ceremony provided a neat final chapter. Evil was vanquished; goodness exalted and then the soap bubble popped and poured us all back into the world.
More important than all that was the pure dumbstruck wonder I experienced on first seeing the film, sitting in the blackness of the morning preview, when it seemed that nothing else mattered besides what was unfolding on screen. I recall that extraordinary, weightless, almost wordless 12-minute sequence in which the family’s eldest son, Jack (Hunter McCracken) is whisked from birth through to adolescence and we view the world afresh, as he views it, and are rendered helpless by the sight of a yellow leaf on a road or a helix of light on the wall and are told that the sky is where God lives, and believe it absolutely.
This felt unlike anything I’d ever seen before and yet it also ached like a memory. The Tree of Life was rapturous, heartbreaking, transcendent. It overextended itself wildly and was the better for that. To misquote Robert Browning: a film-maker’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what on Earth’s a heaven for?
Malick’s picture shows us that even the richest, longest life is done and dusted in a heartbeat. The journey of a film, it could be argued, is shorter even than that. The dazzling newborn that sparks a 24-hour storm at Cannes is invariably rolled out for a brief stint at the cinema, after which it drops quickly out of circulation; outstripped and overrun by fresh neonates; a little dinosaur itself.
Queueing at the supermarket I occasionally notice a dump-bin in which discounted DVDs are arranged like street-corner destitutes. Sometimes this display includes faded summer blockbusters such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; sometimes it contains the odd old Palme d’Or winner. The afterlife comes in a variety of guises. Jack embraced his long-lost brother on a beach at the end of the world. I reclaimed The Tree of Life beside the supermarket check-out.
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