Screening Notes #12

The Conformist (1970): I'm not one to obsessively justify the psychological, thematic, or narrative roles of images in a film, but if The Conformist is going to be the requisite love affair movie for cinematography students, it ought to have more purpose behind its visual choices. Sure, one can say that Storaro's noirish slashes of light play into the emotional turbulence of Jean-Louis Trintignant's character, just like the proliferation of sharp compositional lines or the one strange episode of dutch angles all do, but these semantics are too vague to have real visceral power. More often Bertolucci seems to just be toying with the image's expressive qualities, having a field day with camera movement, fog, filters, and vibrant gels even when these elements are noticeably gratuitous. I'm aware that it sounds ridiculous to gripe about filmmakers taking full advantage of a visual medium, but cinema is more than just visual fluff. It's about the way images are combined and sometimes connected with sound, the way this relationship also has a dialogue with the objects or subjects being photographed, etc., all of which contributes to the soul of a work. The Conformist feels damn near soulless to me.

Ashes (2012): Commissioned by Mubi.com and Lomography to make a short film utilizing the new LomoKino camera (a relatively inexpensive 35mm camcorder), Apichatpong Weerasethakul churned out one of the most unconventional advertisements for a product ever made with Ashes, a work that pushes his already intensely personal cinema to a more intimate place than before. The film is shot mostly around the filmmaker's country home, capturing casual episodes from the flow of daily life. As usual with Weerasethakul, the film's sound design is dense and rich, a tapestry of field recordings and low-key folk music juxtaposed with sequences of total silence. With the added haze of the LomoKino's images, as well as the stutter of the camera's low frame-rate, daily life is rendered ethereal and abstract, yet it also possesses the nature of a photo album flipped through frenetically in time, like a revved-up La Jetee. Unexpectedly, Ashes shifts into lo-fi digital footage towards its conclusion in a mesmerizing sequence of fire, sparks, and camera-phone-ready onlookers. (What it is exactly that we're looking at never became clear to me, but its mystery opens up precisely the zone of dreaming, contemplating, and recollecting that Weerasethakul encourages.) Nudging celluloid and digital up against each other is an extension of Weerasethakul's recent curiosity over the future of cinema, and further viewing of this ambient autobiographical sketch may yield the kind of multilayered rewards offered up by his prior two shorts, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms of Nabua. Watch it here.

Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters (2012): I went into Ben Shapiro's documentary on renowned photographer Gregory Crewdson hoping to get some kind of hint of a future film from the master chronicler of American suburbia, but to no avail. In fact, I got quite the opposite. I've come away convinced that Crewdson's fascination with revealing narratives of immense emotional depth through single images is humbling, inspiring, and essential. If you're unfamiliar with Crewdson's work, the dude distills elements of working-class realism, Hollywood melodrama, and sci-fi into evocative large-scale portraits of small-town life that are equal parts David Lynch, Douglas Sirk, Jacques Tati, and Roy Andersson (though the mysterious beauty of his photographs is uniquely his...yada yada yada). Most interestingly, one would be hard-pressed to discern the difference between a Hollywood movie set and the set for one of Crewdson's single stills, as both involve elaborate logistical planning, a director of photography, high-powered lights, a large crew, and the whole nine yards. Shapiro shot the film over the ten years or so it took Crewdson to shoot his consummate photography series "Beneath the Roses," and the results, mostly on handheld digital camera, are remarkably intimate. The film's finest achievement is the way it captures every precise step in the artistic process, as well as how it makes all the madness and obsession that goes into production seem utterly ordinary.

Street of Crocodiles (1987): Twenty minutes of extraordinarily tantalizing science-fiction/horror atmosphere from the Quay Brothers. Seen on 16mm, this stop-motion animation has an incredible richness to its dusty imagery of a deserted, industrialized city as foreboding as that of Eraserhead. In this world of cobwebs, machines, and shadows, a slender man with sharp, exaggerated features bears witness to the enigmatic puzzles of a gang of puppet figures. It's all a pitch-dark vision of the collapse of a civilization, where no image is bereft of metaphorical import: unhinging nails as indicators of eroding societal foundations, puppets as surrogates for a dehumanized community). This is a murky, unsettling trip, a compact genre film that is unsurpassed in its total commitment to a mood of darkness and filth.

Jabberwocky (1971): Stemming from the same world of inventive pre-digital animation but on the other end of the emotional spectrum, Jan Svankmajer's Jabberwocky is a work exuding buoyancy, irreverence, and absurd humor. Freely inspired by Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, the film taps into eternal toddlerhood, with Svankmajer finding a toy-box of trinkets to incorporate in complex animated maneuvers around a static bedroom tableau. Army figurines march in formation then get swallowed up by a sliding baby doll, sharp knives pirouette around a table, shell-filled jars spontaneously materialize, a tongue protrudes from the picture in the wall, and, over and over, a live action shot of a black kitten knocking things over and licking its chops intersperses the tightly ordered mayhem. Svankmajer's logic is at its most outlandish (intentions of Freudian psychology are too opaque to register at first glance), but his involvement of a gorgeously batty score by Zdenek Liska lends the chaos a precise musicality, a sense of virtuosic orchestration. A domestic dream exploded into the furthest reaches of the childhood imagination. Watch it here.

Cannes 2012 Round-Up

Below is a complete ranking of the films I saw at the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Enjoy!

1. Holy Motors (Carax, France, In Competition)

When I saw Leos Carax's first feature in thirteen years, Holy Motors, on the final day of rescreenings, it was by no small margin the most mysteriously beautiful, inventive film I'd seen at Cannes. Starting with the simple setup of a man working as a professional chameleon, riding a limousine stuffed to the brim with suitcases full of disguises around a serenely dreamy Paris and fulfilling different "appointments" around the city, Carax builds a multilayered meditation on performance, identity, virtual reality, and cinematic artifice. Much of the film's power comes from Denis Lavant, most deserving of the festival's "Best Actor" award, who lives each episode of the film's chronological but strangely timeless structure with the candidness and thoroughness necessary to breathe life into the film's motif of dual identities and the elusive "self". What at first seems to smell of redundancy and half-assed improvisation proves to be executed with such remarkable subtlety, grace, and precision by Carax that not a single delirious chapter - even as the director pushes Lavant to vaudevillian feats such as playing a repugnant sewer-dweller carrying an angelic Eva Mendes into his shit-stained lair, concluding with a sight-gag of Lavant's erection - feels out of place. This is a film with a fearless sense of movement and visual invention, not to mention a constant self-awareness and absurdist humor. I can't wait to see it again.

2. Journal De France (Depardon and Nougaret, France, Out of Competition/Special Screenings)

A basement full of unreleased newsreel celluloid from legendary French documentarian Raymond Depardon covering a vast range of small and large scale historical events circa the middle of the 20th century yielded the festival's most moving and poetic images. Uncovered by Depardon's wife and usual sound recordist Claudine Nougaret and positioned alongside contemporary footage of Depardon taking a photographic tour of France alone in his car, the resulting cut of Journal De France becomes a mesmerizing essay (set to killer musical cues!) on photographic truth and how images become a mirror of one's thoughts and feelings throughout the course of one's life. Yet as much as the film is a loving portrait of Depardon the artist and man, it's also, as the title suggests, a kaleidoscopic journey through France's history, its social and cultural charms, its regrettable involvement in wars, its strange political missteps (the scene of finance minister Giscard D’Estaing describing his public marketing campaign is a particular gem), and most of all, its ordinary civilians. The film's eye, like that of its primary subject, is humble, compassionate, and patient.

3. In Another Country (Hong, South Korea, In Competition)

The first time Hong Sang-soo's static camera compulsively snap-zoomed in on the action in In Another Country's extended opening shot, it's as if the entire audience experienced a collective lurch towards the actors. Perhaps this impression is just to due to my unfamiliarity with Hong's aesthetic, but in any case In Another Country provides a heightened intimacy with the filmed material, a direct relationship between director/audience and subject, and a sense of the film being conceived as it's being shot. A work so casual, spontaneous, and grounded rarely makes an appearance In Competition at Cannes, and Hong's glorious hangout of a film is all the more powerful for it. One of several films at the festival (along with Cosmopolis, Like Someone in Love, Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, In the Fog, and Moonrise Kingdom) that seemed to exist in a deserted bubble of a world comprised only of characters in the story, Hong follows Isabelle Huppert as she materializes the incomplete scenario ideas of an aspiring screenwriter (seen in the opening shot) on vacation in a South Korean beach town. The film's effortless narrative symmetry allows one to contemplate the subtle variations in the ways Huppert's three different characters are treated by a rotating cast of locals, thus providing insights into love, life, and otherness so off-the-cuff and fluid it puts shame to more heavy-handed treatments of these motifs.

4. Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas, Mexico, In Competition)

The obligatory pillar of provocation this year was held up by Carlos Reygadas with his new film Post Tenebras Lux, an ambitious collage-like expression of Mexican country life that unsurprisingly garnered equal parts applause and booing. (One wonders when Cannes crowds will grow up and learn to embrace artistic license and individualistic work without resorting to knee-jerk skepticism.) Post Tenebras Lux digresses rather significantly from the comparatively sobering and linear Silent Light, but what it does share with Reygadas' previous work is its insistence upon making its audience feel something, and it put me in an unusually discomfiting space that I've rarely experienced from cinema. Despite some of its age-old arthouse ingredients (nature, animals, mechanical sex, an unforgivably extraneous scene of animal cruelty), the film is quite unlike anything ever made, and truly unique to Reygadas' sensibilities. A dark energy pulses through the film as the Mexican filmmaker never shies away from presenting conflicting emotions (family bliss and marital tension, tenderness and unexplained violence, religious devotion and paralyzing fear of the Devil) alongside each other with fervent unpredictability, giving its mystical and quasi-autobiographical musings a distinctly different tone than the otherwise structurally similar Tree of Life from last year. Though Reygadas employed the suddenly in vogue but previously extinct Academy aspect ratio (the boxy, claustrophobic 4:3), no film at Cannes felt bigger or more expansive, as its loud, immersive sound design and ghostly visuals exploded from the screen.

5. Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, Iran/Japan/France, In Competition)

I'll join the chorus of critics intrigued but somewhat baffled by Abbas Kiarostami's new Tokyo-set feature Like Someone in Love. The film is startlingly open-ended, seeming to merely capture a few episodes in the middle of a much longer narrative, and in the thick of Cannes craziness, the mental space required to mine Kiarostami's complexity is simply non-existent. Here, the director charts a similar paradigm shift roughly at the midway point as that of Certified Copy when the relationship between a young girl (Rin Takanashi) and an old man (Tadashi Okuno) shifts from prostitute/client to grandfather/granddaughter based on the innocuous misunderstanding of the girl's psychologically abusive boyfriend (Ryo Kase). The side-effect is an opaque investigation into the nature of social roles and perception, limited to a few interiors in Tokyo and several of the director's trademark car conversations. It's amazing how economical this film is, using such a small number of tense, protracted dialogue scenes to open up a vast ocean of mystery around these three characters, each of whom appear to be hiding something authentic and unfettered beneath their social façades.

6. Walker (Tsai, Taiwan/Japan, Critic's Week) A new 30-minute short by Tsai Ming-Liang entitled Walker was one of the best surprises of the festival. I'm still eagerly awaiting a new feature from the Taiwanese master, but this new work is precisely the length it needs to be. The film is decidedly, unapologetically simple, though certainly not simplistic. In it, a Buddhist monk (Tsai apostle Lee Kang-Sheng) dressed in a bright red robe walks through the hustle-bustle of Tokyo at a snail's pace to fetch a snack (this narrative detail is only revealed later in the film in an unexpected sight gag), his head perpetually facing the ground and his eyes in a meditative squint. He lifts each foot as if lifting the weight of his spirit before returning it to the ground with patience and grace. Were it not for the real-time passersby - many of whom take note of the camera's presence (adding gravitas to the performative spectacle) - one might be tempted to assume Tsai shot at a high frame-rate for slow motion. Lee's persevering slowness, his utter commitment to the act, is astonishing. Tsai shot the film himself on a digital camera with his usual frozen takes and distinctive urban framing, and the result is a remarkably pure evocation of the ghettoized pursuit of faith in the modern consumerist environment.

7. In the Fog (Loznitsa, Russia, In Competition) An extreme seriousness towards death characterizes a great deal of the best Russian cinema, and Sergei Loznitsa's In the Fog joins that lineage. This 2-hour opus unwaveringly explores the rocky psychological landscape of men crawling inevitably towards a not-too-distant death, meanwhile caught between the absurd pressures of patriotism and a simple respect for human existence. On the frontiers of the German occupation, Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy) is wrongly accused of treason by his fellow men, and escorted out of his forest home by two Russian soldiers - Burov (Vladislav Abashin) and Voitik (Sergei Kolesov) - to be killed. Happenstance has it that Nazi soldiers interrupt the scene of the punishment, and Burov becomes the wounded, setting the stage for an extended inquiry into the ethical dilemmas of war under a misguided regime. Loznitsa's dialogue-heavy script - set entirely within the confines of the grey and foreboding woods - often stumbles and crawls, and, in its lack of variety, clearly shows the effects of working with limited funds (this is a film that could have benefited greatly from a more palpable sense of surrounding context), but In the Fog is nonetheless the most stirringly spiritual feature of the festival.

8. Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day (Rodrigues, Portugal, Critic's Week) There's not a single horizon line visible in João Pedro Rodrigues' 30-minute short Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, and it creates a powerfully destabilizing effect. Paired in a Critic's Week program with Walker, the films share a quiet observation of people walking through an urban space, but here there is an enigmatic undertone - teased out directly late in the film when one girl's Twilight Zone-esque ringtone sounds - of science-fiction and campy genre cinema that allows the images of a swarm of young adults emerging to level ground from within subway stations to suggest a kind of post-apocalyptic zombie invasion. Rodrigues covers all of the action - teenagers throwing up, keeling over inexplicably, walking into city ponds while holding up their cellphones seemingly in search of service, etc. - from vaguely aerial perspectives, bolstering the uncanny effect of the happenings. Is this a metaphor for the somnambulistic state of contemporary techno-youth, or is it just an unconventional vision of the undead traversing a posthuman landscape? The film's only press blurb is of little help: "Tradition says that on June 13th, Saint Anthony’s Day – Lisbon’s patron - lovers must offer small vases of basil with paper carnations and flags with popular quatrains as a token of their love." Morning of Saint Anthony's Day is an inspired oddity.

9. Amour (Haneke, France/Germany/Austria, In Competition)

Michael Haneke's Amour is an unapologetically traditional, by-the-numbers European arthouse film centering on the big themes of mortality, love, grief, family, and humiliation. Which is not to say it's fraudulent or insincere, just that it's precisely the unflinching film one would expect Haneke to make on the topic of an aging couple slowly coming to terms with death. Every formal strategy (detached wide shots, measured cutting, muted colors), narrative jolt (sudden violence, a metaphorical bird entering a French apartment), and casting decision (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert as the central family) is justified and expected, but as a Bergmanesque chamber drama it lacks the magic and complex humane treatment of Bergman. In Amour, death divides a family, and Haneke, amazingly precise as he is, can't put forth an image of postmortal hope that is very convincing, instead preferring to unceasingly pick apart the physical and psychological strain of aging and death. There's an abysmal fear in this film that's disguised as cruel realism.

10. Lawless (Hillcoat, USA, In Competition)

John Hillcoat's Lawless, previously known as The Wettest County in the World and based off the book of the same name, received some undue critical hounding after its premiere, which is strange given that it's a pretty bareknuckled and well-made Western, nothing more and nothing less. Sure, Hillcoat waters down any moral ambiguity that might have existed in the film's awkwardly schmaltzy epilogue, and the sexual landscape leans towards vaguely misogynistic, but I'll take some of these missteps over The Road's simple-minded affectations of importance and superficially "contemplative" mise-en-scène. What's more, Lawless is chock full of thrilling performances by Tom Hardy as a daftly philosophizing brute, Gary Oldman as an indifferent mobster, Guy Pearce as the slimy villain, and Shia LaBoeuf (!) in his best role as a wannabe tough guy. Still, the greatest source of my enthusiasm for the film was the immaculately dusty and contrasty cinematography of Benoît Delhomme, who shoots these Prohibition-Era ghost towns - always wafting with the smoke of whisky and brandy production - in an undeniably conventional yet painterly manner. It's a ruthlessly brutal genre movie that for quite some time maintains an air of Peckinpah-like stoicism.

11. Lawrence Anyways (Dolan, France, Un Certain Regard) Another year of inclusion in Un Certain Regard for Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan represents yet another example of the mainstream hesitance to embrace youthfulness in auteur cinema. Surely, Lawrence Anyways has more personality, and is more expressive and heartfelt, than a number of the Competition entries, and it could have added further diversity to the lineup, especially in light of its focus on social minorities (specifically a transsexual intending to remain in a heterosexual relationship). Dolan's films clearly emerge from a passionate and genuine place, and their energy and messiness is entirely the product of a spontaneous excitement for cinema. Needless to say, Lawrence Anyways is sloppy, overlong, and digressive, but the strange allure of Dolan's work is that he manages to absorb these flaws into the texture of his character's lives, discovering ways to transform self-indulgent slow-motion shots (this one has even more than Heartbeats) into gaudy expressions of a character's veiled insecurity or overblown self-importance. Like Dolan's main character, Lawrence Anyways is split between two urges: that of individuality and personal fetishism (the film's often radical compositional style and its Felliniesque eccentricities, to name two), and that of conformity (its fiery scenes of romantic turmoil featuring a revelatory Suzanne Clément and its eye-rollingly sappy denouement, both of which achieve Hollywood rom-com stature). Upon close inspection of the film's insanity, it's not too difficult to see the structural design on display.

12. The Hunt (Vinterberg, Denmark, In Competition) Thomas Vinterberg's a director with a clear interest in the secrets lurking beneath the complacent surfaces of Danish communities and families, and he's exercised that concern yet again in The Hunt, a finely wrought but quickly forgettable drama about a Kindergarten teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) who is angrily cast off from his circle of friends and colleagues following the random lie of his female student (Annika Wedderkopp). There's a palpable socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure in the film's small town, as well as a solid sense of verisimilitude that must come from Vinterberg's years as a Dogme ascetic, but at the same time there's a sluggishness, a beating-around-the-bush quality to the film's narrative progression, as if Vinterberg has merely set up a troubling scenario to relish in his formidable knack for depicting societal disintegration. Furthermore, The Hunt feels too much like just a good story that was put to film, rather than a story that was expanded upon and expressed vitally through cinematic means. It's a small distinction, but it's the one that prevents Vinterberg from being as distinctive a director as he could be.

13. Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson, USA, In Competition/Opening Night)

The Darjeeling Limited suggested a director trying to engage with issues broader than his own tiny universe and Fantastic Mr. Fox showcased an artist's desire to work with a new approach, but Moonrise Kingdom represents a firm step back into the confines of Wes Anderson's own headspace, and at this point the refusal to make artistic evolutions more drastic than the simple changing of a typeface and the move away from anamorphic widescreen is somewhat damning. The film feels decidedly small and inconsequential, failing to achieve the surprise emotional punch or sprawling canvas of films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. Furthermore, Anderson puts the burden of the film's momentum in the hands of two unknown child actors (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) who just cannot carry a scene or portray pre-pubescent love in a convincing manner. As usual for Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom is aesthetically irreproachable, shot with an oppressively diorama-like sensitivity and production designed to fantastical perfection, but it puts its eggs in the wrong basket narratively, all while wasting the naturally Andersonian flair of Anderson newcomers Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton. My love for Anderson aside, and despite a hilariously overblown climax that utilizes some throwback color toning, Moonrise Kingdom is a frustratingly flimsy act of regression from this important American filmmaker.

14. Cosmopolis (Cronenberg, USA, In Competition)

The humid theater it screened in was of no help to David Cronenberg's already-stuffy Cosmopolis, the experience of which was akin to being suffocated by the director as he whispered his esoteric contemporary philosophies in your ear. Well, more precisely, Robert Pattinson, who has become the inert mouthpiece for Cronenberg's meandering and impenetrable dialogues on the current state of economics and politics. It's clear enough that this is the story of the 1%, but I'll admit total confusion and ignorance towards the remainder of Cronenberg's intentions, and I'm certainly not prepared or interested in trying to shuffle through the needlessly coded meanings in this never-ending string of talk. Intellectual detachment is all well and good though if Cronenberg were at least able to present his ideas in compelling cinematic fashion (hence the success of Like Someone in Love) rather than resorting to what feels like characters reading manuscripts to each other in a black box theater. The outside world is so closed-off and pared-down in Cosmopolis that it's as if any of Cronenberg's decisions apart from the dialogue (the NYC location, Pattinson's plot-churning desire for a crosstown haircut, the rat as a symbol of the deteriorating dollar) were arrived at arbitrarily. Add to this the flat digital cinematography and Cosmopolis is just a dull, unimaginative slog of a film.

15. The Paperboy (Daniels, USA, In Competition)

Ok, at least Lee Daniels dropped the wacked-out racial hierarchy of the abominable Precious, but in its wake he's yielded a frankly incompetent, meaningless, and misguided tribute to the low-budget homespun camp cinema of the film's 1960's era, and he's traded the revolting view of inner-city blacks in the previous film for stereotypes of southern white trash in this one. Surely, The Paperboy aims for ickiness, but to what end? In a climactic sex scene between recently-released criminal Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) and blonde bombshell Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), Daniels cuts to images of livestock as a punctuation mark, as if deriding his characters' baseless behavior. As much as the film tries to approach a sympathetic note for its depraved characters in the end, for the most part it rides this reprehensive wave throughout, and it presents it all in a psychosexual storm of bad editing and crummy lighting. Zac Efron stumbles away with some surprisingly nuanced acting as a detective's (Matthew McConaughey) younger brother and a man struggling with overwhelming physical desire for an Kidman's older character, but otherwise the cast appears confused, seemingly lost in Daniels' inexact mise-en-scène, unaware of whether or not the cameras are rolling. This is a profoundly awful film.

Cannes 2012: A Virginal Diary

(I attended the Cannes Film Festival for the first time this year, resulting in my low output on this blog for the past two weeks. I will soon post a round-up and ranking of the films I saw.)

The international cinephile is at a great deficit when entering the grounds of the Cannes Film Festival. Navigating between filmmakers, press, agents, buyers, distributors, programmers, and the French, all of whom sit atop a higher rung in the mysterious hierarchy of power at this strangely clandestine event, he must obsessively organize his time, maintain a stoic façade, communicate quickly and definitively with those in charge, and suppress his own feelings of ecstasy upon being granted access to any number of the festival’s events. All of this, of course, while being severely jet-lagged, poorly rested, malnourished on baguettes, ham, and Red Bulls, and vaguely loopy from the wine, champagne, or Stella Artois presented freely and eagerly at so many of the festival-sponsored social gatherings. What’s more, this is all assuming the international cinephile was able to acquire one of the nifty identification cards known as the accreditation badge that is required to make one’s way through any gate, queue, or building. And not even those solve much.

I won’t go into the many ways one can get his hands on said badge, but in my case, as I attended my first ever Cannes Film Festival, I was granted a Short Film Corner accreditation due to the festival’s acceptance of my now three-year-old medium-length dramatic film Wind Through the Cradle. Sounding quite prestigious at first, the limits of the badge – which is adorned with a red circle in the top right corner and a yellow circle in the bottom right so as to prevent confusion - swiftly made themselves known to me: no access to market screenings (an unfortunate setback after I missed the premiere screening of Apichatpong's new film Mekong Hotel), only a limited 150 points to use for in-competition film premiere tickets (some of the bigger entries risked obliterating my total entirely), and apparently no access to the festival-ending Short Film Corner party on the beach. The badge seemed like bullshit. Others told me I was lucky. A market badge actually costs money, and restricts the festival-goer from reserving any premiere tickets. At the same time, it allows for one to boost his/her credentials over the course of subsequent festivals, to gain respectability and clout in the eyes of the business. The Short Film badge is less beneficial in the long run.

What these limitations mean is that going to see arthouse films in the cinema, hitherto a simple, unfussy process, is now riddled with obstacles, governed by a faceless and enigmatic force known as Securitas that is made up of tan-suit-clad Frenchmen whispering to each other, arbitrarily ticking away at their audience counts, scanning badges, and either letting you by their iron post or sternly professing the words “It’s not possible,” a phrase I found to be in abundance in Cannes. It’s the death knell that tolls the long walk back past the rest of the soon-to-be dejected queue, all of whom have stood waiting in hot sun (or in the case of this year’s oddly turbulent two weeks, cold and relentless rain) like you for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. As an example of the perplexing nature of linguistic translations, it has to be one of the most spine-tinglingly impersonal in history. Imagine it lining the billboards of the Croisette in 2013 as the newfangled motto: Festival De Cannes – It’s Not Possible.

When one does manage to slip through this hurdle and ascend the steps to one of the festival’s many official theaters (and this is a much more frequent phenomenon than I’m making it seem, as I stood in line 23 times and only missed the mark 8 times, resulting in my grand total of 15 films viewed), he is greeted to jovial female guards who check bags and usher to open seats. In fact, everything about the internal spaces of Cannes is luxurious, quite a contrast to the militant exclusivity of the external zones. Theaters are clean, often massive, well air-conditioned, and filled with cozy red chairs that encourage dozing as much as they enhance the film-viewing experience. Screens normally stretch beyond the proportions of the respective rooms they’re in, and the surround sound collaborates magically with the acoustical architecture of the theaters. (Given the generally amazing sound design on display in the selected films this year, this was quite a treat.) After scrambling to find a seat (because one can never be sure if security properly gauged the available seating in the building), there’s something sacred about sitting in the cinema successfully with moments to spare before the start of a film. Surrounded by film lovers and finally shielded from whatever chaos reigned outside, the achievement allows for the rare instance of repose, of remembering what you’re really there for.

There's really a special sensation that occurs when watching the types of films I have hitherto watched alone or in half-empty theaters in the presence of hundreds and thousands. A rapt silence, punctuated by an unusual frequency of coughs (perhaps the cumulative result of a country so famously known for smoking), washes over the theaters and centers all attention of the screen. This is especially uncanny in the 2,300-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière, where quieter films produce the sense of a mass holy communion. With the exception of the routine walk-outs in anything mildly provocative (Reygadas, Carax, Haneke, Kiarostami), rarely did I witness patent disregard for films. At one point what I thought was outright hostility from a snickering couple next to me turned out to be uncontainable enthusiasm, as the culprit of the noises giddily remarked in the urinal next to me after the film through language barriers: "I'm sorry, this director just interests me!", speaking of Hong Sang-Soo. Open, honest, democratic cinema enthusiasm prevails at Cannes, so much so that the awkward conversations when you realize you're communicating with an entirely incompatible perspective (usually when someone (often an American) brushes aside a film for being "slow," "boring," or "pretentious") stick out like sore thumbs.

The most bizarre aspect of the festival experience is the way that the kinds of contemplative, challenging films that Cannes has prominently featured in the past decade exist alongside such a raucous atmosphere of partying. Everything is in excess on the Croisette: films, drinks, people, noise, prices. There is simply no time - other than perhaps a measly window between 5 am and 8 am - when the activity settles down, so organizing one's schedule becomes vital and extraordinarily difficult. Accepting the invite to a late-night party where great directors, actors, critics, etc. are present is tempting and exciting, but it frequently means sacrificing quality sleep, which in turn launches a spiral of sluggishness that infects the experience of films the next day, deteriorating the active, thinking mind. One drink at the cheap-minded hotspot Le Petit Majestic (outside of which flocks a massive nightly crowd of networkers) can quickly turn into a long conversation with a peer about a film in competition, which almost surely will lead to another party in the wee hours. Just when I thought I was finishing up a conversation with an LA-based sound designer around 3 AM, circumstances somehow led me into the apartment of three Italian cooks - one of whom spoke more languages and dipped his feet into more industries than I could count - who fixed up a lavish meal of pasta and wine. This was merely one of the experiences I had in Cannes that was impossible to predict and which, in hindsight, is impossible to plot out.

That any film critic can produce thoughtful commentary on this mess of cinema during the festival is mind-boggling to me, and a testament to how much I have to learn before I am fully on the right mental wavelength for this frenetic environment. Granted, I had no access to WiFi or a Press Room (an actual Zen-like space in Cannes where writers crowd into a quiet, potentially sound-proofed room to escape the hubbub of the festival and earn piece of mind), but the thought of containing my varied and overlapping reactions to the films I saw still seems radical, maybe even insane. However, the result of this mental anarchy is a quite unique sensation that was previously unknown to me: the feeling of gathering an omniscient understanding of festival programming, of noticing interesting patterns and trends (aesthetic, thematic, narrative, and otherwise) across the collection of films. In acknowledgment of this, I ended up staying largely within the In Competition films and not venturing too far into the Un Certain Regard, Director's Fortnight, Out of Competition, and Critic's Week categories, preferring to zero in on the formal rhymes within the festival's main event. Regardless of the limitations and difficulties of this, or any of my approaches for that matter, the Cannes Film Festival was an eye-opening experience, an invigorating, frustrating, magical two-week daze in which I was never, ever fully awake.

Wuthering Heights (2011) A Film by Andrea Arnold

If there was any doubt of the emotional infantilism and redundancy of Andrea Arnold's new and fiercely independent update to the classic novel Wuthering Heights, a tune by English pop-folk act Mumford and Suns portentously titled "The Enemy" springs up on the soundtrack, interrupting the soundscape of this otherwise insistently diegetic work. The song cries, "How could you lean on a man who was falling?" a pithy summarization of the central doomed romance of Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw, two young lovers in a windswept farmhouse in a harsh 19th Century Yorkshire landscape. Arnold pulled a similarly heavy-handed move in her previous Fish Tank with Nas' "Life's a Bitch," a rap that not only cemented the film's incessant miserabilism but also undermined the progress hitherto made by the impoverished characters. Musical accompaniment this overt and unwarranted can't help but give the impression of a director timid about the impact of her source material and the methods used to convey the emotions and themes within. In Fish Tank, that timidness severely distracted from the strengths of the film; here, it's just a safety net, another sign that the audience should be feeling the kind of unease and desperation that they've been feeling throughout.

Fortunately, the musical coda is not the nail in the coffin of Arnold's work. This is a film loaded with too many striking aesthetic ideas and brooding atmospheres (all of which descend from Tarr, Malick, and French director Philippe Grandrieux, who uses similarly abstracted handheld shots) to be entirely hampered by its intermittent juvenilia. With its opening scene of an adult Heathcliff (James Howson) slamming himself into a concrete wall repeatedly in a drab, featureless room filmed in queasy handheld shots that translate the brutality of the act to the screen, the film announces itself as a proudly extreme diversion from the long line of previous cinematic adaptations of Emily Brontë's text. Arnold replaces dialogue, character development, and lavish attention to period decor with mud, wind, rain, and rotting animal carcasses, all of which impress upon the film a tactile relationship with nature. The weather (usually grey and threatening) and the open landscape dictates the lives of the characters in the novel, and Arnold, recognizing that as the most cinematically expressive aspect of the work, fills the film with shots of flora and fauna and painterly montages which seem to accomplish little narratively. It's tough to say whether Arnold is making any kind of statement about man's minuscule part in the natural world; instead, this fascination with the details of the setting functions to ground Heathcliff and Cathy's youthful emotional reticence in a very specific place in nature.

Arnold is so committed in her portrayal of the Yorkshire setting that nature is often called upon to fill the void left by the primitive character development. Part of the goal here is to strip the novel down to its narrative essentials, compressing the book's epic romance and its themes of obsession, outsidership, class warfare, and religious hypocrisy to an implicitly felt brew of glances and gestures. When young Heathcliff (played by 14-year-old Solomon Glave) - a wandering black kid of questionable origins (Arnold's decision to do away with Brontë's more ambiguous explanation of Heathcliff's outsider identity and go straight for a black-white dichotomy is both a brave and simplistic decision) - is taken in by the lowly Earnshaw family because Mr. Earnshaw (Paul Hilton) believes it to be "the Christee-yan thing to do," Arnold immediately conveys the family's knee-jerk intolerance of their new black brethren through the menacing stares of Mr. Earnshaw's hateful son Hindley (Lee Shaw), the family's servant Joseph (Steve Evets), the housemaid Ellen (Simone Jackson), and even young Cathy (Shannon Beer). Little is spoken, but Arnold's choice to stage the meeting of Heathcliff and the Earnshaws on a rainy night by inky, flickering firelight, as foreboding a set as any in a film of fog, dim natural light, and dark interiors, directly introduces racism as a central theme.

The second aim of Wuthering Heights is to capture the feeling of hesitantly falling in love for the first time and of hormonal charges bursting to the surface at unexpected times and in unusual ways. Fish Tank's best scene featured a dangerously seductive Michael Fassbender fondling the daughter of his character's girlfriend, and by shooting the scene through the girl's perspective, Arnold was able to catch the vivid moments of fear and excitement that characterize sexual awakenings. Here, she rigorously adopts Heathcliff's perspective for the entirety of the film, and his first intimate encounters with Cathy pop like sunshine against the murky landscapes. One scene involves the two of them riding a horse, and for an extended moment Heathcliff luxuriates in the closeness, slyly smelling her hair and glimpsing her bouncing figure. Later they wrestle around in mud, an act that's fueled by both sensuality and subtle vengeance for Cathy's earlier intolerance, especially noticeable when Heathcliff pins her wrists to the ground in a charged embrace. Arnold deftly handles these moments of emotional ambiguity with claustrophobic, intuitive camerawork (aided further by the film's unconventional 1:33:1 aspect ratio).

Trouble is, Wuthering Heights is a two-hour-plus feature film, and it never expands these thematic roots any further. Racial tensions balloon outward into obligatory n-words, and the burgeoning sexual urges between Heathcliff and Cathy fizzle over into their adult selves (Howson and a questionably cast Kaya Scodelario), who are still kowtowing around one another and making indecisive advances. Instead of exploring the contours of these difficult emotions, how they morph and stagnate over time, Arnold prefers to reduce them to symbolic gestures. Thus, the relentless images of mangled and defenseless animals are able to stand in for both Heathcliff's animalistic image to the white folk and the inevitably decaying loss of innocence in the central romance. After not one but two puppy hangings, the film becomes metaphorically burdensome and, frankly, cruel. At a certain point around a third of the way through, Wuthering Heights bottoms out, adding nothing new to its portentous cycle of anticipation and failure. When a teary-eyed Heathcliff smothers Cathy's recently deceased body with kisses in the final act, it's a punchy metaphor for the film's own belated explosion of emotion.

The Girlfriend Experience (2009) A Film by Steven Soderbergh

For a director who pays fastidious attention to the politics, social trends, industries, and technologies of his milieus, it's no small achievement that Steven Soderbergh's films so often come across as powerfully generational. Few modern filmmakers risk the kind of ephemeral, insignificant subjects that Soderbergh repeatedly zeroes in on in his films, and even fewer can attest to continually locating something (sometimes just one thing) fascinating and timeless in the kinds of obsessive portraits of modern life that he deals in. The Girlfriend Experience, for instance, incorporates a fleet of very "2008-2009" artifacts: the notably self-aware and sophisticated porn star Sasha Grey, who had her moment in the form of a 2009 Rolling Stone interview and has since flirted with obsolescence; the Wall Street collapse, which seems like an ancient phenomenon by now; the presidential election that put Obama in the White House; the once-regarded online media blogger Harry Knowles, who gets an indirect onscreen surrogate in the form of first-time actor and wickedly sharp film critic Glenn Kenny. All of this would suggest that The Girlfriend Experience is a film of its time and not much more, but it succeeds most when its drifting emotional undercurrents and lackadaisical mood indicates something slightly broader and more intangible about life in a 21st century late capitalist society.

Grey plays Chelsea, a high-priced call girl in NYC whose vocation echoes one line Grey uttered in said Rolling Stone article: "I am determined and ready to be a commodity that fulfills everyone's fantasies." The mantra sounds all-inclusive, and it is; Chelsea not only sleeps with the men who hire her, but she also engages them in conversation, shares romantic dinners with them, sits down for aimless relaxation time, and listens intently to countless inconsequential personal issues. She provides them "the girlfriend experience," and like a real girlfriend, sometimes she doesn't even sleep with them. Essentially, these men are putting a massive price tag on human companionship, an opportunity that ought to be staring them right in the face for free on a daily basis. The premise alone reveals the degree to which Americans have commodified anything and everything, constantly searching for new ways to spend money on items, attitudes, and ways of life that should otherwise be priceless.

Where Soderbergh's film gets tricky, however, is in its refusal to simplistically frame this contemporary ethos as strictly dehumanizing and demoralizing. No, the primary intent of The Girlfriend Experience - and of Soderbergh's sneaky, probing, sometimes meandering camera - is to unearth the value and meaning still erected in this consumer-saturated landscape. Early in the film, Chelsea's gym-assistant boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos) is tossing medicine balls back and forth to a customer looking to improve his physique. Their workout is exclusively designed for personal gain, yet the conversation that follows is casual and mutually curious, leading to an offer for Chris to go to Vegas on an undefined business trip. In another scene at the gym, Chris is trying to talk another male customer into buying a more expensive, comprehensive plan at the gym on the grounds that he believes they have a good working relationship and he'd like to keep it going. The assumption here is that the two men cannot go on being friends if commerce does not enter the equation, yet one can sense the desire on both sides to continue the relationship regardless. Despite the fundamentally business-oriented nature of the discussions between these men, there is a sense of ease and comfort in the dialogue that is entirely missing from the scenes that take place later between Chris and Chelsea in their own apartment.

Most of the film occurs as such; transactions, in the form of casual interrogations, interviews over coffee, and phone inquiries about Chelsea's service, dominate the content of the narrative. Rarely is there a scene when people are just talking back and forth, engaging equally, interested in both hearing and being heard. Even when Chelsea cracks her routinely impersonal, all-ears facade to open up to a client about her miserable experience at the hands of a rude slob, the man shifts his role in the meeting, suddenly acting as a therapist hired to ease a woman's personal troubles rather than a human hoping to understand and sympathize. In this urban environment, there is always a speaker and a listener, a teacher and a student, a professional and a client, a producer and a consumer. The one instance where a true conversation occurs is a running scene with Chris and his colleagues chatting in the luxury suite on their flight to Vegas, and appropriately it radically disrupts the film's otherwise contained aesthetic, replacing high-end digital gloss with cheap prosumer video. One of the guys makes a remark about never wanting a woman that he'd have to pay for, and suddenly the film's agenda is brought into clear focus: The Girlfriend Experience reflects a landscape in which humans resist the absurdities of their capitalist system, yet the system fights back, insisting on its own right to distort and to confuse.

Soderbergh again acts as his own Director of Photography in the film, and he sticks mostly to crisply framed shots of hygienic Manhattan high-rises and restaurants, emphasizing vertical lines and seeking angles where the architecture causes a separation between individuals in the frame. Fragmented in asynchronous chunks of long, largely static takes broken up by impressionistic shots of blurry city-scapes peered from a car window, the film is one of Soderbergh's most free-form and exploratory, its cold, angular perspectives hinting at a machine-like observer behind the camera but never fully extinguishing the sense of the director's presence, searching hesitantly for instances that make each shot worth the wait. And perhaps unsurprisingly, this has the effect of assigning a democracy across the film's images, a notion of visual equality that renders it acceptable to only briefly mention Grey's appearance in a work that is ostensibly all about her. The Girlfriend Experience, by embodying this mechanical object and still seeking the human within, continues this implicit battle with capitalism. Human interaction has been standardized, compartmentalized, and monetized, but not necessarily defeated, and it is in this that Soderbergh locates the flicker of warmth that justifies his film.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) A Film by Tommy Lee Jones

Haunted by the ghosts of Sam Peckinpah and John Huston, Tommy Lee Jones' only theatrical feature to date, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is a strange, uneven neo-western whose slim storyline is often held together only by an overwhelming vision of the West as a place of collapsing moral fiber and dissolving identity. Jones directs himself as the paunchy, mumbly ranch hand Pete Perkins from the desolate town of Van Horn, Texas, and Perkins' modus operandi throughout the film is to quietly, insistently preserve a tradition of moral responsibility and human empathy in his dull border town, where multicultural tensions flare up regularly. Policeman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) is at the center of his town's bigotry, a volatile figure who spends his days chasing "wetbacks" through the dusty Texas landscape and indifferently disrobing his bored wife Lou Ann (January Jones) in unlikely domestic spaces. Pepper's one-note performance does little to disguise the fact that he's the loud caricature of the narrow-minded American authority, and much of the film's issues lie in its simplistic staging of the American way of life, which is boiled down to "fucking billboards," prostitution, emotional distance, and ugliness. Unsurprisingly, given the authorial one-two punch here - Jones and notoriously heavy-handed writer Guillermo Arriaga - Mexico embodies a sacred land in the film's universe.

As such, the film's plot works to reinforce that image of unshakeable nationalism. Hinging on the sudden, sporadic killing of Perkins' friend and colleague Melquiades Estrada (Julio César Cedillo), Arriaga then weaves a structure around the three separate burials of Melquiades' corpse, the first two of which are considered rash and unholy by Perkins. Simple enough, it seems, but Arriaga insists on fracturing the chronology a bit to insure that viewers witness the banal death of Melquiades from more than one perspective. The third burial is Perkins' attempt to offer the proper closure to Melquiades' spirit, and it involves him kidnapping Norton, forcing him to dig up the body, and escorting both the body and a hand-cuffed Norton across the border to seek an ideal resting place. Perkins enacts the whole affair with a yawning tenacity, not necessarily vengeful in his justice but exhaustedly adhering to his own sense of spiritual and moral duty.

The character gives Jones a comprehensive workout in the kind of gruff but oddly gentle, outdoorsy conservatism that his screen persona has so often imparted within Hollywood in recent years. Perkins feels very much like the rough draft of Ed Tom Bell in the Coens' No Country for Old Men, with the weary stares and interior digressions of that character echoed here in more primitive forms. Part of this incompleteness has to do with the film's shoddy sound mix, which subsumes voices into the static drone of the West, but it also stems from the generally paltry writing and directorial development. The film relies on its audience buying the close bond between Pete and Melquiades in order to succumb to the act of brotherhood that occurs in the second half, but the script only allows the two characters a couple of clipped, aimless scenes together, hoisted on the assumption that sharing afternoon hookers is enough to signal immutable friendship. Moreover, Jones spends more time hovering over Norton and his vile police companion Belmont (Dwight Yoakam) during the first half of the film than he does any of the more interesting and ostensibly primary characters. Nonetheless, even in the absence of the glue that would make Perkins a complete character, Jones still comes across as an element unto himself, a tired patriarch once shown respect and admiration and now merely a ghost roaming in his own territory.

The first half of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada owes something to Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show as a postmodern homage to the small-town rhythms of early Westerns by Ford and Hawks. Jones aims to capture the lazy routines of Van Horn, limiting the scale to a few classic locations and a rotating cast of townies. Sometimes, as when the camera rests on January Jones' frustrated and adrift beauty in the local diner (shot in a grotesque shade of blue and uncomfortably overexposed), or when macho camaraderie is established at the police station, the film casually develops an internal flow, but other times Jones seems to be roped in by Arriaga's gimmicky suspense-building maneuvers, which actually stomp out the director's attempt to get on the town's wavelength. Free of the script's needless devices in the second half, Jones strays from Bogdanovich to settle into a patchwork, nearly stream-of-consciousness trip through Mexico to bury Melquiades. The body decays (the resulting corpse's gloriously low-rent production values allows it to stand in as a symbol of death rather than a specific person), and surrealism starts to creep in. Jones appears at ease with the kind of loose linearity that this chapter offers him, unsurprising for a man whose default gaze is a tired, no-nonsense one that stares incessantly forward. As the sun-baked march coalesces and begins to turn the bad guy good, Levon Helm arrives for a haunting cameo as a blind man living alone on his porch in Mexico, with nothing to do but listen to the radio sullenly now that his son has died over the border. A professed Bible adherent, the man requests that Perkins kill him for fear that God might disapprove of suicide.

Helm only returns to the film in a punctuational close-up shortly thereafter, and it's too bad that his moment does not last longer. His character underscores a devastating moral ambiguity that only hovers over the film tangentially, hinting at a full emergence in the last act but ultimately a minor subtext. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, instead, seems confused about its intentions, doubling as a preachy argument for multicultural tolerance as well as a more nuanced look at the tensions between old-world and new-world codes of justice. Jones needs a screenwriter to match his archaic sensibilities, not a guy known for his loopy manipulations to admittedly simple stories. It's no surprise that the film is at its most strangely compelling when it's sliding amorphously through a hallucinatory Mexican landscape like the drunk in Under the Volcano; like the best of Jones' performances, these moments carry a relaxed but undeniably melancholy air. The rest is more suited, well, to a performance like Pepper's.

A Performance by Bruce McClure on April 10, 2012

The projector performances of Bruce McClure have ever so gradually spawned a cultish reputation in avant-garde circles, their intense and in-your-face qualities demanding the attention of adventurous filmgoers. Perhaps the major reason why McClure has not quite become a leading fixture with this niche audience though is the fact that his work is fundamentally ephemeral. Limited to late-evening spectacles shown once and never repeated in quite the same manner, his improvisational audiovisual experiences defy the act of preservation in any form, and, given their intermittent strobing effects, any attempt at digital capture is destined to either fail or inadequately represent the woozy ambiance the performances impart on their audiences. The thrill of McClure's work comes precisely from its existence in a dark room amongst various bemused, hypnotized, and enraged viewers, as well as from the sense of it having no pre-destined plan other than what McClure happens to concoct for you in the center of the room.

McClure was at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 10th, a quaint old arthouse that is probably not the ideal venue for his setup: two studio speakers (meant to belt out pummeling industrial soundscapes), a fairly puny six-by-eight projector screen propped up invasively in front of the much larger house screen behind it, and a table strewn awkwardly atop theater seats in the middle of the room upon which two projectors, a tangle of XLR cables, and an assembly line of guitar delay pedals. It's an arrangement that looks gentle and friendly at first, as if for a home movie gathering; that is, before McClure starts building towards a feverish strobing of light and an aggressive layering of harsh, dense electronic tones. At the peak of the mesmerizing chaos, it's easy to wonder how such a forceful sensory overload can emanate from such a delicate-looking apparatus. Part of McClure's ongoing reputation is to go against the grain of every venue he enters, be it movie theater, studio, or museum; pretty much no space can contain the shuttering racket he creates.

The show began with flashes of amorphous shapes against black leader as a dry, harsh crackle resembling the sound of dribbled basketballs bit-crushed and thrown through distortion poked hesitantly through the silence of the room. At this point, the house lights were still on, but when McClure started to apply reverb and looping effects to his crunchy soundtrack, the theater slowly went dark. It's the first gesture that aligns McClure with the structuralists, a way of staging the theater space itself as the inside of a camera. Suddenly, the room is dark and the screen is the world beyond the shutter hole, flickering with light and imperceptible forms. Together, the visuals and the audio stray from any semblance of shape and definition, until the screen is a mere blob of featureless light strobing in and out and the speakers deliver an enveloping drone. McClure riffed on this blueprint for about an hour once it developed, subtly altering the image and soundtrack throughout with his pedal system. Sometimes, the brightest point of the screen was blinding, other times very faint. Similarly, the sound ranged from blistering and high-pitched to strangely lulling. Between the two, the audio is more active, contrasting with the blankness of the image.

A curious dialogue between sound and image developed during McClure's performance. Menacing patterns in the soundtrack appeared to tease out ghostly images in the void of the screen, while persistent attention to the strobing produced a euphoria that caused potentially non-existent sounds to surface in the mix. The result of this fascinating interplay is that no viewer experiences McClure's work in quite the same way; one may interpret his performances as abrasive and violent while others may feel soothed by the experience. I found myself vacillating between these two poles, discovering organic forms in the chaos of the screen at some points and feeling pummeled by the loudness other times. For all the seeming redundancy of the performance, McClure does manage to conjure up a surprising variety of emotional responses.