Festivals

Suffused in a blue-grey wintry light and flecked with brown, beige and burgundy, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis plays out in a low-key melancholy mood broken only when simmering frustration boils over into anger, or sardonic asides swirl up into sudden savage comedy. The reception in the 1000-seat Debussy cinema, full of critics and journalists who had just queued for up to 90-minutes in the pouring rain, was genuinely warm rather than rowdily celebratory. It was as if the film’s calm control – its firm-handed, light-touch mastery – had placed everyone under a spell.

Oscar Isaac is folk singer Llewyn Davis, something of a star in the East Village but struggling to sell records in Cincinnati. Nothing quite goes right for Llewyn as he struggles with his principles over the course of the film, watching lesser acts such as his friends Jim and Jean (Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan) gain acceptance while he gets beaten up in a dark alley and visits his manager to discover he’s received no returns, no post, nothing. What’s more, he has a serious cat problem.

An artist’s struggle in an unforgiving environment is something the Coens have dealt with before in Barton Fink, a previous Cannes success that won them the Palme d’Or in 1991 (and which also featured John Goodman in malevolent form). Inside Llewyn David is a very different film however – apart from a surreal and ultimately defining roadtrip to Chicago and a sinister figure who bookends the film, this is a naturalistic comedy-drama that runs on beautifully observed period detail, a range of typically colourful characters and a some sharp, angry humour – most of it driven by Llewyn’s deep frustration and disappointment. What really raises it, and serves as a mark of the Coens’ supreme confidence, are the numerous songs – mostly played in full – that punctuate proceedings. Each serves a different dramatic function (without telling stories through lyrics) and each stops the film and makes you look closely at, and think hard about, Llewyn as he performs (one of the songs is more of a comic number with Timberlake and Adam Driver, but even that has a bearing on the direction Llewyn’s life will take).

For such a modest film, Inside Llewyn Davis is as rich as anything the Coens have done before. We’ll get a clearer idea of how the film has been received tomorrow, when the reviews come out and the red-carpet audience experience it at its world premiere in the evening. On first viewing though, with the jury still out, Inside Llewyn Davis is leading the pack at this year’s festival.

The relentless rain means that it’s increasingly hard to distinguish the ocean from the Croisette here at Cannes, but on the screen at least everything is buoyant. Three Film4 productions – Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant, Mark Cousins’ A Story of Children and Film and Paul Wright’s For Those in Peril – have filled us with home-team pride, the trio of filmmakers all festival first-timers whose distinctive films guarantee that their presence here will be strongly felt. Looking further afield, relative Cannes veterans Hirokazu Kore-eda and Jia Zhangke fearlessly tackled domestic and social politics to provided a pair of very strong Competition entries – respectively, the delicate emotional balancing act Like Father, Like Son and the violent, searing indictment of contemporary China, A Touch Of Sin. Set against that pairing Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, his follow-up to the almost-perfect A Separation, felt like an exercise in emotional mathematics, a puzzle to be solved rather than a story to be lived.

However, if you want your spirits lifted, soul nourished and cynicism blasted then look no further than the wonderful wizard of Chile, Alejandro Jodorowsky. The silver-haired ringmaster returns to the cinematic circus at 84 years old, with his first film since The Rainbow Thief in 1990. An autobiographical phantasmagoria that begins by looking back to his childhood in Tocopilla, before branching out to follow his father’s own spiritual and political awakening, La Danza de la Realidad (showing here in Director’s Fortnight) could be seen as Jodorowsky’s Amarcord – although calling it ‘Fellini-esque’ would do a disservice to the director’s unique style. Even without the periodic appearances of Jodorowsky himself, tenderly offering advice and support to his younger self, you’d still know exactly whose world you’re inhabiting – a gang of multiple amputees chant protest songs, perfectly uniformed firemen parade through the village streets at night, a beautiful white horse performs balletic tricks, young Alejandro’s mother – who sings all her dialogue – covers her son in black bootpolish in a bid to banish his fear of the dark… Every frame is so full of poetry, every sequence so suffused with romance and adventure, that I barely noticed the heavy grey rain upon exiting the cinema.

Before we left, Jodorowsky himself appeared on-stage looking trim, youthful and full of mischief. He called his film ‘a psychological bomb for the whole of his family [many of whom appear in the film]… a way to reconcile with my father’. He also talked movingly, but never judgmentally or self-servingly, about how cinema is ‘an industry’ and asked ‘what’s left for the director… who is a poet’. Not exceptional or radical statements but touching coming from a director/poet coming close to the end of his creative life and who clearly needs cinema now more than ever. With La Danza de la Realidad, Jodorowsky has created both a memory-piece and his masterpiece at the same time, and its final line sums up both him and his new film perfectly: ‘Sail away from the past… but keep the child’.

There’s still more to come from Jodorowsky at this year’s festival, with a documentary tracing the director’s frustrated attempts to bring his version of Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel Dune to screen (a feat later accomplished by David Lynch). That screens for the first time this evening but, as it clashes with the first press show of the Coen brothers new film Inside Llewyn Davies, I’ll catch up with it later in the week and report on it then. (Of course, the good news is that I’ll have word on the Coens in the meantime.)

For now, it’s back out into the rain, to see if there’s anything left of Cannes itself…

 

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray catches up with George MacKay, star of Kevin Macdonald’s highly anticipated How I Live Now, and Paul Wright’s For Those In Peril, which premiered in Critics Week at Cannes 2013…

I arrived to interview George MacKay feeling like a half-drowned shipwreck victim, having run through a mighty deluge along the Croisette from the Palais, where I’ve just caught the underwhelming Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian) at the 8.30am screening. Fortunately, there’s nothing underwhelming about For Those In Peril, Paul Wright’s debut feature and the reason George is in town. Selected for the Critics’ Week strand, which focuses on new voices, the Scotland-set drama tells the tale of the sole survivor of a fishing boat accident that killed everyone aboard but a young man named Aaron (McKay), including Aaron’s brother Billy. It has already been described by the Telegraph critic Robbie Collin as the “flipside of last year’s Cannes hit Beasts Of The Southern Wild; a film that reassured us that all we seek can be found bobbing somewhere on the waves. For Those In Peril makes some very similar assurances, although they sound less like a promise than a threat.”

As we begin our beach-side interview with the rain beating down on the roof of the temporary marquee, the waves crashing in the background and my boots half-full of water, the setting is in some ways the perfect backdrop to chat about a film in which the sea is a brooding presence that preys on Aaron’s grief-addled mind.

So apart from bringing the British weather with you, how has your Cannes been so far?

It’s been fantastic, although I haven’t been here long. Me and Paul got in yesterday and had a bit of an explore, met up with a few friends for a drink – the DoP Benny [Kracun], the editor Michael [Aaglund], we’re all here together now.

Can we start with how you approached playing Aaron in For Those In Peril – how did you shape him?

Paul’s such a wonderful writer; there’s so much there already in the script. And then the thing that was so wonderful about the whole process was it was an exploration with Paul, discovering things – we talked a lot. I’ve never had such a close relationship with a director before. So we established the reasons behind everything, the purpose and rationale to what Aaron was doing. Which gave me a really strong backbone around which we could improvise and explore when we began shooting.

And how did you relate to the rest of the cast – you’ve got Kate Dickie as your mum, and Nichola Burley as the girlfriend of Aaron’s recently deceased brother -  did you improvise with them, or keep it more structured?

Well, firstly Kate was just wonderful, she’s so lovely. We really felt, without wanting to sound too silly, that we clicked, and understood each other, and had this emotional attachment to the project, which brought us very close together. So working with her in rehearsals really brought that backbone of understanding to playing Aaron. She brought a perspective on him which really changed how I saw him – working with her defined Aaron. That need to be with her is the crux of Aaron, really. And Nichola [Burley] was just so wonderful to work with. We got two days to rehearse together up in Scotland and with Nichola we explored the scenes more and explored how far you can push that relationship.

Aaron’s quite a dark character – did you ever catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and think ‘who’s this guy?’

Yeah, there’s the one scene where he’s got the red make-up on, and I forgot I had it on and went to the toilet and caught sight of myself! It’s like, yep, there he is! It was really invigorating doing it, it wasn’t an unpleasant experience going to those dark places; it was exciting.

And how did that contrast with Kevin Macdonald’s How I Live Now – was it a very different experience?

Well, in For Those In Peril, Aaron is so much on his own, whereas on How I Live Now, Eddie’s very much part of a family. And on How I Live Now, we kind of became a family on set – I felt like a big brother to Harley, Danny and Tom. It was about being together, and so it was much more about being a group, and my role in the group was looking after people. It was just a joy – that feeling of being a family is my strongest memory of How I Live Now. It was different – because of the nature of the part – with For Those In Peril. Me and Paul spoke for ages about the part of Aaron. I spoke with Kevin [Macdonald] before I got the part of Eddie and before filming and up until shooting in Wales, but with Paul, because Aaron’s on his own so much, we had a closeness all the time, because I was in all day, every day, all the time. I just physically spent more time with Paul. With How I Live Now, the best way of understanding the relationships was to hang out with the cast, whereas the best way of understanding Aaron in For Those In Peril was to spend time with the director, because the part in the story is so isolated. I learned so much from watching both of them.

And did you read How I Live Now before filming?

Absolutely, yeah. I think what’s great about the film is it’s true to the book in that it feels like the book, you know? The only way I can describe it to you is charged. There’s emotional intensity, and there’s love, and I’m so glad that came across in the script as well as the book. In the book Eddie is younger, but I think they are very similar.

And both Film4 films, of course…

Yes, I’m flying the flag for Film4!

 Will you have time to see anything here at Cannes?

No, unfortunately not, which is a real shame because it’s so exciting being somewhere where the focus is so entirely on film, and everyone’s here to show new work. It’s obviously amazing just to get your film into the festival but then there’s the big sense of nervousness over whether it will work out…

How I Live Now is out Autumn 2013, For Those In Peril premiered at Cannes in Critics Week on 18th May 2013

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray finds a lot to like about Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ninth feature…

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father Like Son is, like Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, a Competition film whose basic plot sounds like a soap opera shock twist: a couple discover that their son is not their son – he was switched at the hospital with another boy at birth. The couple in question are a fairly repressed upwardly mobile pair, he (pop star Masahuru Fukuyama) more so than she (Machiko Ono) – it’s made clear she hails from humbler roots.

When they meet the couple who have been raising their biological son for the last six years, the difference is obvious: they might have less money and fewer status-based aspirations, but they can claim a much warmer, livelier family life. Once you get over the fact that the set-up involves a slight cliche about the authenticity of the humble life, this is a humane and moving film about what parents want from their children. And the central dilemma is a real doozy: do they swap the kids or not?

Lest you come away thinking this all sounds very grim, I should say that it’s a very humourous film. There’s a lovely joke about children’s piano recitals, and the contrast between the bourgeois couple and the working class family is also milked for laughs.

Expect this one to win at least one prize come Sunday.

 

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray gives her thoughts on Asghar Farhadi’s The Past

My third Competition film seems the most likely Palme d’Or contender so far: Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, his much-anticipated French-language follow up to critical favourite A Separation. It proves to be an impressive picture that verges on melodrama – in a good way.

The key ingredients – a divorced couple under the same roof, stroppy kids, a disgruntled teenager, a new lover, an affair, a wife in a coma, a suicide attempt, an incident at the dry cleaners, some misdirected love letters and so on – sound pure EastEnders, but Farhadi somehow manages to cook up from these unpromising plot points a knotty examination of culpability, justice and consequences, which really allows his fantastic cast to shine.

The talented Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) plays put-upon Frenchwoman Marie, who wants a divorce from Ali Mosaffa’s equable Iranian, Ahmad, returning, as the film opens, from his country, after a four year absence. Tahar Rahim’s Samir is the man she wants to marry, a character who only really comes into his own in the final third, after Ahmad’s retreat from what he has come to realise is a very complicated situation.

For a talky film largely driven by dialogue and personal disagreement, it was a surprisingly gripping watch – a sort of verbal thriller in which we wait to see what new piece of information will cast what we think we know in a new light. Ethical dilemmas are the order of the day, and I found myself playing a game of ‘what would I do?’ as each new problem presented itself. Indeed, I was so enjoying this game, that I didn’t stop to think too hard about plausibility, although writing at seven hours distance, I’m conscious of a certain sense of constructed reality which contrasts with the naturalistic setting and performances. The performances of the child actors are worth mentioning in closing too – they really are excellent, as frustrating and frustrated in their tantrums and sulking as children in real life are.

I’m set to interview filmmaker Mark Cousins tomorrow about his new documentary A Story of Children and Film (playing in the Cannes Classics strand), which looks at children in film and includes a perceptive section on stroppiness in children, the musings of which The Past bears out entirely. More on that soon, plus thoughts on the most sexually explicit film of the festival so far, The Stranger At The Lake, which played in Un Certain Regard this morning. For now, I’m off to catch Competition entry Soshite Chichi Ni Naru by Kore-Eda Hirokazu, another Competition entry with a storyline which EastEnders would love (hospital baby mix-up discovered six years later!), but with presumably more up its sleeve than shock value…