Opinion

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 long, strange 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 has 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 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 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 judgementally 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 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…

For an event that generates so much excitement and carries with it such potential for surprise, it’s remarkable how – year after year – the experience of being at the Cannes Film Festival always feels exactly the same. Even though this is my 20th consecutive visit to the festival, I still can’t quite fully recall the impact it has when one actually arrives – the dramatic change in the routine and structure of the day, the surges of enthusiasm and the suck of enervation as films either deliver or don’t, and an absolute shift in priority as to what’s hugely important at any given moment.

However, give it twenty-four hours or so (which is how long I’ve been at the 2013 festival) and I’m already sleepwalking into bewildering queuing systems, calculating precise times between coffee shop, press room and cinema without even thinking and basically shunting all the usual day-to-day stuff out of my brain to make room for nothing but the festival – the schedule that sprawls across five official sections and market screenings, the complicated foreign titles of films I didn’t know even existed five minutes previously, and opinions that I know will be radically revised “once I’ve had more time to really think about it”. With the logistics and physical layout always largely unchanged from the year before (apart from the new Irish pub), brain and body fall quickly into line and it’s the films themselves that become the only points of difference.

Mind you, after the first two days of this year’s festival that last point is definitely arguable. From what I’ve seen, things are looking as familiar on-screen as they are off. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge opened Cannes in 2001 and now he’s back fulfilling the same function with The Great Gatsby, an entirely airless and lumbering spectacle that’s equally as ghastly as its festival predecessor. The first film to be screened in Competition – Amat Escalante’s Heli, from Mexico – is as bone-dry and violence-prone as Los Bastardos, the director’s Un Certain Regard entry in 2008. François Ozon returns to tease audiences with more of his arthouse softcore in Young & Beautiful, while Sofia Coppola continues to occupy her very comfortable comfort zone with The Bling Ring, a flip and feather-light true story of celebrity and fashion-obsessed teenage thieves set in Beverly Hills.

That’s not to suggest that all the above films are bad, although I certainly can’t conjure any positive feelings about Luhrmann or Ozon at this juncture. However, Heli is a blunt and terrifying thriller about innocents caught up in the drug trade that’s shaded with moments of emotional grace,while The Bling Ring is a gem – its swiftness and ease might make it feel superficial, but it’s actually a sharp character-comedy built on genuine empathy. In both this and her previous film Somewhere, Coppola’s clear-eyed view of an environment she seems to know well yields moments of great visual beauty. Still, the strengths of both films can’t quite hide the fact that this year’s festival hasn’t broken any new ground yet.

Surprises and revelations are still to come, I’m sure, but in the meantime it’s worth finishing with a word on Fruitvale Station, the big winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Ryan Coogler’s debut feature tells the true story of Oscar, a young man shot by police at an Bay Area subway stop on New Years Eve, 2008. Anchored by a sensitive lead performance from Michael B. Jordan (and strong support from Melonie Diaz as his partner Sophia and Octavia Spencer as his mother), Coogler tracks Oscar through his final day alive.

It all seems fairly uneventful until you realize what Coogler is really doing, telescoping the shape, weight and texture of an entire life – challenges, decisions, aspirations, personal connections – into one single day (the film’s ending is set in motion by an effectively neat narrative contrivance that manages to compress the events of the day itself, really sharpening the point). The film feels slightly burdened by the event that it’s building up to – you can’t really do much but feel for Oscar throughout when you know what’s coming – but ultimately it’s the universality that gives the film its force. How would your life look abstracted and played out over the course of a ‘regular’ day? This dignified drama, plain and worthy on the surface, looks set to sneak up on people who may not feel it’s for them.

All this talk of ‘regular days’ brings us back to the start and the experience on Cannes itself, where every day is different and every day is the same.  The routines may continue tomorrow, but who knows what surprises may be up on the screen…