Why Reese Witherspoon would choose to play an obsessive, hyper-focused cop in Anne Fletcher’s action comedy Hot Pursuit is even more puzzling than why she would decide to produce the movie. The role releases nothing new in her; at times she seems to be competing in a high-speed recitation contest of the Texas law-enforcement handbook. Hot Pursuit is the third film from Witherspoon’s Pacific Standard production company after Gone Girl and Wild. The drop in sophistication and competence is startling.

Witherspoon’s Officer Cooper fends off cartel tough guys and cops on the take as she races through Texas with Sofia Vergara’s Daniella Riva, a Colombian drug lord’s widow. It’s as if the filmmakers intend to pull off a female version of reluctant buddy movies like 48 HRS. and Midnight Run. “My daughter was 13, and I wanted her to see movies with female leads and heroes and life stories,” Witherspoon told Variety about her reasons for founding the company. Her producing partner, Bruna Papandrea, added: “What attracts us is character and a funny, unique voice, regardless of genre.”

But the characters of the secretly smart, sexy drug moll and the driven, boyish policewoman are retro clichés, even if we’re supposed to see their grudging respect and eventual bonding as signs of female empowerment. The kind of “voice” Papandrea means—writing that expresses genuine observation and personality—is exactly what Hot Pursuit lacks. You can imagine its odd-couple gags about a fiery Latina and an uptight gringa being punched out on antique IBM cards from some primitive comedy database.

Thanks to the stars, the movie has plenty of non-literary “voice.” Vergara stamps all of Riva’s lines with her own erotic huskiness—the tantalizing timbre that can turn a kvetch into a come-on. Unfortunately, Witherspoon adopts a pinched rat-a-tat-tat delivery; Cooper sounds like her antiheroine Tracy Flick from Election (99) on helium and methamphetamine. Witherspoon acts so jacked-up from the start that a potentially hilarious gag about Cooper and Riva getting coated in cocaine is merely worrisome. You fear that Witherspoon’s toy-size, wind-up cop is finally going to pop her springs.

At first it can be amusing to hear Vergara luxuriate in Riva’s putdowns of Cooper: “You’re so teeny-tiny, you’re like a little dog I can put in my purse!” But the comedy is not just repetitive—it’s also woefully one-sided, because the writers (David Feeney and John Quaintance) misjudge their effects. They think we’ll find Cooper more diverting than annoying when she spits out rules and regs. They position Cooper as the crazy comic and Riva as the curvy straight (wo)man. As it plays out, Riva functions as sporadic comic relief in an abysmal comedy.

Neither performer phones it in, but there’s a disconnect between the herky-jerky storytelling and the nonstop patter. At one bewildering juncture, the women elude a police blockade by pretending to be a single deer, wandering on the side of the road. (In an absurd coincidence, they’ve found an antlers-to-tail deerskin in the back of a pickup.) Even if you suspend disbelief for the sake of hijinks, the stupefying part comes when they set out to rejoin the only man who’s helping them—Cooper’s romantic salvation, a virile, chivalric hooligan, aptly named Randy (Robert Kazinsky). He’s been driving them toward Dallas in a truck. You hear Cooper say, “Now let’s go find Randy,” and that’s it. At moments like that, when crude expository lines get pasted on images like captions, the stars might as well be doing voiceovers.

In a revealing instance of closing-credit outtakes being more charming than the film itself, Witherspoon and Vergara really do appear to enjoy each other as performers. But by then they have failed to persuade us that Cooper and Riva spark as characters. The obligatory pretend-lesbian scene would fall embarrassingly flat were it not for the equally predictable presence of an ogling, gun-toting farmer, played with gusto by down-to-earth comic Jim Gaffigan.

Hot Pursuit has bad luck and poor judgment: today’s audiences won’t automatically love a gung-ho cop like Cooper. At the start of the film, she’s been busted to the property room in her San Antonio precinct because she was quick to use her Taser on an innocent teenager. (This supposedly uproarious subplot isn’t as disastrous as it could be—as least the boy is white and privileged.) It’s an unfortunate way of establishing why she’s the worst kind of department joke—the kind that becomes a verb, as in, “You really Coopered that one”—and also why she’s super-eager to take the assignment of escorting Riva to Dallas for the trial of a cartel leader.

The problem isn’t just one or two myopic sight gags. It’s that Hot Pursuit is as muddled as it is shallow, even for silly escapism. Cooper’s friendship with Riva is supposed to loosen her up. She sees that operating strictly by the book has been crippling her emotionally and professionally. She warms to the convicted felon Randy when she learns that his only crime was beating up women-beating men. But she also bends the rules so that Riva, her high-living new bestie, will still be a millionaire when she gets out of prison. It’s a sour and superfluous touch, because Riva has already demonstrated that her “feminine wiles” make her a winner no matter how constricted the surroundings. Even her jailers love her.

Anne Fletcher is one of the few dancer-choreographers to become a director. She was an associate choreographer on the exuberant movie-musical version of Hairspray (07), boasts choreography credits on a number of other musical and non-musical films (including The 40-Year-Old Virgin), and made her directorial debut with the smash teen-dance movie Step Up (06). Her biggest hit so far, The Proposal (09), was a slick, shameless rom-com that should have generated more chemistry between the always game Sandra Bullock and the affable, inventive Ryan Reynolds. But Fletcher may have a blind spot: for long stretches she let Bullock mistake a robotic verbal attack for a comic style, just as Witherspoon does here. Fletcher did her most skillful and appealing work in 2012’s unfairly pilloried The Guilt Trip, adjusting her tempo to the rhythms of two idiosyncratic leads: Barbra Streisand at her most casual and skillful, and Seth Rogen at his most hangdog and likable. In Hot Pursuit, her eye for movement produces conceivably effective setups, including Riva dragging her designer-shoe-filled suitcase and the diminutive Cooper (who’s trying to stop her), or Witherspoon making Cooper’s climb up a saloon men’s room wall to a high window seem as momentous as scaling Yosemite’s Half Dome — by hand. What’s missing is the confident, intuitive vision that would unify the banter, the caricatures, and the cartoon compositions—and detonate the expected belly laughs. Or maybe the script was just too lousy.

Witherspoon is actually funnier in Wild, especially when struggling with an overstuffed backpack, even though her character, Cheryl Strayed, is desperate and melancholy. Whenever Witherspoon can combine her savvy, instincts and smarts, as she did in Walk the Line (05) and early on, in Freeway (96), she’s a great performer, illuminating every dimension of her roles and coming up with comic or dramatic surprises, like the way she conjures moments of cringe-inducing dramedy and heartbreak with Cheryl’s collegiate condescension toward her mother. Even when she puts together just two or three of her best qualities, she can be tremendously engaging, as in Pleasantville (98). And she can act like a genuine movie star, with deft comic timing and instant audience rapport, as in the crowd-pleasing Legally Blonde (01).

In a Los Angeles Times feature on the film, Rebecca Keegan describes the star as cultivating a “proper, Southern-belle persona filtered through a type-A personality.” Witherspoon herself labeled her first production company “Type A.” But how many moviegoers or celebrity-watchers see her that way? She did have a run of turkeys after Legally Blonde, including Legally Blonde 2, playing calculating women in calculated performances. But she’s been on a rough-and-ready roll ever since her standout appearance in Jeff Nichols’s Mud (12); she even brought some saltiness and sass to the socially conscious heart-warmer The Good Lie (14).

When I interviewed her for Walk the Line, the only time her voice tensed over the phone came after I asked whether it was a relief to play a fluid woman like June Carter following a string of shrewd gals in films like Just Like Heaven (05). “I know I don't play stupid well,” she said. “I don't know how to do ‘I don't think.’ I can't get that dumb, vapid look. If you want dumb and pretty, don't come to me.” Maybe that answers the question I first asked in this piece: why would she choose to act in this screwy nothing of a movie? In Hot Pursuit she tries to parody what she perceives as her own hyper-rational excesses. Like Officer Cooper, she tries too hard.

In Quentin Dupieux’s Reality, Jason (Alain Chabat), a struggling French director in L.A., pitches an idea for a science-fiction movie named Waves (“Like ‘microwaves’,” he explains). In it, TV sets emit waves that suck the intelligence out of their viewers and reduce humanity to a state of imbecility. “Science fiction,” nods the producer approvingly.

Satirical or otherwise—the fact that it might be doesn’t seem to have dawned on Jason—Waves is no better or worse an idea for a movie than one in which the antihero is a misunderstood rubber tire which goes on a righteous killing spree. Quentin Dupieux has already made that movie, Rubber (10). Amid its other oddities, Reality briefly posits an alternative reality in which there’s also a Rubber 2, glimpsed on the marquee of the cinema where, to Jason’s horror, Waves is showing before he’s even made it. “You can’t watch it,” he rants at a puzzled audience, “this film doesn’t exist yet!”

Watching Reality, you do feel somewhat as if you’re watching a film that doesn’t really exist. It feels more like a sketch for a hypothetical movie that’s too preposterous to actually make, but fun to simply evoke, in a cool, hyper-detached way, its purely theoretical status signaled by multiple layers of metafictional movie-within-movie-within-dream-within-movie nesting. The jiggery-pokery begins with the title: “Reality” is both the name of the film and of its ostensible heroine, a little girl (the implacably scowling Kyla Kenedy), whose levelheaded refusal to fall for grown-ups’ lies and fiction-making fripperies represents a solid base of clarity to this nebulous net of confusion. Note: Reality the girl and Reality the film are not strictly one and the same—the actual title seen in the opening credits is Réalité. I’m not sure how much this matters, although it’s intriguing that what presents itself as a very American movie is stamped discreetly but decisively from the start with le French touch, whatever that may be.

Reality/té is, literally, an English-language American movie (with a bit of French dialogue) made by an expat French director—but it’s also a sort of joke on the very idea of what a Frenchman with a self-consciously surreal worldview (and a no-less-self-conscious maverick complex) might get up to on the margins of Hollywood. Quentin Dupieux’s career so far feels like a conceptual joke about itself: starting out as a dance musician under the name of Mr. Oizo (his videos and ads with the puppet Flat Eric were a late-Nineties cult favorite), he made a luridly offbeat comedy—Steak (07), with French duo Eric et Ramzy—before moving to the States for films including Rubber (famously shot on the Canon 5D stills camera) and Wrong Cops (13), which featured a juicy bit of stunt casting: Marilyn Manson as a gawky high-schooler.

Dupieux can generally be counted on to get juicily negative reviews in English-language publications (“mind-numbingly unfunny,” Variety said of Reality), but has ’em slavering in the august (OK, once-august) chambers of Cahiers du cinéma, which celebrated Reality in its February issue by devoting four articles to it (one by Dupieux) and an interview, all under its Evénement (Event) rubric. Unloved overseas, revered by the loftiest minds at home: one hesitates to say it, but in Dupieux, France may finally have created its own hipster Jerry Lewis.

Reality, I have to say, is kind of a bore—but then, it is, after a fashion, supposed to be. One of its running jokes is a drearily lugubrious TV cookery show hosted by a man (Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder) who clearly doesn’t have his heart in it, or in anything; and the film’s score is Philip Glass’s rigorously affectless 1971 piece Music With Changing Parts. Like Glass’s piece, Dupieux’s film rattles on and on, but does gently mutate, by and by. The overall effect is comic, but it’s a comedy of cumulative effect, and weirdly narcotized; if we laugh at all, it’s like doing so under hypnosis.

There’s no real center to the film, more a set of strands knotted round each other, like a cat’s cradle that never finds a defining shape. Reality is out with her dad when he shoots a wild boar; when he guts it, among its artificially rubbery-looking innards is a VHS cassette, which tweaks her curiosity. TV host Dennis (Heder) presents his cookery show while wearing a rat suit that causes him to scratch uncontrollably, which disgusts his viewers—who apparently weren’t disgusted in the first place by a man-size rat overseeing the preparation of a Strawberry Charlotte. Jason, a cameraman on the show, pitches his movie Waves to an archetypal easily distracted despot of a producer (French actor Jonathan Lambert)—who, despite being called Bob Marshall, appears to be as French as Jason. Bob says he’ll finance Waves, on the condition that Jason provides him with the best groan ever to grace a movie—an Oscar groan, no less. Obsessively pursuing this quest, Jason (played with affable intensity by Alain Chabat, normally the most mainstream of French comic actors) dreams of winning the Best Groan award at an Academy ceremony presided over by Michel Hazanavicius and former Catherine Breillat ingénue Roxane Mesquida. It could happen, I suppose. But it’s hard to decide whether Dupieux has set out to make an American movie parodying French filmmakers like himself, or a French parody of American notions about French eccentricity. Meanwhile, incidents that appear to be happening for real turn out to be scenes from a film made by another director entirely, one Zog (John Glover). (Is there an in-joke here about Zog, the one-time king of Albania? Is Dupieux really, secretly parodying the arcane outer limits of Albanian cinema? One can only reply with a shrug of the shoulders and a nonplussed Gallic Bof…).

Reality seems so nonchalant about its somewhat mechanical strangeness that the effect is not so much “WTF?”, more “where-exactly-are-you-going-with-this?” As the film proceeds, you feel rather like a producer (or a Variety reviewer) in a hurry, impatiently glancing at your watch while waiting to be impressed. For a long time, Reality doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, or anywhere particularly new—the mise-en-abyme dream structure is a little bit late Buñuel, a great deal David Lynch, the whole thing slightly resembling a more orderly, daylit Inland Empire with all its neuroses tightly repressed. One twist is right out of Lost Highway—Jason phones Bob, only to find that the producer is already in the middle of a conversation with Jason himself. There’s nothing here to freak you out, really—especially given that Dupieux alerts us to his game early on by having Jason’s analyst wife (Élodie Bouchez) reading a book called Endless Mirrors.

Even the most dedicated lover of hallucinatory Möbius-strip narrative would have cause to complain that the déjà vu factor in Reality isn’t so much a function, more a reflection on Dupieux’s running some very well-worn Surrealist software. And yet, for all this, there’s something strangely intriguing about Reality—starting with the improbability of Dupieux making the film in the first place. In Rubber, he charmed and alienated viewers in equal proportions by having a character turn to camera and pontificate on the rationale of “No reason” being the true motivating principle of movies. And what’s actually quite alluring about Reality is this very gratuitousness*: it may have been done before, but why not simply do it again, and carry on doing it, in a way that finally becomes as hypnotic as early Philip Glass? After all, there’s no harm in it: it can’t reduce you to an imbecile state or make your head explode and gush Troma-style torrents of blood, as the TVs do in Waves.

It’s almost as if Dupieux—who also shoots and edits his own films—had made Reality purely for the sheer hell of adding another Quentin Dupieux movie to his IMDb listing. You can imagine him carrying on up in the Hollywood Hills obsessively making movies for his own amusement forever—just like an older French eccentric, writer-director Jean-Pierre Mocky, now 81, who has pretty much managed to turn out a film a year since 1959, purely it seems for his own cantankerous pleasure (for stretches of his career, he’s also owned a cinema to show them in). And if that’s what Dupieux were doing, how could you possibly complain? Good for him for dreaming himself into existence, like a character in a Quentin Dupieux movie. True, Reality could be more entertaining or more original—but then you could say the same about the supposed ontological state that it’s named after.

* An example of the film’s sheer gratuitousness: it features a fleeting cameo by French musician Thomas Bangalter (who also happens to be Monsieur Élodie Bouchez). But what’s the point of casting Bangalter in a cameo? After all, no one knows what he looks like—he’s usually only ever seen wearing a shiny helmet as one half of Daft Punk.**

** For a further in-joke riff on the fact that no one knows (or cares) what Daft Punk look like with the helmets off, see Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, coming later this year.

We met in the late ’60s. I was at French Film Office, Andrew Sarris at the Village Voice, Mary soon-to-be-Corliss at MoMA and Richard, at, I think, New Times—the four of us on the brink of 40-plus-year marriages whose lifeblood was movies.

Corliss was a leading light of the “heroic age of movie criticism,” a second-generation votary (and sometimes critic and mediator) of the passionate and influential and argumentative cinephilia of Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael. But he was entirely his own man, championing screenwriters, in a book (Talking Pictures) that should be more widely known. He was extremely funny, a punster, bubbling over with thoughts and ideas, a performer, someone whose facility and wit, most apparent in the enforced compression of Time magazine style, could mask an extraordinary breadth of knowledge. He wrote long, scholarly (but never “academic”) articles for FILM COMMENT and introduced fresh voices as its editor. He also sounded the alarm for the future of film criticism when he wrote a timely (if friendly) attack on his colleague Roger Ebert for the new “thumbs-up” style of consumer movie reviewing.

Still, it was as if he had been born to write for Time. He once said he’d been auditioning for the magazine since his teenage years. A devotee of wordplay, he loved the challenge, and the freedom to write about any and everything from yoga to Las Vegas to theater. He adapted to the online format like the space-starved word juggler he was.

Time was his berth, in the literal as well as metaphoric sense, as he passed many an all-nighter on its premises. He was forever youthful, more responsive to the kid-centric blockbuster talents of Spielberg and Lucas than some of his peers. His tastes were sometimes mainstream, but as often (for his middle-of-the-road readers) esoterically eccentric. He was an early fan of Hong Kong cinema, and I can remember at Cannes when he was the first to champion the Australian apocalyptic road movie Mad Max.

Dark, handsome, and bear-like (eye candy, in fact!), he liked and loved women (though his heart was devoted to one), and wrote acutely sensitive think pieces on actresses (did he ever call them actors?) in the context of changing roles.

He left such a blizzard of good prose and provocative commentary, it will take a while to sift through it, and comprehend just how very good he was. His death is a great shock and sadness—I will miss him terribly, his voice, his enthusiasms, his connection to the past.

Looking and listening: the late, great filmmaker Albert Maysles (1926-2015) is the subject of our May/June 2015 cover story. Chris Boeckmann pays tribute to the documentarian’s attuned filmmaking with close readings of his classic documentaries (Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens) and his lesser-known later portraits. Then, to ensure a healthy case of reader whiplash, we proudly present our latest special midsection, Korea Prospects II, a grand follow-up to our 2004 survey, showcasing that country’s continuingly vibrant cinema. Featuring: guest midsection editor Goran Topalovic on Korean cinema’s decade of hard-charging successes, Tony Rayns on Hong Sangsoo and Jang Jin, Samuel Jamier on gangster cinema, Darcy Paquet on independent film and the Busan International Film Festival, and, last but not least, an A-Z of filmmakers by Pierce Conran, Grady Hendrix, and Tom Vick, and a directory of actors by Jean Noh.

In a special essay, Kent Jones writes about the often embattled place of storytelling in film, even (or sometimes especially) among cinema’s most ardent devotees. Quintín cracks the code of seriocomic Argentine trailblazer Martín Rejtman, director of Two Shots Fired and a thoroughly original voice. European Editor Olaf Möller delves into the work of another under-sung filmmaker, Dominik Graf, a genre veteran of German screens large and small with his finger on the pulse of a changing nation. Möller also reports on the latest Berlin Film Festival, while our usual array of exclusive news, columns, and niblets awaits in the latest Opening Shots.

Speaking of which, May/June also features the exciting debut of director Matías Piñeiro’s new column on performance, In the Moment, which kicks off with Carole Lombard in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Plus: Chuck Stephens on Hope Emerson, Eric Hynes on Khalik Allah, Alex Cox on Francesco Rosi’s The Moment of Truth, and Philip Brophy on Sion Sono’s hip-hop musical. And in our reviews section: Michael Sragow on Far from the Madding Crowd, Kristin M. Jones on Eden, Chris Norris on Love & Mercy, Amy Taubin on Results, Violet Lucca on Reality, Nathan Lee on Jupiter Ascending, Laura Kern on an album of VHS cover art, and Kent Jones on an essential new book on rhythm in film by Lea Jacobs.

View the full Table of Contents for May/June 2015, with links to articles. To subscribe to FILM COMMENT, click here.

The Idiots

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle lays bare every facet of the writer’s life, from his favorite bands to the humiliating details of his sexual failures. Perhaps the only thing we aren’t privy to are his opinions on cinema, which is why it was such an unusual pleasure to hear him talk about Lars von Trier’s 1998 film The Idiots, shown as part of Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Print Screen series. Knausgaard was in town promoting the English translation of My Struggle volume four (of six), recently published by Archipelago Books.

Talking Heads, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Led Zeppelin resound throughout the pages of volume four of Knausgaard’s epic autobiographical novel, covering his late-teenage years in Norway. These groups offer the younger Knausgaard a glimpse of transcendence: “I never worked out what it was that possessed me when music possessed me, other than that I always wanted it.” Movies, however, are not a similar source of the sublime in these books, but merely a diversion, as when Knausgaard tries and fails to borrow a VHS of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was surprising, then, to hear how much von Trier’s film had influenced Knausgaard in his search for a new style of writing.

The Idiots remains von Trier’s first and only film certified by the Dogme95 movement, which he co-founded with director Thomas Vinterberg. In the stripped-down, handheld-shot film, a group of performance artists commit themselves to “spazzing,” acting like children or the mentally disabled in public places. What starts as a Danish Jackass eventually returns to the sad realities of the performers’ lives back home—a move Knausgaard described as the “veil between art and reality being taken away.”  He compared von Trier’s film to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The 1869 novel portrays a simple man of no irony or calculation, and positions him against society, which reveals itself to be a performance, a collapsing circus. Von Trier inverts the premise, starting with the performance and ending with the brute simplicity and tragedies of the characters’ lives.

The Idiots

The Idiots was released around the same time that Knausgaard’s debut Out of the World was published, and after watching it, the writer said he realized “my novel was crap.” He responded to the film’s elemental, unadorned style, and the way in which von Trier was a “brilliant manipulator.” (“I cried even though I knew what was taking place.”) He judges The Idiots alongside the poetry of Stig Larsson (not to be confused with the crime writer) as works of art that generated the same feeling, works that get closer to reality. In My Struggle, Knausgaard aimed to get away from materiality of language, something he was focused on in his twenties. Churning out five pages a day, he said, he focused on images and feelings; the language was unimportant. He wanted to get out of his own head, avoid his own cleverness and intellect, and achieve a more direct, intuitive form of expression. Knausgaard’s work does so without von Trier’s emotional manipulation, but it was informed and influenced by the mission of Dogme95.

Knausgaard is no cinephile. While generally dismissive of his home country’s film business—“We’re not used to good films in Norway”—he was enthused about the work of Joachim Trier (Reprise, Oslo August 31st). But when asked by FSLC director of programming Dennis Lim whether any other films or filmmakers had as much of an impact on him as von Trier, he chose one shot from Solaris. Not the film as a whole, but an image from the section on Earth, of raindrops falling into cups. In this image the story dissolved into something else, something more concrete. “How far can you bend a film before it becomes meaningless?” he asked. He poses a similar question in My Struggle, in which exhaustive detailing of everyday tasks makes up the narrative. My Struggle is the image of those cups stretched to 3,600 pages. These nothing moments are the first things that would get cut out of any film adaptation, which is why he has rejected all offers to film the books (so far).

But Knausgaard is working on adapting Out of the World into a screenplay, which he described as the “most difficult thing I’ve done.” Not accustomed to the format, he at first had all the characters introducing themselves at the beginning of every scene. He’s on the fifth draft of the script now—and feels that he’s made progress by adding a voiceover.

Since her 1955 debut feature La Pointe Courte, the work of Agnès Varda has managed to reflect the interior and exterior worlds of her and her subjects in playful, insightful ways, regardless of genre or format (feature or short, digital or film). Her voiceover narration in documentaries like The Gleaners and I (00), The Beaches of Agnès (08), and the five-part series Agnès Varda: From Here to There (12) is direct and conversational, breaking down complex subjects of repurposing in the context of Western capitalism, loss, and art history into understandable and funny pieces. This wry sensibility is also evident in the portmanteau words that pepper these voiceovers, or how she describes her own practice as cinécriture or “cinema writing.” This avowed feminist’s approach isn’t necessarily a refutation of dominant aesthetics, but rather what simply flows forth, depending on where she is in her own life: the challenges faced by the unhappy couple of La Pointe Courte, made when Varda was in her twenties, are geographically and emotionally distinct from the type of problems the divorced, single mother of Documenteur: An Emotion Picture (81) is struggling to find answers to, but both are painfully “real.”

On Saturday it was announced that Varda would receive an honorary Palme d’Or at the close of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which begins on Wednesday. While it’s an impressive accolade—she’s only the fourth director to be given this award—the 86-year-old Varda in my experience has little interest in proving anything to anyone, and still insists on doing everything in a manner that lives up to her own rigorous standards. I note this with the utmost respect: at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s recent retrospective as part of Art of the Real, I spoke with Varda near the end of her shorts program. We were chatting about Ulysse (82) while walking to a quiet place to conduct the interview—in a way that I thought was totally informal—when, upon seeing me pull out my recorder, she suddenly looked me straight in the eyes and asked with surprise: “You’re not [already] recording this? Let’s go!” What follows is our lively exchange, beginning in medias res...

Photo by Julie Cunnah, 2015. 

[Varda continues]  Each film has its history, its beauty or not beauty, and its meaning.  The meaning can change over the years for people who watch the film, because there is a lot of evolution in the sense of history, the sense of understanding.  But when you speak about 35 millimeter or DCP or video, it’s unimportant. The film is what it is, but what is different are the people who made the film.  I change.  I wouldn’t do the same film today about Cuba or about the planters or about women.  Each film has a date glued to it.  And what we try is to overcome the date and make a meaning that can be more than ’62 or ’61 or whatever.  But still, even Cleo from 5 to 7, which deals with a temporal history about being afraid of an illness, being afraid of dying, still has in the film itself a purpose— we include for example the radio broadcasts telling the news of the time. Or in Kung-fu Master!, you have the awareness of AIDS in ’87. I think that we try to escape the limits of history and the time, but still I like to have a point that gives a date to the film, and not make believe that it’s nowhere, no time.

Your 1983 series One Minute for One Image deals with that time-specific aspect. There’s a photograph, followed by someone’s interpretation in voiceover, and then only at the very end you give information about when it was taken, who shot it, and who was interpreting it.

Yes, because as you know, if I tell you it’s a famous photograph—Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Mapplethorpe—you will be impressed.  You will say “Masterpiece!” It was important for me not to say who took the picture, and not to say who’s speaking. And people would go: “Oh! I didn’t know he made that kind of photo.” Or “I didn’t know he would say that.” And sometimes people couldn’t recognize the voice.  That series is rarely seen because it’s difficult to access now. When it came out, One Minute for One Image was on every night at 11 p.m. just before the news. People were faithful to the series, and then the day after, Libération would reproduce the photo with part of the narration and the name. We were like a team with the TV and newspaper, and we did it 170 times. I worked on it in a hurry every day to made sure we delivered.

I learned a lot about how people can look at an image and load it with different feelings—the same image. Even in Ulysse which you just saw, I leave the photo on screen for 15 to 20 seconds—with nothing—so that as a viewer, you start to question: “What is the goal? Is she dead? What is this shot looking at? What is the man looking at?” Then you build your own view, impressions, story. Maybe you think it’s beautiful or meaningless, and that’s so important. That’s what I worked on in this film. Even if I do my narration, which leads you here and there, then the image comes back with no words and you look at it anew. I don’t know how you, Violet, saw that image of Ulysses.

Ulysse

I thought it was a sad image of absence, the absence of women. I didn’t assign a gender to the goat immediately. There were only these outlines of masculinity, facing away from the camera and not really looking at each other.

See, one of my interpretations is that it’s an image of a father and mother, like the mother lying with a big belly, which is one of the images of motherhood, hot and uncomfortable.  And the man standing, looking at the future and the child in between those. What impressed me is that when that child [Ulysses] made the drawing after the photo, he brought the figures together so that little boy is touching the man. In the photo, the boy’s separated from the man. It’s so interesting: nobody wants to be alone. And that child grew up to be a man who doesn’t remember that day, but that child was saying something.

I love that film, and especially that part where the children are talking about what they think. The different meanings they come up with are fascinating.

I like when they say: “Photography is more true.” It’s interesting because it seems obvious that photography is the truth, but it was not obvious for them to look at the image and the painting, and then decide: “It’s more human. It’s true.” I always learn a lot through what people see in films, in images, in whatever. I allow myself some time to express what I had in mind, but that doesn’t mean that people who view the film have to have it. In one of my films that’s about to be re-released, Kung-fu Master!, it’s a story about a woman of 40, played by Jane Birkin, who falls in love with a boy of 15.

With your son, Mathieu Demy.

Yes, played by my son. I purposely separated the scenes with a pause—not silence, maybe some music and noise—just some time for the viewer to react to what he just saw. Is he disturbed? Does he agree? Is it painful or curious? And then we go again. I intentionally gave the viewer the distance to remain himself or herself, and enjoy what they saw and be themselves the way that they look at it. I think it’s very important, but it cannot be in action films, which are very, very [makes her hands shake]—the story grabs you so much that you are just into the story from the beginning to the end. You are hooked. You are addicted. I was trying to make a cinema in which people are not “stolen.” I don’t steal you. I like people to remain themselves in the theater and feel that maybe they’ll enjoy themselves, maybe they’ll cry, but that they’ll have something to say. That seems what’s important to me. Even in Vagabond, you have these witnesses speaking. Then she walks. When she walks, there are no words. While she walks, 13 times in the film for one minute, you have time to yourself to feel something about her. Or maybe you don’t like her. You have no sympathy for her because she is not sympathetic. Maybe you feel sorry for her. Maybe you feel mad at her, et cetera. And I like the idea that you remain yourself, conscious of who you are.

7p., cuis., s. de b., … à saisir

In Vagabond, these testimonies are separated by 13 tracking shots, which reminds me of 7p., cuis., s. de b., … à saisir (84), the short film you did about the doctor and his family living in a hospice. There are similar tracking shots, moving left to right across different windows, that also break up the vignettes.

You see that trees surround the house, like they’re imprisoning the family. It’s not like: “Ah! Beautiful to have a tree in front of the window.” Sometimes, the leaves in the trees blow in a peaceful way. Sometimes when there’s anger, or when the father slaps his daughter, there is a tempest outside. I had to wait to take advantage of the real weather. It’s using the natural movement of nature as an interpretation of what we feel or what they feel or what the character feels. It’s using observation and at the same time the presentation of the image. In itself it says nothing, but if you use it to say something, it says what you wish.

Is that the key to cinécriture?

Cinécriture means “cine-writing.” I say that many times because people say when they speak about a film, they say, “It’s well-written.” They think about the dialogue, which can be well-written or bad. For me, a film is not written by the screenplay or the dialogue, it’s written by the way of the filming. The choices that you have to make between still shot or traveling shot, color or black-and-white, speedy way of acting or slow-motion or whatever, all these choices, and the lens you choose, and the camera you choose, and then the editing, and then the music or not, and the mixing—all these choices all the way through the film, all through the making of the film, that’s what cine-writing is. It’s like the style in a way. I never say “it’s well-written” because I know then people think about dialogue. So, I say, “it’s well cine-written.”

You’re talking about building on an emotion, rather than a story. For someone who maybe wants to unlearn what they were taught in film school, where they emphasize story and having precise motivations for every creative choice, what would you suggest?

It’s not bad that they teach how to express emotion, how there are some tricks—and they are good tricks too—speed up the process of rhythms or to build an emotion or build fear. It’s good to make it well. We have seen Hitchcock films—which are not bad to tell the truth—made with the system that are really organized and masterful.  But I’m more touched by people who don’t really use the technique and the system. Some of Cassavetes’ films put me to tears. A Woman Under the Influence is beautifully shot.  It’s not that it’s not technique, but it follows emotions more than the trick to make it believable. I think that schools are good to learn. The American system or the French system for the mainstream are good, and they do good films. I really love some films. We had Jonathan Demme visit, and I remember The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. He has a film right now that I’d like to see, Ricki and the Flash, the film he just made with Meryl Streep as a rock singer. Some years later, she comes back to her family that she has sort of abandoned. So I’m sure it’s good. But the same Jonathan some time made some documentaries. And like I said, we are at the service of what we shoot when we do a documentary.

But in a fiction, we are the master—the writer, the author, the king of everything, the queen of everything—even though we are timid and not knowing if we’re doing it well and not sure of what we do. I’m not totally sure, I just do it the way I think it should be, but that doesn’t mean I have the right to do so. I say, when you do a fiction, tell yourself it will go well and it will. Going back to documentary is a school of modesty, and going back to the people that you’ve filmed, and listening to them. They have a lot to say. Sometimes it seems stupid. Sometimes they think you don’t want to even hear, but that’s what teaches us. It teaches us that we know nothing about the world. Everybody has something to tell… I really like Ulysse. Ulysse is such an interesting consideration about what an image is. Did you see it that way?

Agnès Varda: From Here to There

Yes, definitely. I wanted to ask you, because you get into the subject of using a still image versus a moving one a little bit in the TV series From Here to There, in the first episode.

Yes, and I speak about the photo in this.

Yes, and you demonstrate the difference between still photography and moving images for the viewers.  When you’re creating a documentary, how do you know—

Yes, but how do we know about people? When I took that image, another one on a terrace, I [took a] snapshot. And I asked myself: why did he come in that time and that place? Why did I happen to do this and get six people in the image? The little boy with the parents, a woman taking a snapshot, a woman and a man, maybe they meet. They didn’t know themselves at all. I used my imagination [for what happened] before the snapshot [was taken].

Once, at a film school, they gave the students the same image of the terrace, and asked them to invent a screenplay from that image, without showing them mine. And my interpretation could be true, could be totally fake, we will never know, because that was in ’54, and I will never know—’56 I think. It’s not a question of memory. I didn’t know. I should’ve asked at the time. “OK, do you know each other? What is your name? How old are you?” which is not the case. Now it’s become fashionable to take an agency photo, analyze it and ask, “Hey, you see that, think it over. In the corner, you see that? OK, this is a shot that we took in the streets of Hanoi.” And then, what do we see in it? What could we imagine?

We are interpreting all the time, and cinema and photography are a reproduction of reality. It’s not reality, it’s a reproduction. And the way we look at it, we make another step, by interpreting what we see, and discovering meanings that maybe were never in that image or never in the situation. But with a simple situation, you can make it a drama, because you noticed she had a strange look and you start to build some meaning. I think besides cinema and photography, everybody’s relationship with images is very important. What you build is based on your own personality, no?

Yes, definitely. And I think that’s also true of music. To return to Ulysse for a moment, you used the music from La Pointe Courte. In the film, you are talking about how you have a very distinct memory of making La Pointe Courte, but you don’t remember the motivations behind that photo, which was taken the same year.

Yes, but that’s why I made the film, because the image was questioning me. I had the painting of the boy in my closet. He remembers the painting as an adult, because it was in my place. Look at the other man [Fouli Elia]: he remembers his shirt, his shoes. And he doesn’t remember who he was. We have strange ways of dealing with memory. We remember details, things of no importance, I would say.

The Gleaners and I

Would you talk briefly about the decisions, or your philosophy, behind choosing music for your documentaries?

It depends. Sometimes it’s better silent, as it is. On some documentaries, it fits the subject, like in the Gleaners [which features Varda rapping]. I know all these people who rap. They’re rap singers. They are on the side of contestation. They are on the side of being mad at society. They are the side of recovering what’s being wasted. They are the ones who have been related clearly to the gleaners, so I asked [who could] do it. I gave them some words, and they rapped about what it is if you have nothing and have to find something.

I try to understand what fits the subject. For Ulysse, the music of La Pointe Courte fit perfectly because it’s the same era and feelings. For Kung-fu Master!, I had very sweet music by Joanna Bruzdowicz, the same woman who did Vagabond—very strong, very difficult music. We even called it “difficult music,” but it’s beautiful because I hate when the music is just accompanying the action. Sweeping violin and then love, and then, boom, boom, boom for fear. So with Vagabond, I separated the music. It’s only when she walks, so you could only hear the music, and her steps on different material in the field, on the street, on the dry leaves, on the sand, so that we know the material she walks on and the music, nothing else. The action isn’t underscored by the music. I thought about all these things, and in many films I thought of a way to use the music to push with the same feeling.

And with that, Varda was whisked away to take questions after a screening of Salut les Cubains (63). The theater was packed.

Like many artists who straddle different mediums, Argentine filmmaker and novelist Martín Rejtman has alternated his focus over the course over his 28-year career, which in part explains the half-decade gap between his latest feature and 2009’s Elementary Training for Actors, which he co-directed with Federico Leon. Elementary was an adaptation of one of his books—he’s also adapted two others, Rapado (92) and Silvia Prieto (99)—but Two Shots Fired is an original screenplay.

Rejtman sustains a unique energy across all of his work, which combines droll dialogue with screwball-inspired situations and chance. In Two Shots Fired, 18-year-old Mariano (Rafael Federman) finds a revolver in his mother’s house and shoots himself in the stomach and head, but survives without lasting physical effects, save for an odd harmonic that’s only audible while he plays in a medieval flute quartet. His distraught mother (Susana Pampin) insists that he carry her clunky old cell phone with him at all times, even though it constantly emits shrieking reminders of long since missed calls. Without a job or any responsibilities to speak of, Mariano drifts along, sometimes engaging with the respective social circles of his mother and brother. As the routines and rhythms of these two sets of characters mirror and oppose each other, Rejtman paints a deft portrait of ennui in present-day Buenos Aires.

FILM COMMENT digital editor Violet Lucca spoke with Rejtman in August immediately following its first screening at the Locarno Film Festival. Two Shots Fired screens at NYFF on Monday, September 29th.

In this film and in The Magic Gloves, mental illness is definitely not the whole story, but it’s present, shaping the action. What draws you to that theme, or that element?

I really don’t know. I mean, my father was a manic-depressive, but that’s too personal. I don’t think that has a direct relationship with whatever I write—it’s just one more element. My way of working mixes together biographical elements, things that I witness, things that I read, and things that I steal from other movies. And then I put it together. People think that maybe there’s a special personal relationship with things, but sometimes there is not. In this film, the music quartet is there because I was involved in one when I was a kid, but there are many other things that I didn’t have any relationship to.

I didn’t even mean it on a personal level, I just meant as an element of the story. What draws you to it?

Thanks for making the question more interesting, because I always take it like, “Oh, I have to answer from the personal!” [Laughs] In Two Shots Fired, Mariano shoots himself twice: is it mental illness or not? For me it’s not. In The Magic Gloves, they take pills and drink, and nothing seems to affect anybody—it seems that these things aren’t really effective. It’s a way of showing how in life you go on, and things don’t affect you so much, and you still go on, and you still go on. Mental illness is one more of these things that is supposed to affect you deeply, and in my films it doesn’t. These characters are still part of a plot that is larger than their own lives.

You always maintain a substantial distance from your characters. Why do you prefer that approach?

I’m not very attracted to this flamboyant way of making films that makes the shot the principal thing in a film. I don’t like to make fancy shots, because I think they call too much attention to themselves. I try to find the right distance in terms of how much attention I pay to the characters, how much attention I want the audience to pay to the characters and to the story and to the scenes. This is a very delicate balance in terms of acting, in terms of position of the camera, in terms of editing. Sometimes I do it in the right way, sometimes I don’t. I also try just to use certain things with real care. For example, if you use too many close-ups, they’re not effective. When you have three or four close-ups in a film, they are there for a reason. It’s like getting the right energy. It’s also a matter of musicality and rhythm, and the size of the shots is part of the music, no?

Do you end up writing a lot more and then cutting things out as you edit, or is basically what you write the final version?

What I write is the final thing in terms of dialogue, usually. And in this film I just left some scenes out. I usually don’t.

Such as?

When they bring Lucía from the coast, there was another scene dropping Ana at the shopping mall, and she was getting back to work right then. And she was meeting her boyfriend there. I left that out. It was more direct to go to Lucía.

When you’re establishing these rhythms, do you shoot from multiple angles and have a lot of excess, or do you have it all worked out in your mind, you get it in the camera, and then work with that?

There isn’t excess, but I don’t have it in my mind either. I find it more and more during the shoot. Before, I used to draw storyboards, and nowadays I’m less precise. I have to confess that working on this film was like making a film for the first time. I was kind of lost during the shoot, never knew what to do, and I had to find my way little by little. It was difficult because it was a very long shoot, and we had too many scenes to shoot with very little time—not very little time, but you know, it was always very hectic and a lot of pressure. So it was like learning again. If I learned something, I don’t know, maybe I didn’t. And it was surprising for me, to feel so ignorant in a way, so empty somehow.

Why was that?

I think it’s because it’s been a long time since I made a feature film with a whole crew. The films I made in between—one is a documentary [Copacabana, 06], the other I made with seven people. A documentary’s different because you go and find whatever you have to shoot. And then I made Elementary Training for Actors [09] for TV, which we did with a crew from a television channel, and I co-directed it. Again, it was different. I swear, I felt completely empty, and I had to learn again how to make a movie. Now I kind of like that. I like the rawness of that situation, because I feel that my films are very primitive. As I said before, I don’t like the fancy shots, so maybe I would’ve felt comfortable during silent cinema, if it had sound. [Laughs]

As the moderator mentioned in the press conference, this film has a certain dynamic: the kids with the kids, the kids with their parents, and the parents with their parents, and there are these mirrored relationships, it’s sort of like a quartet. Was that intentional, or was that something that, when you were coming up with the story, it just developed?

It developed, but for me it was important. My first film, Rapado, was about teenagers, basically. Then, Silvia Prieto was about people who are twenty-something. The Magic Gloves is, like, late thirties. And then I said, okay, I have to mix everything up now, because otherwise I’m going to end up making a film in a retirement home or something. Cocoon, or something like that. [Laughs] And they don’t want that. It was intentional to mix everything up. But then I realized that there were different groups of people, like the music quartet, then all the adults, then the kids. And all the groups kind of dissolve.

I think what makes your films so special is that these people are talking, interacting in a very banal way, and then someone will say something totally absurd, like “She sent a nude.” And then if you think back, when the brother first opens up the picture he sort of has a funny look on his face, so we wonder: “Is she really ugly? What is wrong with this?” And then it’s casually revealed later. How do you create those rhythms in your mind, and by extension, how do you know when to shift from different character grooves?

It’s just instinct in a way. I mean, you asked about how to build the rhythm—that’s the whole work, actually. Usually it’s in the dialogue, but sometimes it’s not only in the dialogue, sometimes it’s in the actions. Sorry, I’m kind of slow because this is my first approach to the film, actually. Usually it takes me a while before I know what the film is about, and I never saw the film with an audience, so for me it’s like not seeing the film. I mean, I haven’t seen a DCP of the film yet. I never saw the film with a good quality image and good sound together, so it’s like, what is it? You saw more than I did.

Sound is huge in your work, and usually has an intrusive role. Is it just for comedic effect, or is that reflecting something larger aesthetically?

I’m completely obsessed with sound. During the sound mix I’m like a crazy person who’s listening to everything, and my sound mixer told me he never worked with somebody who had such a—not a “good ear,” but it’s like I hear everything. It’s my favorite part of the film, I love it. I always feel that I should’ve done more with the sound in order to play more in the sound mix, because it’s really my favorite game. Buenos Aires is a very, very noisy city, so it’s difficult to shoot with direct sound or to have clear sound, so I tend to shoot more in the outskirts now.

It’s also a personal thing. Sometimes I am disturbed by noises that other people don’t find disturbing. For example I had next to my house a garbage plant that was making extremely loud noises. I had to file a complaint and they made studies of the levels—I mean, I am kind of obsessed. Sound is like a thing for me. And I try to be a little more calm about it, and I put all that anxiety in the sounds of the film, maybe. Psychologically speaking.

Yes, I can relate. That’s why I ask.

You’re from New York?

Yes.

That’s noisy.

It’s little noises that bother me. Like someone chewing gum—it’s the worst!

Or somebody breathing heavily, you know? I was at a classical piano concert last Tuesday in Buenos Aires, and there was a guy next to me who was [simulates heavy breathing]. He was ruining my whole experience. I mean, I’m here to listen, I cannot put up with your breathing! But all those things are reflected somehow in the film, and it’s like a musical part that I don’t know what it is, because I’m building it in the sound mix, mostly. I know that there are going to be some sounds but I don’t know what they’re going to be during the shoot. For example, all the cell phones, I didn’t know what sound they were going to have. We picked them afterwards. And at one point we were using some sounds, but then we found out that they were all Apple, and we don’t have iPhones in the film, so we looked for others and we invented some.

What were you looking for with the casting? You’ve worked with Susana Pampin a couple of times before.

This is the third time I’ve worked with Susana. I know her well, and I know she’s a very good actress. She’s more “expansive” as she said [in the press conference] than what I want in a film, but she knows, so we work together with that.

As for the lead actor, we did the casting with so many, many, many actors. It was difficult to find somebody who could speak without putting too much intention in what he was saying. That’s always my problem. It took like two years. [Rafael Federman] isn’t an actor—he’s taken some courses in acting. I liked the way he looks—I mean, he can look a little sad, but also at the same time, he looks smart. And he’s extremely smart, he’s very clever. I related to him personally—I think he went to my same high school, and he’s Jewish. Violeta Bava, the producer, told me that for her, he looks similar to me when I was his age, in a way, even though she never met me back then. And other people told me the same. It’s like he had a familiarity with me.

Working with Susana, she knew what I wanted, so that’s liberating. The guy who plays Arturo played Susana’s husband in The Magic Gloves. And for that role, actually, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be him, so we saw every actor of his age in Argentina. All of them. And it never worked, and when he came, he just read a couple of lines and there was no doubt that it was him. He knew exactly what he had to do. So I guess I’m more difficult as a director than I thought. I mean, I am difficult—for the actors, it’s not easy, in Argentina at least, because I want them to say exactly the lines I wrote and they are more used to improvising. In other countries, I guess in the States it’s not like that.

It’s hard for people to improvise. It’s something that’s specialized.

Right, they just study and follow the lines, but in Argentina, they’re lazy, maybe. [Laughs]

It’s a different type of creativity.

It’s like, when I rehearse, they learn their lines in the way I want them to say it, so it’s like two jobs in one. So I don’t mind rehearsing because of that.

How did you find Daniela Pal who plays Liliana?

She’s really good. She was very difficult with her lines—but it was worth it. She works in theater, and isn’t very well known. The casting director suggested her. She’s surprising because you look at her and you already know, in a way, no? She’s saying so much with her body language and everything.

You said in the press conference that you didn’t want to do something that’s entirely a comedy or a drama. How do you know that you’re hitting that right emotional tone?

I don’t know. It’s very risky because it can be a total disaster, completely unbalanced. But I said okay, that’s why I’m making movies. I’m not doing a formula or anything. I’m just trying things out. And that’s why it takes me a long time to get the financing and to get the people involved, and this and that, because the movies are in between. And also they’re in-between art-house movies and non-art-house movies. That’s very difficult to market, and very difficult to get the money, because sometimes they feel that you need to make arty movies or social movies. But this is so ambiguous that they don’t know how to read it. But this is what I do, so I cannot change that.

When you see one of your films with an audience and hear what they’re laughing at, do you ever change your approach?

No. Never, never, never. I am the first person in the audience and I believe in my vision because otherwise I would be making somebody else’s film.

John Maclean’s Slow West ends with a visual death toll—a series of shots in which the film tracks back, in reverse order, through all the characters who have been killed in the course of its brutal narrative, right down the line to its backstory. Slow West is a clipped, super-economical neo-Western—or rather a meta-Western musing on certain conventions of the genre that refuses to die but continues to mutate, these days usually into more or less ironic forms. There are strong echoes here of the Coens’ matter-of-fact detachment—echoes especially of True Grit, of course, but overall of their tendency toward surprise strokes of narrative shorthand. Inescapably too, this story of an innocent’s journey beyond the Rockies to a violent world of catastrophe and perdition is reminiscent (in a lighter, almost flip way) of Jim Jarmusch’s somber Western odyssey of 20 years ago. Slow West is, if you like, a deadpan Dead Man.

The setting is Colorado in 1870, and the hero is a 16-year-old Scot, Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who has headed across the Atlantic and across a continent in search of Rose, the girl he loves—whose own flight from home, flashbacks eventually reveal, has directly been caused by Jay’s passion. Out in these savage lands, mild-mannered, poetic-souled dreamer Jay is “a jackrabbit in a den of wolves,” says the film’s voiceover narrator Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), a hardened drifter who appoints himself Jay’s chaperone, for a price. And while we know that Jay’s survival chances are all the better with him in charge, it’s pretty clear that Silas is himself one of the weather-beaten canines that roam these prairies.

Slow West could hardly be more generic; as the story of a determined ingénu and a hardened man of violence who plays guardian to him, and who finds himself transformed by proximity to heroic innocence, it’s closer to True Grit in more ways than just the laconic narrative style. Many of the characters seem to have walked out of other films: Ben Mendelsohn’s heavy is, of course, every weaselly, snarling Mendelsohn character we’ve seen in Australian, American, or British films since Animal Kingdom (10), but he’s also decked out in the primeval fur-coated shagginess of Hugh Millais’s bounty hunter in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. As for Fassbinder, his Silas is so taciturn and Clint-like, hat brim low and cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth, that we don’t really think of him as a character, more as a silhouette cut out from the cover of a battered cowboy paperback.

What Slow West reminded me of more than anything else was Patrick deWitt’s 2011 novel The Sisters Brothers, itself an episodic, dryly comic mock-Western in which the bloodiest atrocities are recounted with a Road Runner–like flatness of style, to be contemplated ruefully for the briefest moment before the narrative moves on. It’s possible that the only way we’re prepared to imagine Western narratives today is with disabused knowingness, since the old heroic sensibilities of the pioneer legend no longer convince. But even so, True West, for all its bitter irony, does find a surprising way to restore a redemptive lick of romanticism to the dark picture—to find “hope for the West,” as the payoff line has it.

Scottish writer-director John Maclean, whose first feature this is, came to film by making videos for his old group the Beta Band, a pop-experimental quartet who were expert at confounding their admirers: having made three much-loved EPs of considerable brilliance and eccentricity, they seemed to brazenly throw away their advantage with a willfully askew first album, then never quite regained lost ground. Their eclectic sampling spirit has its corresponding style in Slow West, in which you sense that the Western narrative is just one possible format that Maclean is trying on to see where it takes him. But the excursion works exceedingly well, not least because the film’s digressive picaresque structure always threatens to fall apart, yet turns out to be stitched together more tightly than you expect by the sheer terseness of the execution. A great example is a scene in which, after a night’s getting drunk (on absinthe, which must be a Western first), Jay listens to an old-timer telling the wonderfully black story of a vain fool determined to get his own “Wanted” poster. Jay takes the anecdote in—then, realizing he’s been sitting by the wrong campfire all along, goes on his way.

Maclean springs many such non sequiturs throughout—some of them narrative (like the flashback to Scotland that explains, with deliciously concise logic, just how this whole story started), some of them passing roadside attractions, like the sudden appearance of some African men singing an African song and exchanging greetings with Jay in subtitled French. Maclean will give us outbursts of bloody violence, then gently twist the knife with a little black-comic sign-off: after an eruption of lethal fire in a trading post, he cuts to two angelically blond children waiting outside, looking like abandoned dolls. (For all the story’s bleakness, it’s undercut by an ending that suggests that the whole thing has been an arbitrary game of sorts, and that the world is perhaps not quite as grim as events have suggested.)

In one sense, the star of Slow West is Kodi Smit-McPhee, solemn, hopeful and irreducibly gangly as an earnest student sort, who has led a sheltered life and shivers in wide-eyed fear, but will see it through regardless—the lamb who’s as resilient as all the coyotes out there in the hungry hills. But the other star performances comes from editors Roland Gallois and Jon Gregory, who give the film its distinctive, abrupt rhythm—its episodes feel like a series of telegraphically short book chapters—and DP Robbie Ryan, shooting in a distinctive 1:66 ratio. The film was shot in New Zealand (it’s a U.K./N.Z. co-production), and these landscapes bring a twist of unfamiliarity to the Western, much as Lisandro Alonso’s Patagonia brought a twist to the idea of the Western in his Jauja. There are some familiar yet oddly different vistas here—vast fields of blue flowers, cornfields that are pure Andrew Wyeth, and yet not quite, more luminous and Southern Hemisphere than we’re used to seeing in Westerns. The film leads us through a heightened landscape of intense green and blazing ochre, with unexpected images sometimes looming crazily in the foreground—a corpse, a mushroom, a breakfast egg. Slow West’s knowing narrative dissolves as you watch it—when you get to the end, it signs off with a shrug, and I suspect it’s not the sort of film to mark your psyche for a long time. But you certainly want to see what else Maclean is capable of, and it’s a beguiling trip—lush, strange, and possibly the least dusty Western ever.

This year’s New York African Film Festival screened Philippe Lacôte’s Run, which premiered last year at Cannes in Un Certain Regard and features Isaach de Bankolé as a dissident who assists the title character. FILM COMMENT’s Margaret Barton-Fumo took the opportunity to speak with de Bankolé about the film and his career over tea at a restaurant in Harlem.

Run

You were discovered on the street in Paris, right?

Yes! I was crossing the street when Gérard [Vergez] approached me and I said yeah, what do you want? I wasn’t an actor then but I had some dreadlocks, kind of around the same time as Bo Derek or someone like that [chuckles]—so he goes listen, I'm a director and I'm working on this project, it's a version of Robinson Crusoe and I want you to play Friday . . . At that point I took two steps back and looked at the guy from head to toe. We were in Saint-German-de-Prés near the Café de Flore and I’m like, you know what? Follow the guy, you can take care of yourself. So I went to Gérard's place and talked to him for two hours about film. He was a real gentleman and before I left he gave me a novel by a guy named Michel Tournier called Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique, and the movie is called Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (a 1981 television movie). I read the novel that same night and it was the first novel I ever read all the way through. I had read comic books, I was all math, science, and physics, you know? But I stayed up reading the novel until five o’clock in the morning, and I went to bed saying, ah, I’m going to be an actor! Gérard and I would meet up and discuss the film, but after two weeks he told me that the producer didn’t want to cast someone who had never acted before. I said okay, fine, I’ll just go back to pilot school. But six months later he called me again and told me that he had shot the movie and I said that's great Gérard, so what? He told me that he shot the movie in English, and asked me to come and dub the film for French television, for the same character that he wanted me to play in the first place, Friday.

So I went to the studio in Paris and that’s where the magic happened. I met this English actor who I loved, and it was the first time I ever saw an actor in the flesh in my entire life. It was Michael York, and he was the one playing Robinson Crusoe in the movie. And I took his hand and I was petting it like, are you really Michael York? He was a god on earth, and Gérard was behind him going, come on, Isaach, hey! Come on over here and let me explain to you how this works: on top of the screen you’ve got the image, underneath you’ve got dialogue, there's the red light and now you’ve got to match the timing! Coming from a background of physics and math, this was all technical stuff for me and for two days straight I had a blast. I never in my life thought this kind of work existed. So Gérard gave me the names of four drama schools, and I chose the Cours Simon at random. But then after two years of studying acting, I left one day because I wanted to do a play and they said, no, you can’t perform in it because the character is white, and I said what? It’s a character. So I left. Then I was an extra in a movie here and there until I got the role in Black Mic Mac [86] and the rest is history. But my first professional work was actually ADR!

That must have been challenging.

Jim [Jarmusch] always says that I'm the champion of ADR and I say, yeah man, ADR! It can change a movie, and I love it. It's where I actually discovered the world of words. It was almost like I was on earth and in the sea, two completely different worlds, of science and of literature.

So do you still fly planes?

No, because I was going to flight school for multi-engine planes, but I have my private license to fly small planes. Hopefully some day within the next 10 years, I will renew my license and take off. I love hotels and I love being in planes.

How did you come into contact with Jim Jarmusch? Did he see one of your movies?

No, no, no. I met Jim in ’84 at Cannes. I was a young aspiring actor just barely out of drama school, but at the time I was working on the weekends for this company Videoclub de France that used to buy films and distribute them on video. It was the Eighties and they were using a computer, a small IBM, so I computerized the whole system for the company over the weekends, Saturday and Sunday, and sometimes Friday evenings, while during the week I went to drama school, pilot school and I was also working as a waiter! My boss knew that I was an aspiring actor, so he sent me to Cannes! It was my first time there, and in the morning I saw Strangers in Paradise. Later that same afternoon I was walking along the Croisette and I ran into this guy who used to run four or five cinemas in Paris, Frédéric Mitterand—he later became the Minister of Culture—and he handed me an invitation to a party in the hills at some villa. So I went to the party and I saw Jim. I had to talk to this guy because I had seen his movie that morning and loved it so I approached him, and I gave him a small head shot and he gave me the business card for his production company here in New York, Exoskeleton. A couple of weeks later I sent him an envelope with more details or whatever, but I never heard back from him. Then four years later I shot Claire Denis’s first film, Chocolat [88]. Claire had been Jim’s AD before on Down by Law, so in January ’88 Jim went to visit Claire editing the film in Paris and he saw me in the footage and said, hey, I met this guy four years ago! And that’s how we met.

Black Mic Mac

But first you did Black Mic Mac [86], which is a lighthearted comedy, right?

Yes, I did, and I actually won a César for that film.* Black Mic Mac was already out when Claire was planning Chocolat, and she saw it and was like, no, this is not my actor, this is too different. But I also happened to be on stage for a wonderful director in France, Patrice Chéreau, in a play called Retour au désert by a brilliant playwright who also passed away, Bernard-Marie Koltès. It was a play with just two cast members, a dealer and his client, and that's when Claire was convinced. And then she came back one day with Wim Wenders, who was her co-producer on the film, and afterwards she told me that Wim said to her, yes, he’s good but isn’t he a bit too big? I had a huge belly in the play, I mean huge. But Claire said no, no, we'll meet him afterwards at the bar and you'll see . . . because the belly was prosthetic and that’s when Wim said, oh yeah, yeah, now I understand! [Laughs] So that’s how I connected with Wim, Jim, and Claire, and we all became part of a family.

And ever since Chocolat you proved to be able to carry these very serious, quiet roles.

Chocolat was my start of few words in movies! Maybe what I like about European cinema is the silence. My take on American cinema is that there’s no sense of pacing, that you have to notice and feel all of the silences, all of the gaps.

This is something I started to think about early in my career when I acted in a play for Patrice called Key West, also written by Bernard-Marie Koltès. I played one of the leads who decides right at the start of the play that he isn't going to talk, and the play was almost three hours long. That was very instructive for me. I learned that no monologue is really a monologue; it’s always a dialogue. Depending on the weight of the silences, your own "monologue" can shift and change from one sentence to the next. The wind, the emotion, the space has an impact on you and you cannot ignore it. Therefore you’ve got to be aware of what’s going on. So I like working with few words because words have got to be said only when they’re necessary.

When you’re performing on stage and you have to really project—do you sense the audience when you’re acting?

It’s a great exercise because when you're on stage, it’s different every night. I still believe that the energy, when it’s right, can be perceived whether it’s close or further from the audience, by the camera and through the lenses. When I started out, I used to think that it was more difficult to act in the theater than in film, but the more I do it the more I realize that no, that’s not true. On stage you’ve got to be focused and concentrate each night for three hours. On film you have to focus and concentrate for three months or six months at a time.

Do you feel like you have more control on stage? Have you ever watched a film after it was edited and felt chopped up?

Of course. Yeah, on stage you feel more in control because you hold onto the time, you know, the curtain rises and you captivate the audience. With film the director is the captain of the boat, he can go to the editing room and change everything.

Chocolat

In 2011 the Museum of Art and Design dedicated a program to you called “Isaach de Bankolé: An Unexpected Gentleman” and you gave a master class on acting. What was that like?

I had already done a workshop in Kenya in the Nineties, and the one I did at MAD was kind of like a condensation of that. When MAD asked me if I could do the same thing but with only two hours I said okay, why not? It’s a challenge, you know? In Kenya we would stage a couple of plays over three or four weeks, then I went to Ghana in 2004 and did the same thing. It was a German play, three hours long and translated into English—it was called Innocence. That was a cool experience.

I gave a workshop on how to create a character, how to portray someone using a kind of mathematical method. In life we do things intuitively, but as an actor with a method we are trying to re-create that intuition. I used a diagram and it was a lot of fun to do. First they told me that I had an hour and a half to do it . . . finally it became two and a half hours and my girlfriend asked me afterwards if I noticed that out of the 30-some people there I was the only man—and I was surprised because I never even noticed! Since the MAD workshop I've started to write a book on acting, which is something I’ve always wanted to do.

I hear that you've written a few scripts. Do you also have plans to direct?

Yes, I wrote my first script in the Eighties in France. It was in French and I never got funding for it but then I wrote a short, for which I got funding in ’96. I even went scouting for locations in the Ivory Coast with Agnès Godard, who was going to be my cinematographer. But in ’97 I was about to shoot and a week before starting I got a fax from my co-producer in France saying that I had to give up my rights as a director. I told him that isn’t going to happen because I got the funding myself, everything I did on my own. So I just stopped everything. My fiancée at the time [jazz singer Cassandra Wilson] was about to go on tour through Australia and New Zealand so I said I’m going to come along with a small crew and do a movie about you, and that became Traveling Miles [00].

It’s funny because I wanted to shoot the movie on film and in black and white, so my producer told me about this movie that played at Sundance in ’95 called Brother Tied, a beautiful movie in black and white with a soundtrack that was so incredibly rich—but it was too expensive to get the rights to all of those songs, so the movie never came out. My producer Juan showed me a copy of the movie and I hired the filmmaker Derek Cianfrance to be my DP, and he was a great cinematographer. We traveled together to Australia and New Zealand with a very small crew.

But I still had this short script from ’97 so when I moved here everything came together, and I started to write a feature film that touches on the Amadou Diallo shooting. It's called One Way Ticket and I'm starting to get funding for it now.

Mirage

This is a feature film about the Amadou Diallo shooting?

No, it’s loosely about that but it's different. The film is about two friends, one is a street vendor in Harlem on 105th St. who gets shot—he ends up in a coma and his parents and his childhood friend from the Ivory Coast come to New York to see him but after a week he passes away. So the parents have to take the corpse back home and as they are delivering the paperwork for his release the friend goes to pay his last respects. He props his friend up and grabs him by the wrist and says I’m taking you for a last ride, and they go to Africa and come back on a kind of sci-fi trip that goes under the Hudson river and into the ocean. So I started to get funding for that and in the meantime I wrote another script last year that Jim Jarmusch wants to executive produce, called My Name Is Nobody. That one is about a guy who travels to a war-torn country where the south is split from the north, kind of like the Ivory Coast but he is traveling in a convoy that is carrying diamonds and gold across the country, and there is a politician involved who is tied up in some dirty business. Then I have a third script that was written by Jim Stark, who produced Jim Jarmusch’s earlier films, and who also wrote Mirage. It's a script of three shorts that he put together called La Vie and he wants me to direct.

I’m happy too, because I have had a very great ally in Willem Dafoe, who is going to be in both of my films. About 12 years ago I had him in mind for one of the roles in One Way Ticket so I went downtown to the Wooster Group, I dropped off an envelope with the script in it and two hours later—two hours later—I got a call from Willem! I was like no way, did you read the script? And he said, yeah, let’s sit down and talk! So we did and since then we’ve become really good friends and he wants to be in both movies.

What is the latest project that you worked on?

I just acted in a film by Joseph Cedar, a young Israeli filmmaker who lives here in New York, who directed a film called Footnote. In his new movie [Oppenheimer Strategies] an Israeli politician comes to New York, played by Lior Ashkenazi—a great actor and a very nice guy. In the scene we shot here I’m working at a luxury store and this Israeli politician stops in front of the window and admires a pair of shoes that he can’t really buy, because of the political implications. So Richard Gere enters my store with him and we both try to sell him the shoes. It’s a very long scene, like 20 pages long.

You’re also starring in a Hungarian Western that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival?

Yes, Mirage, and I saw it in Toronto for the first time. I hadn't seen any of the dailies while we were shooting and I didn’t do any ADR on the movie either. I was a little worried because the morning after the press screening Jim Stark sent me the first critical review and when I read it I was like, this journalist must be on something because this is not the movie I shot! So that evening I went to the premiere and he was right (it was a very positive review). I would say 40 percent of what we shot is not in the movie, but the director managed to get it right and use his own voice. I was really pleased with the movie, which in my opinion is kind of a cross between Jarmusch and Tarantino. It’s a very distinctive, interesting movie that’s going to be tough to get distribution for.

Run

And Run, that just screened at the New York African Film Festival—you didn’t see that until it was completed either?

Yeah. I just saw it at Cannes and I was really surprised—in a good way. You never know with a first-time director.

How did your involvement in that project come about?

I was in Paris about four years ago with a dear friend of mine who was working for the foreign office there. I knew this woman since the Nineties, when she asked me to teach an acting workshop in Kenya. Then four years ago I met her at her office and she told me how she had met a young director who did a documentary on the war in the Ivory Coast and I told her that I would love to see it. So she calls [the director] Philippe Lacôte to see if he had a copy that he could lend to me and the next day we met—he had a copy of the DVD for me and he also had a script, it was for his first feature film and he had written a small part for me. Once I got back to New York I sent him an email with my notes and we kept communicating and exchanging ideas, he was really open . . . Then after a couple of years of going back and forth with different drafts, we went to the Ivory Coast to shoot—and I hadn’t been to the Ivory Coast in 16 years!

Is this the only film you've made that is set in the Ivory Coast?

I shot a French movie there in the Eighties, but it was a nightmare and it didn’t end well. I ended up being on set for almost four weeks without shooting, trying to deal with the production and it was a catastrophe! I’ve been involved with different filmmakers from the Ivory Coast and West Africa but nothing really happened until I met Philippe, because he was determined and he is someone who really wants to move things forward in terms of African cinema.

Your role in the film is small but crucial. You become a father figure for the main character who is running from one influential person to the next. He spends a lot of time with a group of agitated rebels but it seems like your character has a stronger political influence on him.

Yeah. His character is a young guy that I could have related to at his age. I kind of take him under my wing and instill in him a certain consciousness, if you will, because he doesn’t really know what he wants to do with his life. The thing is that my character is himself a little bit nostalgic of this era of the Sixties when you had idealists like Patrice Lumumba who were quickly assassinated. In the Eighties we had one figure like that, Thomas Sankara from Burkina Faso who unfortunately was assassinated—one of his friends succeeded him as president and was actually ousted this year by the youth revolution, just now catching up 25 years later.

By the same token I would say my relationship with Run is similar to my real-life partnership with Philippe, who is nearly 20 years younger than me. I’ve just created my own company in the Ivory Coast and together we’re going to line-produce several movies. Also about 25 years ago I went to the authorities about starting a film school in the Ivory Coast and I said to them, listen, I’m kind of doing well in Europe and I would love to give five to 10 kids a scholarship for three years and see what happens. The government at that time didn’t really understand about art or film but 25 years later, Philippe and I were lucky to have a meeting with the President and the same idea came up again, so now we are working together on a different kind of project.

I've noticed that many films set in Africa are shot in the West, in Burkina Faso. Why is that?

Yes, because Burkina Faso has a strong cinema culture, more so than other African countries. There are more resources on the ground and also they have a crew who have been doing movies there regularly since the Eighties, whereas in other countries they might do a movie one year and then not make another one for five or 10 years. Burkina Faso has the crew, the cameras, the lighting equipment, and the culture. My only issue is that the country is still controlled by the French, so it’s kind of tough to be free there and tackle any kind of subject matter.

Oka!

How was your experience filming Oka! (11) in Central Africa?

It was very interesting. I’ve been talking with people who are still living there, like Louis Sarno himself, and it’s tougher today for him and what I would call his family, the tribe of pygmies than it was when we shot there. The infrastructure of the country—you know the camp where we shot is practically disappeared now and the pygmies have to keep going deeper into the forest. But I really had a great experience shooting there, and the people in the village near our camp were great. I love how we were able to mix real people with professional actors. Unfortunately I don’t know the status of the distribution and handling of the film.

I was able to watch it on Netflix.

That’s great, I’m glad you watched it. I’m trying to get a copy for myself! It was tough because when I saw the movie—I had a very difficult relationship with the director when we shot the movie—but when I saw the film at the premiere here in New York I was pleased because it was funny, but at the same time it addressed serious issues that are happening today, like the influence of the Chinese industrialists in Africa, the greed of our politicians—it’s all over the place.

There's a new generation of African filmmakers now. I mean, of course we have Nollywood, but there’s a lack of quality there. In terms of subject matter, experience and technique, I think we have a new generation that wants to make films and not be judged according to international standards, and not judged because they come from Africa. So I’m very pleased when these young filmmakers approach me.

*Isaach de Bankolé was the first black actor to win a César Award, for Most Promising Actor in 1987. Omar Sy was the second, and the first to win the Best Actor award—in 2012.

Over half of Mad Max: Fury Road unfolds in action-spectacle nirvana. Movement, images, and some plucky actors carry all the emotion and humor a movie of this scale needs, and its kinetic force delivers an adrenaline boost to your system. In the years Australian filmmaker George Miller spent reworking the script with comic-book artist Brendan McCarthy and actor-dramaturge Nico Lathouris (who played Grease Rat over 35 years ago in Mad Max) he found ways of plunging into a dystopia that’s at once baroque and bananas, without pausing for exposition or an extraneous gesture or syllable. Like a great workout, the best parts leave you feeling happily spent.

Set in a fortress city-state run as a religious cult and the wasteland surrounding it, Mad Max: Fury Road contains the most bizarrely detailed and enthralling demolition derbies ever staged. But at its best it also plays like an inspired mashup of movies like Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur—silent epics that captivate audiences with their imagination, power, and panache. Max is still a bit of a lug, brooding over barren landscapes and occasionally mumbling an existential homily. ("In this wasteland, I am the one who runs from both the living and the dead. A man reduced to a single instinct: survive.") But his mulish road-warrior integrity makes him the perfect guide into postapocalyptic settings that for once are emotionally primordial and logistically complex.

In the greased-lightning setup, Max, played by Tom Hardy in his trademark brooding mode, hightails through the Plains of Silence in his customized Interceptor (a modified Australian Ford Falcon V-8). In what feels like a nanosecond, male warriors in white body and face paint—the “War Boys”—intercept him while screaming like banshees. They haul him into The Citadel, where they brand him with its logo—a death’s-head in a steering wheel—and cage him in the Blood Bank as a “donor” for ailing soldiers in their ranks. The opening is split as dangerously and neatly as a serpent's tongue between Max's fate and that of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a skinheaded Amazon who drives the Citadel's weaponized fuel truck, the War Rig.

The Citadel’s ruler and Furiosa’s commander is the warlord and self-styled demigod Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who wears a mask over his mouth, jaw, and neck, complete with super-long horse teeth and heavy-duty breathing tubes and filters. He also sports Plexiglas armor to parade his metals and girdle his tumors and flab. His wild mane of whitish hair and laser-like glare fuse his menacing appearance, and Keays-Byrne (who played Toecutter in Mad Max) spits commands with the full-bodied fustian of a man who's accustomed to being obeyed. When he orders Furiosa to make a fuel run to Gas Town, he has no reason to believe she won't follow his orders.

Furiosa dares to go rogue. Before she does, Miller tells us everything we want to know and are afraid to ask about the Citadel. The director visualizes Joe’s grotesque domain in fierce, hinged tableaux that come together with a snap. In a towering, craggy natural compound, as majestic as Monument Valley and as eerie as Australia’s Ayers Rock, Miller erects a rocky kingdom on an aquifer. Joe’s monopoly on water allows him to build a society based on rabid devotion—to himself. Chutes in the mountainside mete out daily floods of "Aqua Cola" to lowly Citadel-dwellers, as loudspeakers pipe warnings about "water addiction." This pure H20 has become the be-all, end-all; the environment is generally so polluted that malformations and cancers rampage through the population. Joe fills caves far removed from the mob with greenery from hydroponics and machines that pump milk from lactating women for his family and soldiers. Down below, various dungeons swell with captives. High above, Joe's sons man the observation room: one is a giant, muscled warrior who has a slow-moving brain and much more modest inhaling tubes while the other is physically stunted but has an active, adult mind.

Joe has convinced the unwashed hordes that he is divine and has persuaded the War Boys that dying in combat will elevate them to Valhalla. But Joe never forgets that he's a mortal who needs a proper heir to hold his fiefdom together. So for him it's a primal and a political tragedy when he goes into his harem and finds it empty except for his five wives' caretaker. On the walls are scrawled chalk messages, including "We Are Not Things."

It's marvelous how Miller reveals the workings of Joe’s system, tossing off exquisitely wrought images in a way that also fixes them in memory. He and editor Margaret Sixel imbue the film with a propulsive tempo. Their rhythmic magic comes partly from the sight and sound of minions pounding on drums, setting a beat for the men who work the winches to labor in unison. They're like the drummers who keep galley slaves rowing as one in toga movies (notably Niblo’s Ben-Hur), except these drummers work en masse, in a setting as topsy-turvy and vertiginous as the city in Metropolis. To enter Joe's sanctum, visitors must be winched up, but some of the operations rooms and dungeons are farther up or down or sideways. These dizzying catacombs operate not just on fealty and regimentation but also on adolescent testosterone. The War Boys whip themselves into a kamikaze frenzy before an altar of V-8 steering wheels.

Among the War Boys champing at the bit for battle is the pivotal character Nux (Nicholas Hoult), who knows that his "half-life" is ending thanks to a couple of tumors he nicknames Larry and Barry. He wants one last chance to enter Valhalla in glory. Opportunity knocks when Furiosa takes an unannounced detour from her Gas Town route, and Joe reckons that she's hidden the women in the War Rig. Max's blood has been pouring into Nux via an intravenous drip. Nux gets the mad inspiration to strap Max to the front of his car with the blood apparatus attached to a facemask, an image that recalls pirates using Romans as makeshift prow-heads and battering rams in Ben-Hur.

What ensues is a freak-out blend of super-charged chariot race and phantasmagoric war movie. Combatant drivers try to bounce each other into oblivion or grind on each other's wheels. Lancers toss spear-mounted grenades. Miller and his brilliant cinematographer, John Seales, shoot with multiple cameras from wildly different angles so that fighting breaks out in every corner of the screen and it still makes lunatic sense. Every character and act becomes even crazier in this film's great arid outdoors, but they all remain comprehensible. Instead of a regimental band, the War Boys have a hard-rock guitarist whose axe shoots fire, backed by a phalanx of taiko drummers. That's what I call Burning Man.

With Hardy hidden behind a mask for roughly 45 minutes, two other superb performers take up the slack of connecting with an audience. Hoult delivers a high-pitched tour-de-force as Nux, which is all the more touching and scary because of his improbable exuberance. When Immortan Joe glances in his direction and the War Boy believes that he’s made eye contact with his immortal leader, Nux screams: "He looked at me! He looked at me!" Nux is certain his leader is telling him that he's awaited in Valhalla. The depth of Nux's exultation prepares you for the evolution of his character.

The other astonishing performer is Theron. In her first tight close-up, she looks in the rearview mirror—and seems to be looking right at us. With her head shaved and her body toned, she gives a display of intelligence and emotion that's alternately telepathic and balletic. Whether she's coolly taking Max's measure or hiding her anxiety about protecting her precious cargo, she lets us know exactly what Furiosa is thinking. When her prosthetic arm is ripped off in a fight, Theron, not the makeup and digital-effect artists, conveys how vulnerable Furiosa feels without her device. Theron is inspiring when she pours intuition and lifeblood into this damaged character, and heartbreaking when she shows it ebbing away. But because of Theron’s talent and conviction, you never count Furiosa out.

Hardy does pull off a difficult feat as Mad Max: his commitment to the character includes doing enough of the daredevil stunts that you never catch the substitution of his stunt double. Hardy's specialty has often been making qualities like ruefulness and alienation dynamic. Max keeps his distance from all the others, so Hardy draws on his own eruptive charisma to throw off a dramatic force field. In his slyest moment, he shoots an ally a minimalist thumb’s up. What hems Hardy in is Miller's determination to keep Max tethered to his loner mythos. By the climax, it reaches a ludicrous extreme: when Max wanders off this time, he seems to doom the human race; there isn’t another healthy man in sight.

But the movie runs out of steam before that. Miller wants to contrast the rock-and-roll rococo stylings of the Citadel and battle scenes with the fresh simplicity of the runaway women—youthful knockouts clad in wispy scraps of cotton and muslin. Miller does his best to individualize them, as do the fetching, talented performers (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton). Most successfully (and movingly) Keough's "Capable" undertakes War Boy Nux's emotional rehabilitation. But you know as little about their pasts as you do about the addled wives in Tommy Lee Jones's The Homesman.

Furiosa tells them that together they'll reach "The Green Place," her homeland, from which Joe had snatched her as a child. It's too Of Mice and Men for this wised-up movie: she appears poised to talk about how they'll “live off the fatta the lan'" and "get to tend the rabbits." It doesn't prove so simple, but the ensuing disappointments and reversals don't match the imaginative richness of the buildup. Your heart may sink, as mine did, when the action pulls not just a 180, but a complete 360. Happily, by then, Miller has introduced enough new ingredients to keep his pot boiling, including a can-do clutch of sharp-shooting older women called the Vuvalini (notably Megan Gale as "The Valkyrie" and Melissa Jaffer as "Keeper of the Seeds"). Even when Miller's unmatched action pyrotechnics begin to feel like the same ol', same ol', he comes up with revitalizing flourishes. In the climactic battle, War Boy lancers perch on vaulting poles attached to Joe’s attack cars; they sway over enemy vehicles and lob grenades right into them. My favorite moment, though, is a quiet one. As the runaway women take in a coruscating starscape, one of the Vuvalini points out what she says is a satellite that used to convey information around the world. “Shows,” one of the women says. “Everybody had a show.” Has there ever been a subtler, wittier, or more gorgeous tribute to social media?

After the international sensation of the original Mad Max in 1979 and 1980, Miller decided that he'd tapped into the deep mythic roots of the loner hero. I wish Miller had drawn a different lesson. Working quickly and on hunches, a seat-of-the-pants filmmaker can capture a global mood. By setting a revenge epic in the bleak near future, he'd created a scabrous, funny, nihilistic fantasy for audiences who were weary of political cowardice and duplicity, a counterculture turned sour, expensive and frustrating oil shortages, spikes in inflation, and the first onslaughts of international terrorism. Drawing on his experiences as an emergency-room doctor and a boy growing up in Chinchilla in rural Queensland, Mad Max united the grisliness of the scary "educational" films that once were shown to high school kids before prom night with a sense of "the sticks" as a scary place to be in the mid-to-late 20th century. And, of course, it had a command of energies colliding in widescreen space comparable to Sam Peckinpah's. (For a price that fit his puny budget, Miller reportedly bought wide-screen camera lenses that had been used on Peckinpah's 1972 The Getaway.)

Miller has become a giant of big-audience moviemaking, with credits like the freakishly beautiful and original Babe: Pig in the City (98, after producing Babe), the infectious tap-dancing penguin cartoon Happy Feet (06), the rigorously veracious medical drama Lorenzo's Oil (92), and a virtuoso remake of "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" in The Twilight Zone—The Movie (83). But his two previous Mad Max sequels, The Road Warrior (81) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (85) have become his most iconic movies. And although there are wonderful segments in each, they are also self-conscious pieces of mythmaking. For my money, they lack both the tabloid energy and seize-the-day freshness of the first Mad Max.

With Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller comes full circle, returning to his Mad Max roots and emerging as The Compleat Action Artist. He does make a lamentable wrong turn midway through, but his drollery, smarts and rock-opera sensibility permeate the movie. It's telling that Miller named this chapter of the Mad Max saga for Furiosa. His movie proclaims that sisterhood is powerful and proves that a heroine can be more exciting than a hero as a loner archetype. It’s unfortunate that the female-bonding part is conventional and even vaporous compared to the movie’s postapocalyptic world building. But when Theron glares into the War Rig's rearview mirror, what the audience sees is a bold feminist future.

At the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival, Eugene Hernandez will be filing dispatches for FILM COMMENT about the films, press conferences, and other events.

Tale of Tales

Seated at the head of a wide table in a white room, Salma Hayek is voraciously feasting on a giant, beating heart. That image of Hayek, from Matteo Garrone’sTale of Tales, traversed social media in the days leading up to the film’s world premiere at Cannes. In the Italian director’s latest, Hayek’s feast is a turning point in one of the three fairy tales reimagined in this fantastical competition entry.

Adapted from stories by 17th-century Neapolitan author Giambattista Basile, Tale of Tales interweaves stories that involve three different sets of royals played by Vincent Cassel, Salma Hayek, Toby Jones, and John C. Reilly: a queen is determined to become a mother, a sex-crazed king can’t stop chasing women, and an aging monarch becomes captivated by his new pet flea to the detriment of his daughter. 

“He is an author who's unknown, and it’s unfair,” Garrone said of Basile yesterday morning at the press conference for Tale of Tales. Born in 1566 in Naples, Basile wrote tall tales aimed at entertaining kids, and his stories would later influence Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.

“A key idea in the film is desire,” Garrone added. “Desire that goes beyond limits and becomes an obsession.”

During yesterday's press conference, Garrone explained that he was drawn to Basile’s stories because of their universal traits and his own passion for the characters. The 46-year-old filmmaker admitted that his films—The Embalmer (02), Gomorrah (08), Reality (12)—may seem quite different from one another, but they share his love for the characters.

Tale of Tales is filled with bright, colorful characters and settings as well as moments that may shock some viewers. “We tried to go back to the origins of cinema and create images that would surprise the spectators,” Garrone said.

Matteo Garrone (center), Vincent Cassel (left) moderator Henri Behar) and John C. Reilly (right)

Meticulously handcrafted sets, props, and lavish period clothing populate Tale of Tales. Not surprisingly, shooting that scene in which Hayek devours the heart of a sea monster—she’s been told it will break a spell that has prevented her from bearing a child—was a disgusting experience. Seated next to Garrone at yesterday's press conference, Hayek recalled his intensity and absolute dedication.

“Our director here wanted [the heart] to be perfect. God forbid I took a bite and a doctor would recognize that an artery was missing!” she exclaimed.

Garrone supervised the creation of the anatomically precise organ, constructed in part using pasta and candy. Close-ups of Hayek gorging on the heart were framed in a way that allowed her to spit up just out of frame whenever she gagged. 

While the director spoke of his characters’ obsessions in Tale of Tales, the trait clearly carried over from the characters to its filmmaker.

“There are method actors and there are method directors,” Hayek continued later in the press conference. “They arrive and they go into their own world and they live there. If something doesn’t belong to that world, it won’t go; you stay there until he gets it.”

Garrone seemed to revel in the extreme nature of the fairy tales, which he strove to reflect in the film’s vivid version.  

“Yes, these are characters that everybody can relate to, but [the story] always goes to a place where you never could have imagined,” he noted. “It goes to very unique places and it goes in a very unique way.”

Mad Max: Fury Road

“Mad” Max Rockatansky is best known for his souped-up black 1974 Ford Falcon XB coupe, totaled early on in Mad Max: Fury Road, but we know for a fact that he has his Class A CDLs, or the Australian equivalent thereof. In the all-chase last act of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Max takes the wheel of a Mack R-600 CoolPower truck pulling a decoy tank trailer, while in Fury Road he switches off with Charlize Theron driving a juggernaut called the War Rig. In a piece for Bloomberg Business, Fury Road production designer Colin Gibson discussed the fleet which he assembled (and reassembled) for the film, and described the War Rig thusly: “[A] Czechoslovakian Tatra and Chevy Fleetmaster fused together into a six-wheel-drive 18-wheeler powered with twin V8 engines.” More than any action film in recent memory, Fury Road explores the dramatic and kinetic possibilities of a big rig haulin’ ass with a hostile army at its back door. And while its setting is pure post-apocalyptic sci-fi, its outlaw spirit and hardware align it to another genre: the trucker movie.

The first Mad Max appeared in December of 1979, at the end of a decade which might be said to constitute the golden age of the truck flick. Only a couple of weeks ago, one of the archetypal works of this car chase subgenre, Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy (78), appeared on Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Convoy grows into mythic dimensions from humble beginnings. Semi-legendary driver Martin “Rubber Duck” Penwald (Kris Kristofferson) and a couple of buddies, “Spider Mike” (Franklyn Ajaye) and “Love Machine” (Burt Young—everybody else calls him “Pig Pen”) get in a signature slo-mo donnybrook with local-yokel Arizona Sheriff “Cottonmouth” Wallace (Ernest Borgnine) and his deputies at a roadside diner, then gouge on it for the New Mexico state line and, so they think, safety. Instead, Cottonmouth keeps in hot pursuit with the help of local, state, and national authorities, and “Rubber Duck” finds himself leading a growing army of the disenchanted—the “convoy” of the title, a mobilized political force on par with the Whiskey Rebellion, or at least the Bonus Army. Although Convoy is widely dismissed even by (or perhaps especially by) Peckinpah aficionados—the shoot takes up five of the 578 pages of David Weddle’s Peckinpah biography “If They Move… Kill ‘Em!", and these are mostly concerned with Peckinpah’s financial problems (which caused him to take the assignment) and cocaine (which, in Weddle’s opinion, caused him to botch it)—it’s a hypnotically watchable movie, even rather touching in its Utopian democratic fantasy.

Convoy

The convoy, seen in Peckinpah’s film snaking across the landscape from gorgeous helicopter vantages, is described in the 1975 hit song of the same name by C.W. McCall and Chip Davis on which the film is based, a newly-recorded version of which gets sampled throughout the movie: “A thousand screamin’ trucks / An’ eleven long-haired Friends a’ Jesus / In a chartreuse micra-bus.” McCall and Davis’s “Convoy” provided the Citizen’s Band (CB) radio handles for the film’s dramatis personae, as well as its basic premise, and the song, like the film, is generously dappled with colorful CB slang: “Mercy sakes alive,” “Huntin’ bear,” “What’s your 20?” and so on. “Convoy” was hardly the first or last time that the trucker, and his patois, would be mined as material for a country performer—sprechgesang artist Red Sovine, to take one example, made a career out of it. The affiliation between the long-haul trucking industry and country music—or, to be historically correct, Country & Western or hillbilly music—is as old as both. The truck country playlist begins with Cliff Bruner and His Boys’ 1939 recording of “Truck Driver's Blues,” and carries on through Art Gibson’s “I’m a Truck Drivin’ Man,” Ted Daffan’s “Truck Driving Man,” the career output of Dave Dudley (“Six Days on the Road,” “Truck Drivin’ Son-of-a-Gun,” “Me and Ol’ C.B.”), Merle Haggard’s “Movin’ On,” theme to the NBC series (74-76) of the same name, the entirety of the Every Which Way But Loose (78) soundtrack, including the Eddie Rabbitt title track, until we arrive at the video for Florida Georgia Line’s “This is How We Roll,” in which the bro-country ensemble throw a rager in the back of a moving semi.* Convoy’s Kristofferson had made his reputation in Nashville as a songwriter and performer before he ever set foot on a film set, as had Jerry Reed, who co-starred in Smokey and the Bandit (77), warbled the theme “East Bound and Down,” and drove the Peterbilt 379 full of contraband Coors while Burt Reynolds’s Bandit ran “blocker” for him in a souped-up TransAm. The tradition of casting country performers in trucking movies would continue all the way to Randy Travis in Black Dog (98)—part of a mini-cycle of truck-related thrillers at the fin-de-millennium along with Breakdown (97) and Joy Ride (01), itself heavily-indebted to Steven Spielberg’s Duel (71)—but I am getting ahead of myself.

Before you can have a trucking genre you must first, of course, have a trucking industry. It started in the years after World War I and spread as fast as paved roads, though it didn’t immediately capture the public imagination. Perhaps the archetypal “truck” image of the Depression years—the converted 1926 Hudson “Super Six” hauling all of the California-bound Joad family’s worldly belongings in John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath (40)—was one that denoted blight rather than commerce. That getting to California was only half the battle was a well-known fact to Albert Isaac Bezzerides, aka A.I. or “Buzz,” who’d emigrated from the Ottoman Empire to the Sunshine State with his family as a child, and worked with his father driving a truck in the San Joaquin Valley. If there is a single original auteur of the American trucking film, it is certainly Bezzerides, and its first masterpiece is Raoul Walsh’s They Drive by Night, released by Warner Brothers in the summer of 1940, and based on Bezzerides’s 1938 novel The Long Haul. The film, starring George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as brothers and beleaguered independent truckers, drew on Bezzerides direct experience of cutthroat practices within the industry. During the 1930s, most industrial manufacturers of any size owned their own trucks and employed their own drivers, leaving only piecemeal work for agricultural concerns to independent drivers, hauling produce and livestock to market, forced to accept work on impossible, physically ruinous terms in order to keep a competitive edge, and getting ripped off from every angle. The Long Haul was Bezzerides’s ticket into the screenwriting racket, and he would later adapt another of his trucking novels, 1949’s Thieves’ Market into the screenplay for Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway, released the same year. “They were based on things I’d seen with my father or on my own,” Bezzerides said of his novels. “I worked with my father, trucking, going to the market to buy produce. There was corruption and they’d try to screw you. When he was selling grapes, the packing house would screw him on the price and then sell to New York for an expensive price. When I was trucking I wouldn’t allow it. A guy tried to rob me in such a blatant way I picked up a two-by-four and I was going to kill him.”

The working-class Bezzerides wrote in a vein that in the Thirties was still called “proletariat literature,” and while he continued to turn out pages uninterrupted through the 1950s, others in Hollywood who’d thrown around the p-word would be done in by their former (or present) political affiliations. Dassin, a former member of the Communist Party USA, received the news that he’d been blacklisted while shooting Night in the City (50) in London, a city that, along with Paris, would become one of the primary destinations for political exiles from the movie colony. Cy Endfield, who’d only just begun to establish himself as a director of noir thrillers, moved to England after his name was named in 1951 and got right back to work, at first using such professional aliases as Charles de Lautour, Charles de la Tour, Hugh Raker, and C. Raker Endfield. It was under the last sobriquet that he produced Hell Drivers (57), one of the finest films produced in England that decade, and perhaps the high point of Endfield’s six-film collaboration with star Stanley Baker, which also produced Zulu (64). Baker stars as a lorry driver newly employed by Hawlett’s Trucking Company to haul gravel to and fro in endlessly repetitive runs, pressed to work at suicidal speed thanks to a vicious competition encouraged by management.  

Blowing Wild

While the trucker film is thought of as an exclusively American phenomenon, there is an alternate, non-Hollywood tradition of which Hell Drivers is representative. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s South American expedition Le salaire de la peur (Wages of Fear, 53) is the most famous of these films, more recently eclipsed in reputation by William Friedkin’s 1977 Sorcerer, which was not the first remake. New Yorkers would be advised to take advantage of a forthcoming opportunity to visit Anthology Film Archives for screenings of Hugo Fregonese’s Mexico-shot Blowing Wild, a film which, released less than half a year after Clouzot’s, lifts its nitroglycerine courier plot intact. (The script is credited to quick draw wheeler-dealer huckster Philip Yordan and, to paraphrase a line from The Mother and the Whore: “Like all imitations, it’s better than the original.”) Certainly the most idiosyncratic trucker movie of all time is Marguerite Duras’s Le Camion (77), which consists of the authoress sitting down with Gerard Depardieu to read him the script of a movie involving a disillusioned older, female hitchhiker who catches a lift from a male truck driver who happens to be a member of the Communist Party. Her reading is periodically interrupted by cutaways to long, sustained shots of a truck trundling along the highway in some desolate, mizzling Parisian suburb, shots which never correspond to the narrative that’s being described. For Duras, as for Endfield, A.I. Bezzerides, or C.W. McCall and Chip Davis, the truck driver is the quintessential proletariat or workin’ man, but Duras holds out little hope for his redemption. Here is how her essay on Le Camion, collected in the City Lights Books volume Duras by Duras, begins:

“It is not worth the trouble to create a cinema of socialist hope for ourselves. Or capitalist hope. No longer worth the trouble to make films about justice to come—social, fiscal, or any other kind. About work. About merit. About women. About young people. About Portuguese. The citizens of Mali. Intellectuals. The Senegalese. No longer worth it to create a cinema about fear. Or revolution. About the dictatorship of the proletariat. Liberty. About your bugaboos. About love. It’s no longer worth it.”

Luckily nobody told this to Hal Needham, whose Smokey and the Bandit had its tepidly received world premiere at Radio City Music Hall, just a week before Le Camion faced hisses at Cannes! Bandit eventually made out like one at the box-office, inspiring EMI Films to shell out for the rights to Convoy. The trucker movie had been powering up for several years already: Movin’ On, starring Claude Akins and Frank Converse as long-haul-driving partners Sonny Pruitt and Will Chandler, premiered on May 8, 1974, and ran for a total of 46 episodes. The series was, perhaps, before its time, though Akins would have a chance to get back behind the wheel, this time on the other side of the law, playing Sheriff Elroy P. Lobo on the tail of Billie Joe McKay (Greg Evigan) in NBC’s B.J. and the Bear (78-81), as well as enjoy his own spinoff The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo (79-81). Though “bear” is CB slang for “cop,” in this particular instance the Bear referred to was McKay’s pet chimpanzee—series creator Glen A. Larson, an intellectual property crook of Yordan-esque proportions, was somewhat infamous for modeling shows after the latest blockbusters, had been inspired by the runaway success of Every Which Way But Loose, in which trucker and bare-knuckle brawler Philo Beddoe (Clint Eastwood) traverses the highways and honky-tonks of the San Fernando Valley with his orangutan, Clyde. (Every Which Way But Loose must be considered an enormously influential film, for it is also impossible to imagine 1987’s Sylvester Stallone vehicle Over the Top—another film about a long-haul trucker with a sideline in competitive bloodsport—without it.) I would stop to discuss less-celebrated items like early Chuck Norris vehicle Breaker! Breaker! (77) or feminist permutation Flatbed Annie & Sweetiepie: Lady Truckers (79), but I’m already behind schedule.   

White Line Fever

The brief heyday of the trucker movie and so-called “CB craze” was bracketed by two identifiable historical events. The first was the 1973 oil crisis; the second, the Motor Carrier Regulatory Reform and Modernization Act, a huge step towards the deregulation of the trucking industry which was signed into law by President Carter on June 1, 1980. (Very broadly speaking one can track a Rightward shift in the trucker movie, as the protest shifts from a call for more regulation in the Forties and Fifties films of Bezzerides and Endfield to a call for deregulation in the Seventies.)  The ’73 oil crisis resulted in the passage of the National Maximum Speed Law, setting the nationwide speed limit at 55 miles-per-hour, and intensifying an already-existent culture of lawbreaking connivance among truckers, who took on the aspect of outlaw heroes using CB argot to keep one step ahead of the bears. An anti-authoritarian streak animates the best of the trucker movies: The Bandit’s rebellion is of the just-for-kicks, “Whaddya got?” variety, while in Convoy, Rubber Duck emerges as a populist hero, an unofficial spokesman for the truckers who suddenly finds himself called to articulate a platform, and no sooner has this happened than Seymour Casell’s slickster New Mexico Governor is sidling up to him. (One scene has the Governor’s press representative making his way down the convoy, hearing out a list of the driver’s grievances, which range from the speed limit to Vietnam to Watergate to “We’re sick and tired of beatin’ our eyeballs coast-to-coast and then havin’ the damn smokies lift us out for our green stamps.”) The greatest of all trucker films, Jonathan Kaplan’s White Line Fever (75), ends with independent Carrol Jo Hummer (Jan-Michael Vincent) barreling his Ford WT9000, nicknamed “The Blue Mule,” right at the headquarters of the organized crime-backed corporation who’ve been muscling in on him and his kin.

The reference to Paul Bunyan’s ox was no coincidence, for the trucker movie quite self-consciously placed itself within the chronology of American folklore, a convoy of tall tales leading back to the dawn of our bumptious nation. Smokey and the Bandit, for example, begins with Reed crooning a sit-right-down-and-I’ll-tell-you-a-tale invitation: “You heard ‘bout the legend of Jesse James / And John Henry, just to mention some names / Well, there's a truck-drivin’ legend in the South today / A man called Bandit from Atlanta, G.A.” The back cover copy on my Convoy Blu-ray is quite to-the-point on another connection: “When the Western film, for many decades the staple of the American cinema, suffered a decline in the Seventies, a new sub-species helped fill the void—the trucking epic.” Indeed, the basic template of the truck movie—distrust of social contracts, rugged self-reliance, and a temporary banding together against hostile outside forces—can all be found in John Ford’s Stagecoach (39). (10 years before They Drive By Night, Raoul Walsh had forged West with wagon master John Wayne in The Big Trail.) The image of a stagecoach even graces the side of the Bandit’s truck trailer, although the symbolism is somewhat muddled—the Bandit’s avatar is the highwayman in black holding up the stage. Along with those other sublimations of the Western which emerged at the end of the Sixties—the motorcycle/ hot-rod flick and the vigilante film—the trucker movie became a favored forum in which to discuss freedom and authority, the individual and society.

No matter how we suppress the Western, it keeps boomeranging back, popping up in the oddest of places—like Western Australia. George Miller, for his part, has been known to repeat an assertion that he credits to French viewers, calling the first Mad Max a “western on wheels.” It appeared in the magic hour of the trucker trend, released in the US in 1980 in an Americanese-dubbed version from the rather ironically-named American International Pictures, who’d done very well for themselves in the field of automotive carnage. (Their first release was 1955’s The Fast and the Furious.) For those who remember the Mad Max trilogy principally for everything that seemed ahead of its time about its aesthetic—the sporting goods store mix-and-match/S&M/gladiator costuming—it is interesting to re-watch the first film, itself just recently issued to Blu-ray by Shout! Factory, and see just how of its time it was. Rockatansky and his partner, Goose, are cast as hard-working new centurions hobbled in the performance of their duties by the letter of the law, a la Dirty Harry (71). In subsequent installments, social breakdown is followed by an energy crisis, though the treatment is more Aussie eco-panic than American “So what?”—it’s “Beds are Burning” vs. “I Can’t Drive 55.” The enormous success of Mad Max was, one suspects, instrumental in bankrolling Richard Franklin’s Road Games (81), a big rig-set thriller starring Stacey Keach, Jamie Lee Curtis, and a dingo—still the greatest Australian trucking movie of all time, though now it’s got Fury Road right on its donkey. 

* As mentioned in the documentary Gay Sex in the 70s, truck trailers in the Meatpacking District were often used for fuck parties, although it is unclear if FGL are alluding to this phenomenon. Gay porn auteur Fred Halsted, from whose L.A. Plays Itself (72) Thom Andersen’s similarly-titled film takes its name, used truck trailers in his short-lived sex club, Halsted’s. Though I have not seen it, Halsted’s filmography includes a film called Truck It (73), which suggests an alternate history of the suck n’ fuck truck movie. 

Orson Welles as a student at The Todd School, circa 1930

Among the many misconceptions about Orson Welles—e.g., that none of his films made money, that all his protégés betrayed him—one that has garnered curious, unfounded support is that he was apolitical. Perhaps his imperious manner suggests ivory-tower detachment from issues on the ground; maybe his connection to Shakespeare links him more to statecraft of centuries past. Either way, it’s a false assumption to make of the man who produced radical plays for the Federal Theatre Project, spoke fervidly in support of the New Deal and against racism, wrote a newspaper column on political affairs in the 1940s, and considered running for Senate on behalf of Wisconsin (a seat which instead went to Joseph McCarthy).

Most intriguingly of all, he served as technical advisor on the first anti-nuke propaganda film on record.

Rip Van Winkle Renascent is a screenplay written by faculty members of The Todd School, a preparatory academy in Woodstock, Illinois that Welles had attended between ages 11 and 16. Among the script’s authors was headmaster Roger Hill, Welles’s mentor, described in a New Yorker profile of Welles as “a slim, white-haired, tweed-bearing man, who looks as if he had been cast for his role by a motion-picture director, [and] has never let the traditional preparatory-school curriculum stand in the way of creative work.” Hill indoctrinated Welles into the world of the theater, collaborating with him on many projects including Marching Song, a 1932 script about abolitionist John Brown. Welles would always cite The Todd School as what he thought of when he imagined “home,” and it was while his daughter Christopher “Chrissie” Welles was attending Todd that the staff was moved to respond to the recent bombings of Japan.

Roger Hill and Orson Welles in 1978

Hill and fellow educators Pat Armstrong, Sandy Smith, and Hascy Tarbox adapted Washington Irving’s 1819 tale of Rip Van Winkle—a complacent villager who sleeps for 20 years and misses the American Revolution—into a barbed musical satire. Instead of awakening to find the colonies newly minted states, Rip continues slumbering for a century and a half, roused briefly by historic events only to be lulled back to sleep by gremlins—taking the form of ambassadors and senators—who would prefer he leave world affairs to them. Music director Carl Hendrickson contributed songs, such as this verse intoned by the gremlins in their guise as government ministers, before eventually revealing themselves as war gods:

We are diplomatic boys and we love a lot of noise
But you mustn't think we mean to do you harm.
Though we deal in bombs and treaties
We devour bowls of wheaties
And that's the major reason for our charm.
Though we often times have friction
We've a common predilection
And on one thing we are all of us agree,
It's our solemn, bounded duty
To steal any kind of booty
Such as oil or any bases that we need.

(Now they go into a dance with the bombs they carry. These are the old fashion kind, basketball size, with sputtering fuses. As they dance, the Diplomats continue their song:)

You no doubt are all agog—in a sort of mental fog
As to why we carry these about with us.
They're the symbols of our trade,
Knowing that they may be sprayed
The other side is not so apt to fuss.

(Their song is over but their dance continues to a climax when one Diplomat rolls his bomb up the ravine. At the top it explodes into a huge cloud of smoke. When this clears, we find ourselves in a cave labeled Headquarters of Mars. Here three weird puppets go into their own gleeful dance and sing their song:)

GODS OF WAR:
We're Immortal gods of war.
We are Wotan, Mars and Thor
And we love to see the humans
Play their games.
Once they used just sticks and stones.
Even then they piled up bones
But now they fight with lovely
Gorgeous flames.

(Another explosion and another smoke dissolve and the song is over...)

Finally the nuclear age arrives and Rip can sleep no more. Inspired by oratory from his friend, schoolmaster Derrick Van Bummel, Rip strikes down Mars and reads words of peace from one of Van Bummel’s books. As in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, the ending is a plea for engagement and tolerance, lest the world extinguish itself.

Rita Hayworth, Christopher Welles, and Orson Welles in 1945

Busy making films at the time, Welles did not contribute to the Van Winkle script, but he visited the school twice while it was being filmed and volunteered his technical expertise. As Hill recounts in his production manual:

To show a Senate Committee marching out of our Capitol, [Welles] had us paint the Washington building on beaverboard close to the camera and have actors do their march on a platform far away. The platform must be just below camera range while the feet are seen. To get the required depth of focus, an outdoor shot on a sunny day is needed. In the same way we show diplomats marching out of a castle and up into the mountains. As for mountain-climbing shots, a large gravel pit and trick camera angles accomplished the effects. Instant transformations of little Gnomes into villains out of history were simple lap-dissolves. Actors in the midst of blazing atomic fire was just double exposure.

Speaking of Gnomes, one of them was played by 9-year-old Chrissie Welles, the only girl ever to attend the school.

The resulting 45-minute film, hailed as “the first atomic bomb peace picture,” opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, playing to an audience of international dignitaries. A British MP requested a print, making it the first film ever exhibited in the Houses of Parliament. Perhaps most notably, Eleanor Roosevelt convinced UNESCO to purchase 20 prints and exhibit them around the world. It’s barely known today, let alone screened, but it preceded Dr. Strangelove by nearly two decades as a biting example of anti-nuclear satire—a fascinating Welles footnote, emerging as it did between Kane and Lime, two men with their fingers on the button.

Claude Lanzmann (left), Thierry Frémaux (center), and László Nemes (right)

Of the 19 films chosen to debut in the prestigious competition section at Cannes, two of the films that have screened in the fest’s first half are already standouts: Todd Haynes’s Carol, a tender and touching adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith love story The Price of Salt, from the United States; and from Hungary, László Nemes’s Son of Saul, an up close and brutal look at one man’s quest to protect a young boy's body from an unceremonious disposal within the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

“We wanted to talk about something that is only too often historical, the stuff of books,” Nemes, the 38-year-old director of Son of Saul, explained. “We wanted to make this very present, very alive, and we wanted to boil everything down to the dimension of a single human being.”

Nemes’s story, set over the course of a day and a half at Auschwitz-Birkenau, focuses on a single man and his mission: a member of a Sonderkommando group—Jews who were enlisted by the Nazis to dispose of those who had been gassed—believes one victim to be his son, and sets out in search of a rabbi who can properly bury the child. Shot with long takes, his protagonist stays in focus in the foreground while the background remains blurry. Married to a harrowingly precise soundtrack, viewers witness graphic moments from the carnage within the camp and inside its crematorium.

“Our approach was to exclude everything that was not fundamental to our story. Not to represent anything that gives you a sense of where we are and what was going on,” the cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, added.

This approach sustains intensity for the viewer, witnessing an individual who is navigating an overwhelming experience while trying to remain focused on his personal mission.

"We didn't want to be emotional in the conventional sense of the word,” Nemes continued. "These people work in the crematorium, and after several months they are so empty of normal emotion. Normal emotions have been eroded away."

Son of Saul

A rare debut feature in the Cannes competition, Son of Saul arrived at the festival with a strong pedigree. Nemes spent two years working as an assistant to Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr on the 2007 competition entry The Man From London, a background that added a level of expectation to the movie. Today, Nemes downplays their bond.

“Béla Tarr was my school, a way to learn the tools of the trade. There’s no other relationship, not consciously,” Nemes told me during the press conference. “He is nervous when I talk about him. I haven’t talked to him in eight years, but he’s glad and at the same time nervous.”

Nemes and Erdély shot Son of Saul on film stock, and it is apparently the only Cannes competition entry that will be projected on film here this week.

“I might be part of a dying kind, but I only want to shoot film,” Nemes explained in response to my question during the press conference. “This is the soul of cinema, the physical image projected. Everything else is a screen."

Erdély and Nemes are quite passionate about the analog format.

“It’s not okay with us that industrial trends make film disappear,” Nemes continued. “I think the bottom line is that the viewer gets less in the end. It’s a regressive state. We want to fight against that. We want to make sure the new generation of filmmakers understand what it means to shoot on film.”

Cate Blanchett (left), Todd Haynes (center), and Rooney Mara (right)

A world apart, Carol was shot on Super 16mm film stock, and at its gala premiere, Todd Haynes’s latest film received a lengthy standing ovation.

Set in the early 1950s, Carol traces a love story that grows between two women, one a seemingly self-possessed mother and the other an aspiring young photographer. Their romantic interest in each other was a foreign notion to mainstream America at the time, and as if to reflect this fact, the characters are often shown viewed through windows or reflected in mirrors.

In a chat before the press conference, cinematographer Ed Lachman told me that the decision to compose scenes in this way was about “fragmenting the world emotionally.” Haynes elaborated on their creative decisions in the press conference. He’d thought a lot about “the act of looking and being looked at. An optical experience. And positioning people on either said of that optical experience.”

The film begs comparison to Haynes’s Far From Heaven (02), which featured a closeted man coming to grips with his sexual orientation. Yet other than the period elements, the two movies are quite different.

“Todd didn’t want to do a Sirkian world of heightened reality or artifice,” Lachman, who also shot Far From Heaven, said during the press conference. He said Haynes wanted to depict the more lived-in, even dirty environment of post-war New York. The two looked to the photography of Vivian Maier, among other sources of inspiration.

In Carol, the title character (played by Cate Blanchett) is an idealized female subject as seen through the lens of Therese (Rooney Mara), a budding street photographer. When the movie begins, Therese observes and desires Carol, but as time goes on and external forces challenge their relationship, the dynamic shifts and Carol is forced to observe and pursue Therese.

"Therese changes. The two women at the end of the film are very different from the two women at the beginning,” reiterated Todd Haynes. He cited David Lean’s Brief Encounter as one film that was a reference for Carol.

Carol

“Carol is almost a construct of Therese's imagination,” screenwriter Phyllis Nagy said. “She has really invented a whole world for Carol.”

Asked about the importance of telling this story at this moment, Nagy, who spent years trying to get the project off the ground, contemplated that while gays and lesbians have made some progress, there’s still a long way to go for many.

“Nothing has changed and everything has changed because we can have this movie now,” Nagy explained. She said that she hopes the film starts a discussion at a time when homosexuality is still illegal in many countries around the world. “We politicize the material by just allowing people to live their lives honestly."

"When you live your life, your identity is front and center, but it’s something we are not often treated to seeing in films or in art,” Nagy concluded. “I hope it has some ripple effect eventually.”

For once, an interviewer had stumped Orson Welles. In a hotel room in 1960, a seemingly innocuous question from a television reporter about a sense of home has him searching his pockets for a matchbook. He pauses, eyes downcast, his brow dented in thought. “I suppose it’s Woodstock, Illinois, if it’s anywhere,” he replies. “I went to school there for four years. If I try to think of a home, it’s that.”

Throughout the month, Welles’s homeland has repaid the compliment. On May 8, Woodstock Celebrates, the cultural stewards of this town of 25,000 located 50 miles northwest of Chicago, launched a three-week festival to hail the roving master as a product of the prairies. Of all the centennial celebrations of Welles worldwide, this is perhaps the most territorial, the most intimate.

The weekend kicked off with a screening of Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles at the historic Woodstock Opera House, where Welles made his professional directorial debut at age 19. Before the show, director Chuck Workman stood at the podium on Welles’s namesake stage, the christening of which is captured in the film. He explained that, before researching Welles’s life in Woodstock, he “didn’t know how much this area was the cradle of arts in those days. I knew Frank Lloyd Wright and Orson were around, but I didn’t know how much going on in Chicago would spread out hundreds of miles from Chicago to make an art world.”

Orson Welles at 18

After graduating from the progressive Todd School for Boys in Woodstock in 1931 and sidestepping college, Welles famously decamped for Ireland and secured work onstage. Three years later, he returned to Woodstock to host a summer season “in the European spirit and tradition” at the Opera House, convincing his Dublin counterparts (actors and production mavens Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards) to join him, a coup covered in the New York and Chicago press.

It was during this summer in Woodstock that Welles worked on one of his first short films, the amateurish riff on surrealism, The Hearts of Age. More importantly, this was the moment when Welles proved himself as a master of publicity­ with a strategy he dubbed “The Selling of Woodstock, Summer of ’34.” The promotional materials he doled out coaxed lines of limousines to the town he’d trumpeted as “the grand capital of Victorianism in the Mid-West” and “a wax flower under a bell of glass.” (There is some contention that these words were ghostwritten by Thornton Wilder.)

The productions became mandatory viewing for leading Chicago theater critics. As Simon Callow notes in Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu, even the flagship Marshall Field's department store on State Street ran full-page ads for the latest gowns to flaunt at Woodstock galas. It was all the more impressive given Welles’s saturation of the local media. Even at age 13, for example, he was anointed drama critic of the Highland Park News, published in the affluent North Shore suburb, where he regularly savaged local productions in his column.

The Hearts of Age

In his introduction to the screening of Magician at the Opera House, film scholar Michael Dawson likened Welles to a “broken water main” of talent, an apt metaphor on a particularly stormy night. After the screening, attendees were encouraged to brave the rain and walk to the nearby courthouse to skim Welles memorabilia and sip wine provided, from afar, by Francis Ford Coppola. Outside the opera house, festivalgoers moved in single file beneath the network of canopies lining local shops, including an independent bookstore that offered Rosebud and Macbeth cookies for sale.

The town square, cherished by locals for its star turn in Groundhog Day, where it doubled as the Punxsutawney of the mind for its North Shore-raised star, Bill Murray, remains virtually unchanged, save for the no-handgun placards dotting the garbage cans at the entrances. As attendees dodged Ned Ryerson’s doozy puddles and headed toward the whirling spotlights in a pickup truck parked at the courthouse steps, a man behind me, laughing along with his friends cracking Gene Kelly jokes, seemed to best capture the spirit of the place. “Actually,” he said, “the spotlights work better when there’s rain.”

The charismatic headmaster at the Todd School during Welles’s attendance was Roger Hill. “Headmasters are big frogs in small puddles,” he once said. “They constantly speak down ex cathedra.” Hill favored a free-range, self-empowering approach to education. Students could chase their muse on the stage, at the printing press, even in the school dog kennel. Welles swallowed the curriculum whole, save for geometry and all sports but fencing, which he felt bolstered his stage presence. Upon his arrival at Todd, Welles said he “fell in love” with Hill.

“I tried to find a way to capture the attention of this fascinating man who fascinates me tonight as much as he did the first day I laid eyes on him,” Welles remarked on a 1970 episode of An Evening with Orson Welles. “He has never ceased to be my idea of who I would like to be.”

The Stranger

Welles’s tributes to Hill and the Todd School were often more subdued, as James Naremore illustrated in a Saturday afternoon lecture on Welles’s Nazi-hunting thriller The Stranger. The setting for the talk was the Rosebud Theatre, a makeshift events space in Woodstock’s local VFW hall, on the outskirts of the same town square that inspired the film’s backdrop. While Welles’s masquerading prep-school teacher is a far cry from Roger Hill, the Harper School where he hides from a war-crime investigator played by Edward G. Robinson—a role, Naremore noted, that Welles originally intended for Agnes Moorehead—bares striking resemblances to Todd.

Welles’s preferred location of Woodstock was scrapped by the studio, along with “powerfully grotesque, impressionistic dream sequences” and Latin American scenes that Welles valued over the more traditional fare that remained. But Naremore pinpointed various Todd references in the film—teachers’ names, school proverbs—that Welles smuggled in, particularly on signage and in his own handwriting, a minor production detail for which he had maximum control. (Coincidentally, Woodstock was the longtime home of Chester Gould, who drew the Dick Tracy strip from his rural studio and maintained an office in the square, where his brother Ray lettered the comics. In interviews for This Is Orson Welles with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles mentions that Gould had a “great sense of set-ups, real good movie set-ups.”)

While examples of Welles’s hidden hand underscored Naremore’s presentation, a discussion later that evening with the weekend headliner, Oja Kodar, examined Welles as a man in full. Making a rare stateside trip from her home in Croatia, Welles’s partner and collaborator from the early 1960s until his passing held court before a rapt ballroom audience. Flanked by banners with photographs of Welles in his moon-faced youth—uniform rumpled, hair center-split—Kodar brought a certain majestic air to the proceedings.

John Huston, Orson Welles, and Peter Bogdanovich

At the midpoint of her discussion, she yielded a portion of her time to Roger Hill’s grandson, Todd Tarbox, who was in attendance. Tarbox spoke of the Hill family’s enduring respect for Welles, as well as the long-held lament that Welles didn’t maintain more friendships from his youth. The disconnect was probably not out of hostility: in Road to Xanadu, Callow quotes a letter from Maurice Bernstein, Welles’s legal guardian after his father’s death in 1930, stating that Welles looked up to the other children at Todd, but that they “mystified him, even scared him.”

The evening’s moderator, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, stressed Kodar’s importance to Welles’s literary legacy, tracing the lineage of several Welles films, completed or otherwise, to Kodar’s original short stories. “I’m not going to be like one of those people who get an Oscar and then starts thanking their grandmother, all the way up to Adam and Eve,” Kodar said, self-effacingly. Yet for over an hour, she shared inspirations for her prose: fascinating scenarios of mistaken identity, exposed voyeurs, lost souls.

While remaining short on details about the release of The Other Side of the Wind, Kodar offered insights into her mystifying title for the still-unfinished film. In the early 1960s, she and Welles were drifting through a studio back lot in Rome. “The day was very windy,” she said, recalling that Orson looked like “a giant bat” as his black cape flapped in the wind.

Orson Welles

“When people ask me about Orson,” Kodar continued, “I still think today of him as an element of nature. In a certain sense, he was more than human. He was wind. I know, of course, he was human and he had a mother and father and a brother, but when I looked at him that day [in Rome], I was thinking, ‘He’s the wind. Does the wind have a brother? What is the other side of wind? It’s something else.’ This is how I came up with this title. Orson loved it, and he said it fit the character of Jake Hannaford, played by John Huston.”

She later likened Huston to an “unfrocked priest.” The way he listened, she explained, impelled you to confess.

“Living with Orson, you don’t know where you live,” Kodar said as the conversation drew to a close. “I didn’t live in Hollywood. I lived on the moon. I lived in the water, the air. There was no geography.”

For one night, the landscape that shaped Welles was underfoot.

We Won't Grow Old Together

By some accounts, Saint Valentine was an early Christian priest who, after offending Emperor Claudius II, was beaten, stoned, and then beheaded. Many people feel something similar is happening to them each Valentine’s Day. It is to these lonely, sulking, love-weary souls that Anthology Film Archives devotes one of my favorite annual series, the Valentine’s Day Massacre. A celebration of cinematic anti-romance, this year's four films––We Won’t Grow Old Together (72), Possession (81), Modern Romance (81), and Minnie and Moskowitz (71)—were a prime opportunity to look further afield and count the ways in which love can trap, horrify, infuriate, and debilitate us.

What would an investigation of love’s pitfalls be without a descent into the very worst that concupiscence has to offer? Cinema, after all, has a rich history of depicting sex as gross, unfulfilling, alienating, and repellent; a category I’ll call anti-romantic sex.* (It remains to be seen what label might apply to Gaspar Noé’s forthcoming Love, screening this week in Cannes, though if 2002's Irreversible is any clue, it won’t all be chocolate and roses.) Anthology’s Valentine’s Day gift puts on display a counterpoint to the hapless sex we are accustomed to seeing in movies, in which a man and a woman fall gracefully from kiss to the missionary position, hair and makeup undisturbed, and miraculously orgasm in unison. As with the most interesting aesthetic categories, the positive criteria are less tangible than the negative ones: Titanic (97) was a celebration of bad sex, the kind that exemplifies the Danielle Steel, wonder-bread American doublethink of wanting to be stimulated without having to admit you like softcore pornography. Sex of this sort is a candlelit parade of delicate insinuation at the expense of honesty or insight. More often however sex is simply boring: was there sex in Dallas Buyers Club (yes, straight sex), or 50 Shades of Gray? Was it memorable?

Good sex on film is none of this. It is the sort that hides nothing for the sake of modesty. It feels essential to the whole of the film: we’d be missing something crucial about the characters and the world they inhabit if we didn’t actually see this act in all its detail. The Valentine’s Day Massacre is, for a series on love, rather light on sex. We Won’t Grow Old Together, Modern Love, and Minnie and Moskowitz allude to it, and in many ways we suspect that it is the unseen elastic that continues to snap these dysfunctional couples together, but the sex itself remains off screen. Not so for Possession, which is aptly billed by Anthology as a “batshit crazy depiction of an imploding marriage.” Here we have one of the most grotesque metaphorical depictions of infidelity in cinema: husband (Sam Neill) catches wife (Isabelle Adjani) making love to a half-formed demon-monster that she has been secretly constructing while her marriage falls apart. It’s a perverse cuckold fantasy—the wife isn’t simply cheating on you but is being violated by a malevolent supernatural force. Think about that the next time your spouse is home late from work. 

Desperate Living

But body horror is only the beginning of a whole taxonomy of sex gone wrong. The lightest form of sexual anti-romance is the sort that pokes fun. It strips away the gentle sighs or the flattering lighting and reminds you that sex is often either absurd or mundane. It’s the kind that takes on the mainstream doublethink and says “oh, so you do like watching sex right?”—then proceeds to show much more than you bargained for. John Waters masters this, with his kitschy anti-aesthetic, corpulent, and bony characters, and their incomprehensible paraphilias––the man can make anything seem sexual, even smothering someone to death, as Grizelda (Jean Hill) does in Desperate Living (77). Roy Andersson does something similar in You, the Living (07), by making us watch a rotund old woman wearing a pickelhaube screw her tiny husband while he laments about losing his retirement savings.

A personal favorite example of the mundane imposing itself into sexual fantasy is A Taxing Woman, Juzo Itami’s droll 1987 mockery of crime thrillers, bureaucracy, and the Yakuza. The star of the show may be the inscrutable, middle-aged tax-fraud investigator Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto) who is neither married nor courts romance, but her nemesis, the tawdry ebullient gangster Hideki Gondo (Tsutomu Yamazaki) has one of his best moments between the sheets. Gondo and his mistress are in bed at his house and, as with most of the movie, everything is played straight: the dark lighting, the woman underneath shrieking in ecstasy, the tastefully placed sheets. But seconds after they both climax, Gondo reaches off camera, grabs a fistful of tissues, and inserts them between his partner’s legs. It forces one to think “Is this guy really that worried about his sheets? Could he be more of an asshole?”—a question which is addressed immediately when he commands his mistress to grab some important business documents before she has even caught her breath. In a jab at the traditional postcoital booty shot, we watch the lover walk into the light with the tissues swaying along with her hips, shattering any illusion of eroticism the moment had left.

Then there are the sex scenes where we aren’t laughing, which are sadder and more unsettling. These show us two characters genuinely trying to connect but failing. It is the sort that is hinted at in Synecdoche, New York (08), when Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard starts crying while undressing, muttering “I’m sorry” all the way into bed with Tammy (Emily Watson). The impenetrable loneliness of both characters is made real by their lack of passion, warmth, or intimacy. Oshima’s notorious, cryptic meditation on power and obsession, In the Realm of the Senses (76), is rife with these moments: virtually two hours of unsimulated sex scenes, none of which are erotic. The immediacy and inevitability of the sex forces you to anatomise it: why are they doing this, or that? What is going on in their heads? It takes the vapid psychology of pornography, in which the inner lives of the participants are wholly suppressed to produce the commodity of pleasure and reverses it: pleasure is dissected so relentlessly and extirpated of gratification that were forced to examine the character’s minds.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

One of the greatest examples of this mold of sex comes from Nicolas Roeg, a fixture in articles about movie sex for Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland’s performance as a bereaved couple in Don’t Look Now (73). That scene conveys their simmering desperation, lust, and endurance. But it’s in The Man Who Fell to Earth (76) that Roeg’s genius for giving sex its full emotional and narrative import is truly demonstrated, as part of a shattered, bitter, inexhaustible romance.

The result is spectacular, even in description: an emaciated David Bowie, who plays an alien, engages in various sexual acts, some involving fellating a gun that shoots blanks (let that sit in), with a former lover who has left him for his best friend. She is caked in makeup and hairspray. Both are sloppy, drunk, and lacking in grace, and shrieking things like “oh yeah, in your ear,” “bite it,” and “I’m rich, I can afford anything” between licking each others tongues and clumsily rolling about. The editing is disjointed, the lighting harsh; the cloying song “Hello, Mary Lou” echoes in the background. The scene begins with Bowie’s alien Thomas Jerome Newton threatening her with the gun before she realizes it is a fake, and after it ends, there is not a glimmer of joy left in the movie, despite there being almost 30 minutes left. Perhaps the most devastating part of the scene is the fact that the characters are doing all this willingly. Their coupling was their genuine attempt to recover something that died and festered long ago. After watching this, even if you thought you might have wanted to have sex ever again, it will at the very least cause you to seriously doubt your motives.

* Missing from this taxonomy is queer sexuality. In the past few decades we’ve seen more men at least getting at it, but often it’s as vapid as bad straight sex. It titillates but doesn’t embarrass, disquiet, or repulse us. Almodovar, however, will always have a special place in my heart for showing Gael Garcia Bernal as an homme fatale reluctantly bottoming in Bad Education (04).

Steampunk and retrofuturism—genres that look forward by looking backward (and vice-versa), or what The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction defines as science fiction that captures “the older but still modern eras in which technological change seemed to anticipate a better world”—have fared best on screen in light-fingered cartoons that bypass heavy exposition or Big Thoughts. My favorite steampunk movie is still Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky (86), a piece of undiluted euphoria about a girl who drops from the sky into a mining town and the spunky boy who catches her. The girl carries a potent crystal that leads them—along with pirates and government agents—to the floating island of Laputa, an Atlantis of the air, both a warning of rampant technology and an example of machines and woodlands evolving into peaceful coexistence. Suffused with humor and suspense and a belief in youth as a time for taking risks, the movie soars with adventure and leaves room for rib-tickling pranks, like a miner and a pirate competing to see who can burst his shirt-buttons quicker by flexing his pectorals.

Like every moviemaker who has worked with John Lasseter at Pixar, Brad Bird must know his Miyazaki. In his own slangy, rugged-individualist way, Bird matches Miyazaki repeatedly for imagination and virtuosity in animated films like The Iron Giant (99), The Incredibles (04) and Ratatouille (07), and in his live-action Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (11), which lightly mocks the central concepts of Mission: Impossible movies (hairbreadth escapes, unlikely disguises) while also spectacularly fulfilling them. In the eclectic and ambitious Tomorrowland, Bird aims for a Miyazaki-like blend of action, humor, and poignancy. The result, I’m shocked to say, is a spluttering misfire.

Like Miyazaki in Laputa, Bird pivots his story on a charismatic girl connected to a would-be utopia. The girl is Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a lifelike robot with a distinct cerebral charm, and the place is Tomorrowland, established by Earth's genius dreamers as a haven for human creativity in another dimension. But Bird's movie lacks clarity and authentic exuberance, and adopts peculiar, self-defeating strategies. For example, it offers only teasing visions of Tomorrowland as a gargantuan science-fair wonder-world, part Epcot Center and part Oz. (The most spectacular sights were shot at the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, including an enormous, curving piece of architecture that resembles a brontosaurus skeleton.) Then Bird withholds the origin story for Tomorrowland and treats it as a big "reveal." Why the delay? It’s as if Bird thought he could add some much-needed suspense by twisting Tomorrowland’s roots into a whodunit. It’s a mystery without clues or a pulse-quickening payoff, and it’s pointless to hold off on the answers. Even the film’s promotional comic book, The Secret History of the World of Tomorrowland, lays it out right away: In the late 19th century, Gustave Eiffel, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and Jules Verne built a scientific and artistic sanctuary, designed to be free from greed, corruption and conquest.

Athena is a recruiter for Tomorrowland, and her latest hot prospect is tomboy teenager Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), the daughter of a soon-to-be-unemployed NASA engineer (Tim McGraw). Casey has snagged Athena's attention because of her feistiness and brains, as displayed in her gutsy, illegal effort to slow down the demolition of NASA's Cape Canaveral launch platforms. Robertson is a sinewy, go-for-broke actor, reminiscent of Jennifer Lawrence in her Winter’s Bone (10) period. But Cassidy is such an uncanny performer that Athena steals every scene they share. Her quickness and honesty register as air-clearing wit, a welcome respite from the film’s repetitive rhetorical flourishes about faith and hope. In one of the movie's many contrived catchphrases, Casey's sabotage proves to Athena that she  "hasn't given up." Athena has big plans for her. The robot knows that Casey won't make it to Tomorrowland alone, and that she'll need the help of Frank Walker (George Clooney), an inventor Athena enlisted when he was a pudgy little boy (Thomas Robinson).

Frank never forgave Athena for confessing that she was a robot only after he was in thrall to her. Even when he grew into adulthood and she remained a robot child (Cassidy was 11 when cast), he never made his peace with her—and, extremely creepily, never stopped obsessing about her, either. He left Tomorrowland in 1984 and became a recluse back on Earth, thoroughly disillusioned and blaming Athena for his loss of hope because she gave it to him in the first place. At the climax, Bird prolongs their tearful rapprochement and directs Clooney and Cassidy to play it straight. It's bizarrely—and upsettingly—romantic. All that's missing is the classic kiss and clinch.  

Bird fills the movie with jetpacks, ray guns, and sci-fi totems of all kinds, like a man-size model of the original Gort in Robert Wise's The Day The Earth Stood Still (51). The script, by Bird and Damien Lindelof (based on a story by these two and Jeff Jensen), ties the action to the recruiter's Tomorrowland pin, which positions a T that resembles a jetpack against the universal sign for the atom. When programmed with the user's DNA, the pin allows him or her to enter an engulfing vision of the dream kingdom at its peak. It's fun to think of Bird, who was born in 1957, stuffing this work with childhood memories of the 1964 New York World's Fair, Disneyland's Tomorrowland, James Bond’s jetpack in Thunderball (65), and other milestones of pop fantasy. (He includes references to later favorites, like 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1983’s The Right Stuff.) A sequence set at the Eiffel Tower is everything the entire movie wants to be—surprising, wondrous, and exciting. Bird blasts the rust off a landmark and, with delirious invention, restores its fascination and majesty.

Generally, the film is best when it's lighthearted. Casey first uses the pin in a jailhouse waiting room, to the amusement of a punk in a porkpie hat; his bemused reactions to her obvious dislocation produce a satisfying belly laugh. Later, she visits a sci-fi memorabilia store called "Blast from the Past," run by suspiciously intense neo-hippies played by Keegan-Michael Key (of Key and Peele) and Kathryn Hahn. It gives Key a chance to exploit his surefire manic/hyper shtick and his ability to go from 0 to 80 in a second.  

Too much of the film is message-ridden for an imaginative romp. What Bird keeps front and center, from beginning to end, is an awkward plea for upholding optimism despite environmental disasters and political upheaval and all the other setbacks of the 21st century. The movie often refers to a metaphor that Casey's dad once taught her: "There are two wolves inside all of us and they're always fighting. One is darkness and despair. The other is brightness and hope. Which one wins? The one you feed." The poetry may be hollow—don’t all wolves hunt prey? But Bird, like Casey, genuinely wants to feed "brightness and hope." Tomorrowland might have fulfilled that goal if it were really about a band of happy warriors taking this wisdom as their battle plan. Too bad Frank and Casey spend so long as a grump and a bewildered naïf.

In all his other films (Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol included), Bird has been a first-rate director-comedian, grounding even serious storylines in matter-of-fact humor. In Tomorrowland, you can count the comic coups on one hand: high school teachers peddling rote gloom and doom to an increasingly fed-up Casey; Athena's confession that she doesn't have any ideas (she is, after all, a robot); and, later, her admission that she never laughed at Frank because he simply isn't funny, a sentiment unfortunately shared by the audience. It's amusing that the leader of five dark-suited bad-guy robots sports a fatuous grin and calls himself "Dave Clark." (They're like Men In Black, evil audio-animatronics division). But you dread their presence in the wrong way—Bird may have been pursuing Buster Keaton-like slapstick, but when they appear, he often settles for head-slamming mayhem.

In Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, Bird toyed with an established format and made nary an off move. In Tomorrowland, he commits several neophyte errors. Pierce Gagnon, as Casey's kid brother, looks confusingly similar to Robinson as young Frank Walker, so you expect Athena to scoop him up right away. The scene of Athena planting a Tomorrowland pin in Casey's belongings at night is shadowy enough to make you wonder whether Casey has a doppelganger. The ultra-cold opening of the adult Frank telling his childhood story straight to the camera is so inept and boring that it feels like a stroke of editing-room desperation. Casey's family life is just as badly stitched and sketchy. (Judy Greer, as Casey's mother, appears only in a home-movie flashback of Casey as a star-struck little girl reciting names of constellations as she dreams of soaring into space.)  Bird loudly telegraphs the flash of insight that enables Casey to diagnose why Earth seems bent on self-destruction. Frank asks her whether she'd want to know the exact date of her death. She responds, "what if me accepting it is what causes it?"

When a comic artist loses his finesse, it's often because his ambitions have prodded him to try too hard. In pursuit of Tomorrowland’s idealistic goals, Bird forces his effects. For a movie that celebrates dreams, Tomorrowland is too mechanically plotted and replete with robot-on-robot and human-on-robot violence. For a movie that strives to inspire fresh ideas, it's too full of clichés, like casting Hugh Laurie as the cryptically menacing governor of Tomorrowland, his haughty British accent and attitude immediately signaling his untrustworthiness. And for a movie that's supposed to hinge on the human heroine's brilliance, it focuses mostly on her ability to take a beating. The story is laden with talk about "tachyons"—particles that move faster than the speed of light—but the ultimate gimmick at the heart of Tomorrowland is as easy to operate as a trackball.

The best live-action films with a retrofuturist feeling have been period adventures like Martin Scorsese's Hugo, or adaptations of classic science fiction from distant eras, like George Pal's 1960 version of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Those movies give off a seductive nostalgic glow that Bird fails to achieve even when he depicts Frank at the Hall of Invention at the '64 World's Fair, lugging around a jetpack that he made with an Electrolux vacuum. It may be that laboring through this overly complicated movie drained Bird's passion for looking ahead by looking back. In Tomorrowland, even nostalgia for "the future" seems more like retro déjà vu.

During a press conference at Cannes this week, Yorgos Lanthimos proclaimed his love for the sitcom Friends. In the show’s second season, the character Phoebe refers to someone finding their “lobster,” i.e., their true love, their mate for life. The single men and women in Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’s fourth feature, The Lobster, seek the same fulfillment, but if they can't find a match in a few weeks, they will be transformed into an animal.

Rules within the rigid world of The Lobster require that the singles, who are confined to a resort hotel, have some defining characteristic that they can match up with a potential paramour. A lisp, a limp, or even frequent nosebleeds are enough for two people to form a bond, find love, and avoid life as a dog, for example, or a donkey.

This darkly comedic framework skewers the state of dating culture today, and the director revealed that the film was highly influenced by the British reality show Hotel. The idea evolved slowly over an extended period of time, through a collaboration with co-screenwriter Efthymis Filippou. “We discussed little stories and built it up from there,” Lanthimos said at the press conference.

The director said he hoped the film would, like his other features, have something to say about relationships—romantic ones, in this case. Not that what it has to say is universally agreed upon...

“Everyone interprets it very differently,” actress Rachel Weisz, who co-stars with Colin Farrell, John C. Reilly, and Ben Whishaw in The Lobster, said. “The first thing it makes me think about is narcissism—the fact that you have to fall in love with someone who has similar qualities.”

For other cast members, the film’s ideas and story are more opaque.

“I don’t really feel I know what the film is about,” Whishaw admitted. “I haven’t seen it yet. I suspect that it might be the kind of film that might be different every time you see it.”

“I have no clue what it’s about,” Farrell said. “There’s a sense of the deep loneliness that permeates it. This is the kind of film that just [my] being in it doesn’t mean I know more about it than any other audience member who sees it. I just felt that the texture of loneliness was something that [existed] throughout the script.”

Farrell discovered Lanthimos when he happened upon a theater in Philadelphia that was showing Dogtooth (09). He popped in to watch the film and was impressed. With The Lobster, he was drawn by what he said was “by far the most unique and particular script that I had ever read.”

“I didn’t understand it and am still not sure that I do [now],” Farrell continued. “I found it deeply, deeply moving, and yet there are no emotional peaks in it. None of the dramatic conventions that I have been used to over the years.”

Weisz was also a fan of Lanthimos’s work.

“I just wanted to be in one of his universes. I put myself in his hands,” she said. ”It’s the pursuit of love, in this Lanthimos world. Very Romantic—with a capital ‘R,’ not in our modern way.”

The Lobster is being seen as a big step forward for Lanthimos and has kept people talking throughout this year's edition of Cannes. Having made three films in Greece (read Gavin Smith’s 2009 coverage of Un Certain Regard prize-winner Dogtooth), with this film he’s working with well-known actors and in English for the first time.

“I thought it was time to do something different and progress,” Yorgos Lanthimos explained. “It’s quite limited, what you can do in Greece. I moved to England with the goal of making an English-language film. We approached the film like we’ve approached every other film we’ve done—except this time we were able to pay everyone!”

Never mind being naïve enough to imagine ever seeing a film that will change the world, but even the most hardened critics, in their heart of hearts, come to Cannes with the dream at the back of their minds that at some point, we’ll see one film that will at least change cinema. Most years, that dream is pretty comprehensively disappointed, and this year it has indeed been disappointed day after day, in a festival that offered the most mundane official selection in recent memory. The keynote was set by Emmanuelle Bercot’s opening film La Tête Haute (Standing Tall), an unassuming if engaging social drama in which Catherine Deneuve is a juvenile court judge presiding over the fortunes of a young offender. In reality, Deneuve is playing an idealized version of the French state itself, ever patient and compassionate, and that was clearly just the reassuring image that people felt they needed in these tough times: since its release in France last week, the film has been a major box-office success.

Critics, of course, don’t come to Cannes for that sort of easy reassurance—we’d rather witness the most despairing jeremiads, as long as they come with a twist of inspiration. And in the festival’s official selection, there were scant traces of that—except in Laszlo Nemes’s fearlessly severe Holocaust drama Son of Saul, the one film of the 2015 competition guaranteed to fuel substantial debate over the next year. (Here’s Eugene Hernandez on it, for starters.) 

But for a response to current events that was politically and artistically miles from the norm, you had to look to an extraordinary one-off phenomenon in Directors’ Fortnight. This was Arabian Nights, an authentically sui generis six-hour, three-part offering from Miguel Gomes, the Portuguese director of Our Beloved Month of August (08) and the deliciously confounding, fabulist confection Tabu (12), a postcolonial romance about a man, a woman, and “a sad and melancholy crocodile.” Tabu especially reveals Gomes as a man who likes telling stories, but at the start of his new work’s first “volume,” Arabian Nights: The Restless One, Gomes appears on camera to muse over how difficult it is for him now to pursue his project of making a film similarly devoted to storytelling. Portugal, he points out, is in economic crisis, the government having imposed a brutal set of austerity measures in recent years that have exacerbated mass unemployment and destroyed the lives of large swathes of the population of an already challenged country. For someone with the enviable and privileged job of making films, Gomes worries, how is it possible to merely spin yarns in such a climate? And he gets up from his table and flees, his bewildered crew picking up their cameras and booms and heading off in hot pursuit.

The exact relevance of the original 1001 Nights to Gomes’s project only becomes apparent after a while—after he has fused together pieces of reportage on two completely different events that happen to be going on in Portugal at the same time at the same place, in the Northern town of Viana do Castelo, a shipyard closure and an attempt to combat an invasion of wasps. Then comes the premise, expounded via a visit to a fabulous Kismet-like episode with princesses, sailboats, camels, turbans, and the finest silks of Araby. Scheherazade saved the people of old Baghdad by telling stories to beguile her angry husband the King; Gomes’s film will use the structure of the Arabian Nights to beguile the times, fulfilling its social responsibility by capturing the realities of hard-times Portugal, but also spinning tales as whimsical and baroque as the director happens to fancy.

What we get is an episodic, fragmentary, digressive ragbag of different stories, genres, techniques, voices—sometimes manifestly artificed, sometimes seemingly giving us straight documentary, but for much of the time, walking a perplexing line between fiction and documentary, much as Gomes did in Our Beloved Month of August, in which real-life firefighters and carnival-troupe performers suddenly found themselves playing their own roles in a melodrama narrative.

And so, over six hours, Gomes’s film goes wherever it wants. At one moment, we’re in a fanciful version of old Bagdad, or on a sun-kissed rocky coast (in reality, somewhere around Marseilles), where the beautiful Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate) dallies with a succession of admirers who certainly never featured in the original Nights: one is a priapic beach boy named Paddleman (Carloto Cotta, the dashing lover in Tabu), another a break-dancer named Elvis. The next moment, we’re on a Lisbon housing estate, watching the poignant story of a small dog named Dixie as it passes from owner to owner. There’s an outrageous ribald episode (the film’s one piece of overt political satire) in which assorted Portuguese ministers, bankers, and economists are endowed with a form of metaphysical Viagra (the episode is called “The Men With Hard-Ons” and features the sublime English subtitle: “Oh melancholy man, tell me the truth—does your willy wiggle?”). There’s the epic tale of a swimming club for the unemployed (“The Bath of the Magnificents”) which takes in a series of testimonies from assorted real-life Magnificents, and ends in documentary mode with a joyous mass swim on a chilly-looking New Year’s Day. And there’s an extended piece of pure Manoel de Oliveira (to whose memory Gomes dedicated the film onstage), a Brechtian piece of outdoor theater about a courtroom trial involving a pantomime cow and several people in fanciful demon masks. (Put it down to Cannes fatigue, or perhaps to the inordinate length and prolix literariness of this episode, but I couldn’t begin to focus on its drift; but then I did say it was pure Oliveira.)

Arabian Nights is constantly surprising and mutable, hugely entertaining, and to tell the truth, at times a little boring and repetitive—you feel at points that Gomes is over-stretching his material, or simply getting over-fixated on episodes that don’t quite sustain their interest. But in this sense the film has much in common with the “loose baggy monsters” of the experimental novel tradition—hyper-digressive, multidimensional creations such as Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick, your Thomas Pynchons and David Foster Wallaces. A little boredom comes with the terrain and makes the surprises more vivid. And there are surprises aplenty, not least on the musical front: the old Latin jazz classic “Perfidia” threads its way through in a multitude of cover versions, Eighties power balladry brings tears to the eye in Dixie’s story, and Volume Three takes the ostensibly cringesome “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” (by the forgotten Klaatu, better known by the Carpenters cover) and makes it its own, not least by using it as the theme for an impromptu tortoise race.

Gomes, you may be thinking, is a wild and creative guy—and yes, indeed he is. But actually, the message of the film is that it is the times themselves, and the people who live through them, that are wild and creative, generating stories no matter how much harsh political conditions might tend to purge the world of narrative exuberance. The Arabian Nights, as each volume’s opening titles remind us of the film’s source, simply provide a structure for coverage of events in contemporary Portugal. And here’s one of the most significant aspects of the work’s radicalism—its innovative process of preparation. Gomes arranged for a team of journalists to fan out over Portugal, interview people, and bring back real-life stories that could be used in the film. The stories were then submitted as research topics to a “Central Committee” which voted on which ones to use, then started forging narratives out of them. Then, as Gomes puts it in his production diary, “in the shortest time possible, the terrified production team will have to find actors, negotiate rehearsals, arrange for sets, and hire a technical team to film that tale. This is how things should run in this office for twelve months.” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s regular DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom—who shot in ’scope on 16mm and 35mm, in a variety of contrasting textures and intensities—moved to Lisbon for a year to work on the film, with no idea what the team would be shooting. As far as winging it goes, this is as extreme as it gets: the methods of news reportage and documentary applied to the fabrication of narrative.

It pays off magnificently—at the very least, Gomes and his collaborators have invented an entirely new approach for looking at the real world through an optic that distorts it, defamiliarizes it, and restores to it a rich, poetic form of truth. Just as the film’s fantasy Arabia takes on the colors of the everyday, the concrete realities of contemporary Portuguese working-class life (whether it’s the struggles of firefighters, the subculture of chaffinch hunting and birdsong competitions, or the neighborhood arguments caused by the disruptive crowing of a pet cockerel), all this becomes as fabulous and entrancing as any tale of princes and genies. But there are genies here too, and exploding whales, and politicians with erectile issues. It’s all in the nature of a good story, and Gomes’s stories, even if we only get six hours’ worth, could go on forever. In the real world, they’re going on still.

Participants:

Scott Foundas, chief film critic, Variety

Todd McCarthy, chief film critic, The Hollywood Reporter

Marco Grosoli, www.spietati.it

Joan Dupont, International Herald Tribune

Stefan Grissemann, Profil

Jonathan Romney, contributor to FILM COMMENT, Sight & Sound, The Observer, and Screen

My Golden Days

Gavin Smith: So what’s the general feeling about the festival this year?

Todd McCarthy: Well, I think it’s a pretty slack festival, but the first thing I would say is that from what I’ve seen the, festival’s decision to throw its lot in with French cinema this year has not paid off at all. I don’t know why they did that, I think a lot of the films are okay, ordinary, good films—if you were to see them in cinemas, you might think, “Well, one’s okay, one’s better than another”—but they’ve not been, in my view, really high-end, festival-worthy French films. So I think that’s the first thing to say.

GS: One exception being the Arnaud Desplechin film My Golden Days.

TM: I’m avoiding even including that because it was rejected for the competition, which, now that we’ve seen some of the other films, is particularly shocking. What could’ve that been motivated by?

Jonathan Romney: Well, there’s no surprise—the Audiard film Dheepan is something we would expect to be in the competition.

GS: Automatically.

Scott Foundas: Yeah.

TM: Yeah, but one could say that about Desplechin too. So there are a number of French films that you would call, I would call films that you’ve got to come to a film festival to see.

SF: The festival under Thierry Frémaux has made this concerted effort to not play certain filmmakers just because they are who they are, and we saw that back in the year of Mike Leigh and Vera Drake where the film was rejected and then it went to Venice and won Venice. I’m all for the idea of including younger and less well-known filmmakers in the competition. I think it’s great that this year, among the French directors, they put in Stéphane Brizé with The Measure of a Man. He's a very interesting French filmmaker.

GS: And Valérie Donzelli’s Marguerite and Julien!

Joan Dupont: I saw that.

SF: —which went over like a lead balloon…

JR: It’s a very problematic film.

JD: Very.

Marguerite and Julien

JR: I think it was partly there because it has this heritage link with Truffaut. The Jean Gruault script that she re-adapted was originally going to be a Truffaut project, and it’s got a kind of Truffaut homage element running all the way through it. But it’s also very weird because it’s this postmodern play with conventions, a complete anachronism—at one point it’s quite clearly a medieval story, but then it seems to be taking place in the 1900s. And then it has modern microphones and helicopters. It just doesn’t come across in any way—it just feels really banal, it’s almost as if the anachronisms are the only thing it has going for it.

GS: I heard it dismissed as a kind of a Wes Anderson imitation, because of its whimsical trimmings.

JR: It’s pure kitsch, but not in any sort of interestingself-ironizing way.

JD: I can’t say I’m disappointed because I don’t think I was expecting much, but I thought it was very, very all over the place—a little of this, a little of that. The only nice moment for me was getting a glimpse of Geraldine Chaplin, who plays a kind of wicked witch mother-in-law! I thought she was great.

SF: She has a habit of coming into movies and turning them up a notch.

JD: Yeah, but isn’t it nice to see that, you know? With those eyes, and all that… But otherwise, I don’t know what Donzelli was after. It’s not romantic, it’s not sexual…

JR: It’s quite insipid, strangely, especially given the subject of incest.

Marco Grosoli: Gruault very clearly thought of this idea for Truffaut—it’s a pastiche of pretty much every aspect of Truffaut’s filmmaking. So you have to ask some questions when you approach such a subject. The approach is completely anti-Truffaut—which could be a good thing if there is some awareness in it, but there is none. Truffaut would have clearly stretched the childhood of the characters, up until their mature love story when they’re adults. Here, the exact opposite takes place: when the two main characters are children, they’re already adult and provided with sexual tensions that read very clearly in the film, which goes in a direction that’s completely different from the one that was intended in the script. And all of the other mistakes that she makes—and there are a lot—come from this original fault in the way she conceives the film.

GS: We started with one of the minor films in competition. Maybe we should step back and talk about the things that either had high expectations or have been met with great acclaim.

Our Little Sister

Stefan Grissemann: Jonathan was speaking about cinema heritage, or heritage culture, and I think two of the best films that I’ve seen here were Todd Haynes’s Carol and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister. Both of them have a sort of melancholy quality that is directly derived from nostalgia for the classical era. Our Little Sister, of course, harkens back to Ozu and Carol goes back to classic melodrama. Even though they look very different, they have a lot in common: they’re both almost 100 percent actress’s films and I think both of them work very well because they’re also very toned-down, they’re decidedly unspectacular. I appreciate that very much, and I know that Haynes is criticized by some because of the texture or quality of his films, because of the emphasis that he lays on costumes and gestures, suggesting that he can be perhaps too superficial or not deep enough or cold or chilly as I’ve read in some reviews. I don’t think so at all. I think this is the perfect way to tell this particular story.

SF: I also think in this one he really finds the perfect balance of his interest in all of those surfaces and the meaning of objects and gestures and in just a really compelling story, which I felt totally wrapped up in from the very beginning. I never felt that sort of distance that you sometimes feel even in his good films. And I totally agree with you about the Kore-eda film. I’ve felt that with the last four or five films by him that if you wanted to imagine what an Ozu film would look like today, this is it. He has the same kinds of concerns about looking at Japanese society through the prism of the family in a totally effortless, lucid way.

SG: Totally, yeah. It’s really masterful, and it’s deceptive because the story seems so slight.

SF: He had some ups and downs in his career early on, and now I think he’s completely found his voice.

JR: What’s very interesting about those two films, I think, given the fuss last year about there not being enough women directors in competition, is that this year has become a women’s festival, but not with women directors. Donzelli really kind of blew it I thought, and Maïwenn blew it dreadfully, and Emmanuelle Bercot didn’t really pull it off in the opening film, Standing Tall. But the women in the films—I didn’t like Maïwenn’s film at all, but I think Bercot gives a really, really strong performance in it, even if it goes off the rails. The women who played the sisters in the Kore-eda film, the ensemble of women I’ve just seen as Moroccan prostitutes in the Nabil Ayouch film Much Loved… they’re really strong performances, and, of course Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara—

SG: And even on a more frivolous level, of course, in Mad Max: Fury Road.

SF: Not frivolous at all!

JR: And not forgetting Amy Poehler as, you know, an emotion in the head of a little girl in Inside Out, which I think is a great film.

SF: And I think you could also add Emily Blunt in Sicario, where she is literally the only woman in a film totally dominated by men, but it’s all through her eyes.

GS: She’s the moral center of the film, in fact.

JD: If there is one.

JR: While it’s not a very interesting film, it wouldn’t have functioned at all if she hadn’t been there just kind of frowning through the whole thing, constantly saying, “What is going on?” I mean, it’s not even a role, but she somehow carries it nevertheless.

TM: I didn’t care for Kore-eda’s film. I thought it remained in a minor gauge for me the whole time, and I got very tired of it. I don’t know why. I love Ozu, but not that. The one film that I would speak for that just knocked me out way more than any other was Son of Saul.

Son of Saul

JR: Yeah, absolutely.

TM: I think it’s an extraordinary film, one of the most amazing opening shots I’ve ever seen that completely establishes the perspective from which you’re going to experience these events, which, in a way, I think is the most appropriate and convincing way of showing Holocaust-related material I’ve ever seen in any fiction film. In other words, the perspective—you know what’s going on outside the frame or out of focus in the back of the frame, the character doesn’t want to see it, doesn’t want to think about it, you don’t actually see everything that’s happening but you know what’s happening. And I think that was sustained in an extraordinary way all through the film. It’s the one film that just stays in my mind in a way that I could say it was worth coming here to see. I felt like everything else that I’ve liked—like Mad Max, Carol, and Inside Out—you know, they’ve already opened or they’re going to open very soon, and somehow the sense of discovery at Cannes hasn’t been there for me this year, the one exception being Laszlo Nemes’s Son of Saul.

GS: Whether you like it or hate it, that’s definitely the big discovery and flashpoint of the festival, at least so far.

JR: It’s quite brilliant, because formally and thematically, it completely rethinks the Holocaust film and the whole question of whether you can represent the Holocaust, whether you should represent it, the question there being a taboo and if you stage these horrific events, whether you can show them at all or not. So it’s extraordinary to think about all of these things going on, apparently being reconstructed very realistically and panoramically, but they’re all out of shot or they’re obscured by the protagonist’s head. And as you said, it also becomes a kind of metaphor for his situation because he’s someone who’s completely innocuous. And it radically de-sentimentalizes the Holocaust, because one of the ideas that we always hold onto about the Holocaust which is very sort of reassuring, is the idea that among the victims there was some sort of solidarity and people were able to reach out to each other emotionally, and this suggests that the horror and the oppression was so complete that even that became impossible and is now isolating people, making victims into Sonderkommando executioners and then making executioners back into victims. And it’s just a genuinely horrific—and I think very, very lucid—rigorous rethinking of what it means to think about the Holocaust cinematically.

TM: And while the character knows what’s going to happen to him eventually and we know what’s going to happen to him in three or four weeks, he’s blocking it out. He can’t think about that at this moment, he’s just going to make it one more day and one more day and as long as he can—it is the perfect metaphor.

SG: I agree that it is a virtuoso film in a way—it’s a knockout. But I think that’s already part of the problem for me, because I think the Holocaust doesn’t need a knockout director but a responsible director. I think that Son of Saul is a very smart-ass film in a way, because he’s on top of the discussion, he even makes the Lanzmann argument of focusing on the Jews that rebel and revolt and not on the Jews that let themselves be slaughtered. And the thing that he incorporates, the true story of the photographs being done within the camps, the four photographs that remain—there’s one being taken in the film—shows that he has something to say about the making of images and the question of should we make images of this. But nevertheless, I think the whole enterprise of doing a film like this, in such a knockout form, is in itself highly problematic and also obscene, I think. Just thinking about staging such a thing, just thinking about laying 20 nude dead women on top of each other and then let one be dragged across the floor with her legs open… I think that’s highly obscene and it doesn’t give me any clearer or more enlightening picture of what happened.

MG: But the knockout aspect of the film is on the margins. The film is about an obsession, which is precisely why it manages to avoid sentimentality: obsession and sentimentality are mutually exclusive, something obsessive is by definition “unsentimental,” and we are 100 percent on the side of the obsessive main character here.

GS: Do you think that justifies the style of the kind of bravura plans sequences?

MG: Well, yeah, because you don’t see anything beyond the main character because the character doesn’t see anything around him beyond his own obsession.

Son of Saul

SG: But in the scene where he gets almost shot, it turns into a thriller, into a genre film: can he escape, will somebody identify him as a Sonderkommando and save him? And then he drops the whole system of keeping everything on the fringes, it’s totally clear how people are shot, over and over again. It’s a totally narcissistic adventure story. The narcissism kills the objective that it should have, mainly, to enlighten about the Holocaust.

MG: But it didn’t want to enlighten about the Holocaust!

SG: Then what does it do?

MG: It tries to be about the obsession of the main character. The Holocaust is a kind of contour, is a kind of side thing.

JR: You can put it like that, but the Holocaust and the question of how you represent it is absolutely essential—but then it becomes marginal precisely because of the strange mechanism by which it’s blocked out and literally placed on the edges.

MG: I think what is essential is the testimony of the Holocaust, not its representation, which are two distinct things. When you consider the film as a testimony of the Holocaust, you already have in mind a possible addressee, so the issue that it tackles is not really how to represent the Holocaust but to what extent is it conceivable to want a testimony of the Holocaust at any price. It has such an outstanding pace and obviously spectacularizes the Holocaust, but at the same time, by means of the things that the main character does and thinks, it kind of implies that anything can be sacrificed for the sake of the testimony, and of course the immorality itself falls within this “anything.” So in a way it says, “Okay, I am immoral because I spectacularize the Holocaust, but on the other hand it’s true because everything can sacrificed—including morality itself—in order to provide a testimony of it.

TM: Could I just ask what examples you would hold up as a successful or, in your view, correct or moral representation of the Holocaust? In a dramatic format, not documentary.

SG: Well, yeah, there’s a film called Passenger by Andrzej Munk.

TM: Okay.

SG: I think it’s very tough to portray things like this. It’s also tough to portray the Vietnam War. But the Holocaust of course is a very, very special point in history and it’s very hard to represent. I mean, Nemes is a first-time director, maybe he shouldn’t feel that it’s his duty to do that. I think if you’re doing it, it should really be painful. If you want to be true to the Holocaust, you should make a really painful film.

JR: I found this film acutely painful—

SG: —I found it more technically brilliant.

JR: Well, I also found it very kind of polemically important. Having been coming to Cannes over the past 20 years, I’ve become aware of a shift in that line where the taboo lies, and of course in the mainstream it started with Schindler’s List but then it went on to what I regard as the genuine obscenity of a film like Life is Beautiful, which I thought was horrific! Now that’s an obscenity because it’s saying, “It’s okay, we can laugh about the Holocaust.” And I know that some writers have tried to do this, even a very fine British comic writer, Howard Jacobson, has attempted this in Kalooki Nights . And for me that’s the only attempt—it’s called—that’s the only attempt to sort of laugh at the Holocaust, but it comes from a particular kind of sort of tradition of Jewish humor. Benigni’s film was just gross sentimentalizing, and at that point it almost felt like a spell was broken, that once he’d done that then you could also have that terrible film Jakob the Liar, and I thought, well, where can you go after this? So I think what Nemes is doing in his film is saying, “Okay, let’s kind of reposition this question of taboo, let’s remember this question of taboo, and now let’s confront it, but confront it from a very serious position.” And I can absolutely see why you’d still feel there is that element of obscenity there, and I think he wants us to be aware of it, but I think he also want us to be aware of the position from which, you know, that obscenity might possibly be regarded and analyzed. Now, I think it’s a very difficult, brave, polemical film, and I do hope that people are going to be arguing about it very passionately.

GS: Stefan, when you spoke of the narcissism of the film, I have to say the “Look Ma, no hands!” virtuosity of the camerawork does somehow undercut the gravity of the material.

SF: But don’t we come back to the Godard-Rivette discussion of the tracking shot in Kapò—this is that question all over again.

GS: It might almost be a reference to that.

JD: Son of Saul absolutely works for me. I don’t see why this is more narcissistic than anybody else’s film!

GS: Maybe because of the context.

JD: But it’s that context that is a very difficult context, but is extremely powerful. And this fantasy that he gives birth to something beautiful, that he wants to bury, it’s an extraordinary thing, and…for me, it was very emotional.

GS: What’s stood out for you so far?

Carol

JD: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Journey to the Shore I liked a lot… I found it very mysterious. And I’ll say something about Carol right here: I did not find Carol mysterious or intriguing. I found it beautiful to look at, but very surface. But the Kurosawa film took me other places. And that’s what I like is to not to know where I’m going, and to go into the woods with somebody. And that film for me does it, because the way he shifts from the husband who comes back and then their voyage together, I found really interesting, really intriguing.

MG: It’s a very free kind of writing.

JD: It’s very supple.

MG: It’s basically his genre films, his horror films, minus the genre, if such a thing is possible. And it is, I mean, this film is a demonstration that a rather interesting reflection about the thin line between life and death can be carried out by itself without the genre structure.

SF: So it’s a better version of Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees then? ‘Cause I haven’t seen that one yet. [all laugh]

GS: Yeah, it’s the antidote to The Sea of Trees.

JR: It’s a really different, interesting thing, this whole question of “mystery." There’s a certain quality that we all look for when a film sort of touches us, where we don’t just see events that are being staged in front of a camera and filmed in a particular way and edited in a particular way—where it becomes something else.

GS: An experience.

JR: An experience that becomes more than the sum of its parts, in the classic formulation. But somehow when you see some works, all the ingredients are there, but it’s not clicking somehow. And there are a couple of films which could have almost been calculated to please me, on paper they would be exactly my kind of thing—I fully would have expected to like Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales but somehow, no magic there whatsoever, I saw an absolutely deliberate construction and elements put together in a particular recipe. And perhaps worse in a way, was Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster. I loved Dogtooth and the one he made before that, Kinetta—they showed a genuinely strange sensibility. And this one just felt like it had been bolted together in a particular way, and it felt very deliberate and labored, and there was just some sort of tonal thing about it that stopped it from going up a bit further and acquiring that spark. It’s very disappointing.

GS: Was that a universally disliked film or is there anyone here who will speak up for it?

SF: Oh, I’ll speak up for it a little bit but I’ll agree that on paper it sounded like a love letter to Jonathan Romney. [laughter all around]

SF: I didn’t care fore Dogtooth at all, for all the reasons Jonathan just said about this movie, because I felt it was so arch, it was so deliberate, everything was with a yellow highlighter over it. You knew that at some point this pristine environment of the film was going to be corrupted by some kind of explicit violence. And then I thought in Alps, he had kind of loosened his style of bit and he’d hit on a more interesting metaphor, with performance in life and performance in art. And this movie in the realm of directors trying to make a more accessible English-language film that’s still in their own style, he certainly does more successfully than most. It’s totally his film from top to bottom, but I think in a way he’s hit on his most interesting concept thematically, and then he doesn’t quite work it through all the way. Somehow the idea of exploring marriage as both this social construct that’s imposed on people but also kind of a prison, and all the ideas about what people look for in a partner and that kind of thing, it’s such a rich idea for a movie, and somehow he ends up not having enough ideas about it to keep the movie going.

GS: I think there’s a bit of Gone Girl in that idea about marriage—

SF: I thought of that, I said on Twitter I thought of a number of Marco Ferreri films that are centered around these ideas about a male ego and the domestic prison. There’s a lot of Dillinger Is Dead in this movie, although whether Lanthimos would ever fess up to it or not I don’t know, because apparently he doesn’t acknowledge any influences…

GS: It doesn’t have the rigor of his other films.

The Lobster

SF: But it’s a memorable film. Because you go, “Oh look, there’s Léa Seydoux, and there’s Colin Farrell, and there’s John C. Reilly…”

SF: But Colin Farrell is wonderful in this movie, and you never see Colin Farrell play this kind of role. He plays a total dweeb, and he’s wonderful. And so, by the way, is Olivia Colman, as the head manager at this hotel...

GS: What about Tale of Tales? That’s the one I was referring to where I had the impression it was universally rejected.

TM: That’s not true. I would say both films that we’re talking about had something going for them in terms of style, but I think they were both all set up and had no real delivery at the end. I would say half of The Lobster was interesting, as long as they were at the hotel, but then it narrowed so much that it really withered down to nothing in the end, with no payoff. So it ended up being disappointing, but there was still something there. The Tale of Tales too, when you’re first figuring out what’s going on, all these different actors, and the art direction and all that, it was interesting for a while, but then it just sort of withered away. I think in both cases there was a certain degree of interest, but it wasn’t rewarded by the second half of either film.

JR: I think there’s a narrative problem: certain films are great as long as you’re thinking, “Where are you going with this?” And then as soon as you figure out where it’s going—end of story.

SG: I would like to strongly defend The Lobster, even though I agree it’s too long by 20 minutes or so, because once we’re in the woods, it becomes a bit repetitive. But it’s still wildly original. It’s a very quirky film. You can hate the eccentricities he puts on the table but I was still totally surprised by most of it, for the first 80-90 minutes. And Ferreri is an interesting reference point because I thought the whole time it had a sort of cynical surrealism… Surrealism is always cynical in a way, but, it was quite deserved. I think that’s the right tone. And the voiceover made me think of Kubrick in a way, because it has the coldness of Kubrick, Barry Lyndon in particular. It has the same sort of detached cynicism to it. So I enjoyed it. I think he’s one of the more intelligent forces of European auteurism.

MG: Yeah, I agree. And I don’t think that Ferreri would have ever been able to film the space of the forest, like this place of freedom as more—how can I say—more narrowed down and more compelling than the concentrationary hotel itself, which is what Lanthimos does—it turns out to be one of the best things in the film. Basically there is the establishment, which is a strong constriction, but then it turns out that the absence of that constriction in the forest is even worse. It’s an overwrought film, of course, but I found it interesting how it conceptualizes the rule and the exception, and to find something else that doesn’t belong to the rule or the exception. And in this respect I think one of the perhaps better ways to enter the film is to try and think of it as a film that goes against the grain that it chooses to belong to, namely the Von Trier-ian, Haneke-ian pessimist film. At the beginning you think that you’re going to be in that zone, but then it ends up being an optimistic film.

SF: It’s romantic in a strange way.

MG: Anti-romantic but definitely optimistic.

GS: I definitely prefer being in Lanthimos’s forest than Garrone’s, and this does seem to be the competition of forests, so logically we should now talk about Gus Van Sant’s film.

SF: “Cannes 2015: Days and Nights in the Forest” [laughter]

The Sea of Trees

SF: The Sea of Trees—what is there to say? It’s like kicking a dead horse. There seems to be one of these movies every year, that just baffles everyone as to how this film could’ve possibly been selected. Clearly this wasn’t a banner year for American films, just in terms of what was available, because a lot of, let’s say, the usual suspects of Cannes didn’t have new films this year. I think they were kind of scrambling just to get the three that they have.

JR: But there is a problem with those selections, because there’s a very simple question that they’re clearly not asking, which is: can we ask people to sit through this film for two hours? Is it right to say to people—you know, it’s implied: we’re going to offer you something good, you’re going to like this, you’re going to have a good time, it’ll be interesting. But to actually ask people to spend two hours watching The Sea of Trees? I think it’s an appalling thing. Someone clearly has not thought about what it means to watch a film like that. So why are they giving it to us?

SF: It’s a Gus Van Sant film.

JD: I think it’s a Cannes-quality idea. And I think that they’re very obsessed with that. We are the festival who gives you people like Van Sant, and they belong to us.

GS: No more so than the case of Naomi Kawase.

TM: Do you think they actually watched that film and liked it?

JR: Who knows?

JD: Of course they did.

TM: Because, for the record, I haven’t encountered anyone who has stood up for that film yet. Usually some film has a defender here or there, and I haven’t found a defender on this one.

GS: I found one, but just one.

SF: I think the press is slightly complicit in this, in that every year when Cannes announces the selection, you always have, this immediate pre-criticism of the selection, based on no one having seen any of the films. And you have all of these—I wouldn’t even say critics—just these social media prognosticators and entertainment industry analyst types who will always immediately criticize that “There aren’t enough big names in the competition. There’s nothing to look forward to. Why didn’t they take the new Jeff Nichols film?” Or whatever. So I think that there is an implied pressure on the selection committee to take some big Hollywood-type names so that they aren’t pre-criticized for having too obscure of a selection, even if that means taking a film that’s as bad as The Sea of Trees.

GS: Is Gus Van Sant a really big Hollywood-type name?

JD: Not really.

JR: But people see it.

SF: It’s like the Atom Egoyan film last year—it’s in the same position.

TM: These are pre-approved, Cannes names that have won things in the past, so they can be justified on that level. You always come to the festival with good will, and you say, “Well, they picked this, so there must be something worthwhile about it.” But then you look a little deeper, and there are one or two people on the committee who are real champions of these people, so these directors are going to be at Cannes no matter what.

GS: So there’s a sense that the committee says, “This person won the Palme d’Or 10 years ago, so they’re in our club.”

TM: That’s what was interesting in the festival this year. Some of these people were “demoted” to Un Certain Regard. Or in Desplechin’s case, went over to the Directors' Fortnight.

GS: But Desplechin hasn’t ever won anything, has he?

SG: No.

SF: But I think one interesting thing is the fact that you have Apichatpong and Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Naomi Kawase all in Un Certain Regard does suggest one thing: that Venice has now declined in importance to the point where directors of this level are willing to come to Un Certain Regard to be in Cannes rather than go in competition in Venice, which always used to be the model when films by directors of that stature, who were either regulars in the competition or had won prizes in Cannes, didn’t get selected. I think you could say the same thing about Desplechin or Miguel Gomes. All these guys could’ve waited to go into competition in Venice, very easily, but it means more to be somewhere in Cannes than to wait for Venice at this point.

Cemetery of Splendour

SG: I think that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour should’ve been in competition. He’s just as much a name in cinephilia as Van Sant—actually, a much bigger name. It’s another one of those films that constantly surprise you. It has a particular blend of the everyday and the fantastic, which nobody else does like him. I thought it was richly textured and brilliantly realized, and reflected on cinema and the act of seeing and dreaming, both states that we associate with cinema. It’s a wonderful film.

MG: I found it a rather cheap reproduction of what he’s always made with a more linear, legible narrative, which doesn’t amount to much in the end.

TM: I am too. You really have to think about the audience: he has a lot of fans, but if you’re considering filling a theater built for 2,000 people? And what’s wrong that’s being in Un Certain Regard? You just have to admit that it’s smaller or more specialized film. You’re still in the club. Sometimes, you hit a home run, sometimes, it’s going to be something less. I don’t think it’s such a shame.

SF: But I think what makes a difference is that the most mainstream press, or the press writing for the biggest outlets, tend to follow the competition predominantly and see other films as they’re able to fit them in. And when the festival does take a chance and puts something like, let’s say, Colossal Youth by Pedro Costa in competition—

GS: —they’re never gonna do anything like that again!

SF: —it forces a lot of people to be exposed to that who ordinarily would never see the film.

GS: Name a film since Colossal Youth that’s been of that caliber.

SF: Let’s just say that Tropical Malady had a pretty violent reaction when it was shown in competition with a lot of walkouts. But then when they showed Uncle Boonmee, it was very well received. I think there’s something to be said for gradually exposing the larger audience to a more radical kind of cinema. They may not take to it at first, but by the second or third time that director comes into competition, they know how to enter into that kind of film. If you put Laz Diaz at Un Certain Regard, you’re more guaranteed to only get the people who are already interested in seeing the new film by Lav Diaz.

GS: So if you were Thierry Frémaux, you would’ve put it in competition?

SF: In that case, yes. But this becomes a question: Shame was shown in competition. You had the year of Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth. It wasn’t shown in competition, but everybody said it should’ve been. I think in this day in age where you have this very fine line between long-form TV series and feature films, and you have all these filmmakers going back and forth, you have to evaluate it on a case-by-case basis. I know Jonathan and I are both big fans of Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights that has been showing at the Directors' Fortnight, where the third volume shows tomorrow, and that is another film that very, very much deserves to be—

GS: —it would’ve been a very daring thing to do, and a real statement, to put it in the competition.

Arabian Nights

SF: It would’ve also said that narrative cinema can take all kinds of forms. But this is not a difficult film to—

GS: —but there’s no red carpet life in Arabian Nights, unfortunately. The audience wouldn’t have had it.

TM: You have to be realistic: how do you show a film like that to the black tie evening audience? It’s six-hours. That’s impossible. Plus, they’re presented as three separate films.

JR: As far as the red carpet factor goes, what do people feel the logic was for choosing the opening night film? Because I could see them not wanting to do a big-budget, prestigious clunker like Princess of Monaco again. Still, Standing Tall is a very odd choice.

GS: Catherine Denueve is in it.

TM: I found the film insufferable because it’s so full of itself, self-justification for the French legal system: we don’t let anyone slip through the net, there’s always someone there to catch them. I think it probably made the French audiences very happy for that reason, whether they acknowledged why or not.

GS: As the French insider, what do you say?

JD: I don’t think that’s fair. I think that they thought they were making another kind of Truffaut film about this lost boy who they were trying to humanize.

TM: But it’s all about the system and Marianne, Catherine Deneuve, who’s at the center of it all.

GS: She’s the Truffaut figure in the film.

TM: But she’s the symbol of France.

JD: I don’t think it was about France.

SF: The important thing to point out is that this is already a massive hit at the French box office. It’s like a new record in first weekend ticket sales. On paper, it looked like a strange film to put in the festival, but it looks good for the festival to have it. In the year where the Coen Brothers were the head of the jury and Mad Max was showing the next night, I think there was a certain pressure to find a French film. Of course, you could say that they could’ve shown a film with French stars—there was a Jean-Paul Rappeneau film that was apparently under consideration with Nicole Garcia, Mathieu Amalric, and a lot of other people like that. But they decided to go in the direction of something more like The Class, which won the Palme d’Or a few years ago.

The Measure of a Man

GS: Maybe we should wind up with the other notable French film in competition, the Stéphane Brizé film, which seemed to be very well received, and another film that’s attempting to wrestle with contemporary France and its problems.

JR: You talked about the problem of images in Son of Saul, and for me, the most interesting thing about Brizé’s film is what it says about the abuse of images in society. It’s about economic collapse, how people are forced to do whatever they can to make money, and thereby enter into this system of the oppression of others. The most interesting aspect of the film was the use of images, not only surveillance system in the supermarket—which is absolutely terrifying. Who would’ve thought that the most amazing tracking shot you’ll ever see is from the ceiling of a CCTV system in the supermarket!?

GS: I thought that was kind of a wink to Tout va bien.

JR: Exactly, yeah. But there’s another moment where they’re looking at his interview footage—

GS: Oh my god . . .

JR: —and every aspect of his physical, vocal comportment is being monitored. And there’s a really interesting French documentary called Rules of the Game about young people being trained to enter themselves for job interviews in which every aspect of their behavior is monitored.

GS: Not monitored, but critiqued.

JR: So unless you conform to a certain code of social behavior—physical, social, vocal, dress—you’re screwed.

GS: Posture, too. I say that as I’m slouching a bit.

JR: Which is why we’re all film critics, because none of us would ever pass that test in the real world! But the idea of his image being critiqued in that way really frightened me. I think it hit a very painful note.

MG: I can’t say that I liked this film, but it’s still interesting the way in which the film finds this abuse of images by overindulging with ellipses: you don’t see when the main guy is hired, you don’t see when the woman who is fired kills herself, and probably a few other things I didn’t notice.

SG: Cinema is the art of making images or images in motion, or the illusion of motion, so the self-reflexivity of films at this year’s festival seems really high. We have photographers all of the place— Isabelle Huppert in Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs, Rooney Mara in Carol—and we have two filmmakers—Margherita Buy in Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre, and Philippe Garrel’s In the Shadow of Women. They all seem to be talking about the same thing.

SF: The Iranian film in Un Certain Regard, Nahid, has an important plot revelation that is conveyed via a surveillance camera, which puts it back in conversation with The Measure of a Man.

Inside Out

JR: Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario has another important use of surveillance cameras too, with the bank.

TM: We haven’t talk about the two big American films, Inside Out and Sicario, and I think they’re both quite interesting. Inside Out seemed to be hugely well received, and it my mind it’s a 60s head-trip packaged as a mass audience film in a very clever way.

JR: It’s also kind of a lesson in how Pixar films work on us. I find the best Pixar films completely emotionally effective, and I mean that they’re very manipulative: I know that something’s going to make me laugh or cry. It always happens, even when I try and distance myself. But this film actually shows you how it works: you see when they’re pressing the joy button or when they’re pressing the sad button.

SF: More self-reflexivity.

JR: But it’s reflexive in a way that’s incredibly enlightening about how all films work. On one level, it’s going to be a very joyous experience for kids who will see it—younger kids will see it as an adventure story—but it also uses those more juvenile elements, such as the funny elephant, which 2-year-olds will like. But it says: this is the image for 2-year-olds, and this is what it means to 2-year-olds. It’s a really self-analytical film, even in terms of the plasticity of the image, the way it uses colors, the way it uses textures. There’s that strange, trippy moment where it deconstructs the image and basically shows you how CGI works. It’s an extraordinary film that’s given me more intense pleasure than anything else here. I didn’t even feel the same level of pleasure with Arabian Nights.

SF: I’m sure that someone’s probably written their dissertation on this by now, but the Pixar films are so formally daring and so full of this kind of self-deconstruction: Wall­-E, with the long, silent opening, or Ratatouille, with the Proustian childhood flashback and the synesthesia of eating food and seeing colors and shapes. There are all these very heady concepts in these films that are ostensibly for children, and it’s something that when live-action filmmakers try to do it, the studios run in panic. Including, quite frankly, a lot of the tension between Warner Brothers and George Miller throughout the making of Mad Max is all about ways to make the film—

GS: You keep bringing it back to Mad Max. It’s like an obsession with you.

MG: He spent three months with George Miller, he can’t get it out of his head.

SF: But that film is just in a class by itself.

GS: As it should be. Do you have anything to say about any of these films? What about Sicario? I heard a lot of people dismissing it as run-of-the-mill after the screening.

SG: It has a dark, gloomy quality to it. It’s a very commercial film, and it’s also admitted a lot of things Son of Saul. If any of us would’ve lost someone in the drug war there in Ciudad Juárez, we wouldn’t be so excited with the suspense things that they do with it. It has an obscenity to it as well.

TM: And it has the obsessive main character.

SF: I think it’s easy to write of Villeneuve as a high-end genre filmmaker because his technical filmmaking is so good. But I do think in this film and Prisoners and the one before, Incendies, he is asking some interesting questions about revenge, the morality of violence, who’s on the right side, and is there even a right side, whether it’s in Lebanon or suburban America or this drug war—

GS: But they’re not very deep questions. They’re very obvious questions that are resolved very effortlessly in the film. I don’t think you’re really left pondering the moral dilemmas afterwards.

SF: I think a lot of people wonder will leave wondering if there’s a hero in Sicario at all.

Sicario

JR: I found this one essentially banal. I’m quite happy to watch Emily Blunt frowning for two hours, which is basically what she does. The idea that she’s the moral center to this film, saying, “Should we be doing this?” So what? Is that all they can come up with? I found it very laborious and sub-Michael Mann. I could see that topic, and indeed that script, could be given a different dimension somehow.

SF: It’s like pre-digital Michael Mann.

GS: There is something in that film in addition to Emily Blunt frowning, which are the scenes involving the cop and his family, and that’s the residue that’s left behind after all of the action of the film has been worked through is the wife and the son. That’s kind of an interesting device to insert into the film, because you could easily see a studio executive saying, “Do you really need this stuff about the guy’s family when we don’t even know who he is? Does it really matter?”

JR: It felt like it owned a lot to Soderbergh’s Traffic, but Soderbergh would’ve made more with that character and would’ve been smart enough to realize that he’s actually kind of the central story. Villeneuve sees him as a marginal device.

GS: It is a device.

SF: I liked the abstraction of the film. You don’t really know what’s going on for a very long time, and you never really know what everyone’s motivation is. Think about his last film, Enemy, which was about a guy who had a doppelganger— Villeneuve seems very interested in this idea of multiple identities. Everybody in the movie, except for Emily Blunt, says that they’re one thing, and then turns out to be someone else and have a hidden agenda.

TM: I agree with Scott on that, but I think in terms of set pieces, when they go over the border in Mexico, that’s as good as it gets with this kind of thing.

SF: The movie literally starts with a bang, and you think that it can’t possibly sustain that level of tension for two hours. I felt on the edge on my seat in a way that I haven’t felt since Prisoners, which managed to do that for two and a half hours.

GS: I feel that Prisoners is a much lesser film. You haven’t seen it? How dare you! You’ll get to see it. We’ll stop now. Thanks, everybody.

JR: We should utter a prayer that the next few days will give us something major…