Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cannes 2009

2009; Wiley; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-8705.2009.01880.x

1467-8705

Colin MacCabe,

Cinema and Media Studies

I don't know whether this was the best Cannes ever but it was certainly the best that I have attended in twenty-five years. First of all there were far less people. When I first went, in 1985, Cannes already hosted all the film world, the journalists, the festival programmers, the producers and distributors both big and small, the directors and the stars. But every year as film became more dependent on television and the state, this original population was swelled by television executives and, worse, bureaucrats from every region in Europe that had started up a film fund. Finally, in recent years, as London nightclubs opened temporary branches, there have been a huge number of young people for whom Cannes in May has absolutely nothing to do with films but is simply the venue of choice to get loaded and laid. Executives, bureaucrats and liggers all gone, gone with the wind of economic collapse. The film people were still there, however, and if there was rumours of the sound of belts being tightened – hotels and apartments available for less than the full twelve days of the festival, buyers seeking market passes for one day – there was absolutely no stinting in the quality of films being shown. Indeed Cannes 2009 could be taken as proof that even as video games displace film as the major form of entertainment at the box office, film's position as the global art form remains unchallenged. By one of those coincidences at which history reveals itself, the Competition strand this year played host to many of the greatest directors working: Almodóvar, Loach, Haneke, Audiard, and, almost like a time-travelling visitor, Alain Resnais. There is no doubt that the most moving moment of the festival was Resnais's reception in the Grand Palais as he arrived to present Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass). When he entered the cinema, the applause went on for ever. As indeed it should. Here is the man who first introduced André Bazin to the history of film; the man who made Les Statues meurent aussi with Chris Marker, and whose Hiroshima, Mon Amour completely altered the artistic ambitions of postwar cinema. Wild Grass is a charming middle-aged love story, which weaves its protagonists' lives together with wit, simplicity and wisdom. However, the last two minutes of the film seem to come from another much more bitter and anguished film and Les Herbes folles is a film that demands a second viewing. One film that didn't even get a first Viewing was Lars von Trier's Antichrist. I have cordially disliked von Trier's work ever since The Element of Crime; the combination of an extraordinary ability with the camera and scripts written by a lippy and self-satisfied 14-year-old have never appealed. The opening sequence of this film, in which a small child falls to its death as his parents fuck, saw von Trier still toiling away somewhere at the beginning of the twentieth century trying to épater la bourgeoisie. To show that nothing changes, the Cannes critics reacted to the provocation as the Dane must have wished, but I had left the cinema long before Willem Dafoe's penis started spurting blood or Charlotte Gainsbourg had cut off her clitoris. However, the festival was not just Old Masters. Andrea Arnold's first film, Red Road, was set in Glasgow. Her second, Fish Tank, inhabits London's East End. Not the fabled alleys of Whitechapel nor even the familiar parks of Hackney, but further east, where the white working class fled the slums in search of new jobs at Dagenham and the new houses that Harold Macmillan built as Churchill's housing minister between 1951 and 1954. Now, where the edge of London meets the Essex marshes, it is home to the underclass that Thatcher and Blair created. A world of terrible deprivation – deprivation of speech, deprivation of feeling, deprivation of life. Here Arnold finds her heroine Mia (Katie Jarvis), 15 years old, isolated from her peers, rowing constantly with her party-loving single mother and her irritating younger sister. Every conversation is nasty, brutish and short, and Mia tries as hard as possible to be unlikeable. But she is as beautiful as the dawn and, as Robbie Ryan's camera captures her in her landscape, we are irresistibly drawn into her young life. Arnold's first film was marred by too melodramatic a script, but Fish Tank effortlessly takes the most ordinary of stories and turns it into a gripping plot. Michael Fassbender takes up with Mia's mother, and the physical attraction between 15-year-old girl and charming hunk is perfectly realised, including a sex scene as moving as it is clichéd. The final scenes of the film are unbearably painful and yet Arnold manages to salvage a credible happy end. This really is direction of the very highest order. There are few stories as sad as that of John Keats. When he died of consumption in Rome in 1821 aged 25, he thought himself an abject failure and asked that his grave bear the simple inscription, ‘here lies one whose name was writ on water’. In fact, once dead both his poetry and the terrible story of his death became a staple of the Victorian imagination. Part of that story is his secret engagement to Fanny Brawne, to whom he poured out, in some of the greatest letters ever written in English, both his theory of poetry and the ambivalence and ambiguity of his attraction to Fanny. Unfortunately, Jane Campion's biopic of Keats and Fanny, his ‘bright star’, has nothing to do with ambivalence or ambiguity, nor indeed has it that distance from its characters essential to historical fiction. At no point does Campion let either the letters or the terribly spoken poetry breathe. No sooner is poetry being recited than Campion's camera is off on a giddy chase trying desperately to hold our attention instead of letting Keats's lines work their magic, while the pedestrian script turns Fanny and Keats into a couple of modern lovers who unaccountably never get around to exchanging bodily fluids. It is clear that Abbie Cornish, who plays Fanny, has the presence to become a major figure in the cinema, but Ben Whishaw struggles in a role that never begins to capture Keats's obsession with death and his desire to ‘cease upon the midnight with no pain’. As if to underline the film's oafishness, there is no quotation from Keats's ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, the poem that captures most perfectly his ambiguity about Fanny. I have great difficulty when teaching this poem to make students understand why Keats can prefer the bold lover on the urn who will ‘never never’ kiss to the ‘breathing human passion’ which leaves a heart ‘high sorrowful and cloyed’, but it can be safely said that Campion's film doesn't even attempt such a difficulty. Her lovers are early twenty-first century actors in early nineteenth-century clothes – there is absolutely no sense of the past and how they did things differently there. Bright Star was funded by the UKFC's New Cinema Fund, the institutional successor to the British Film Institute Production Board. I was head of the Production Board at the BFI from 1985 to 1989, when we brought successful historical fictions to Cannes. It was unimaginable then that subsidy would be given to conservative period pieces with no sense of the history of the literature they adapt. The artistic and moral bankruptcy of New Labour's cultural policies is evident in such funding decisions. But if Jane Campion provides an object lesson of a great director who has completely lost her way, the festival provided example after example of great directors for whom the camera can still illuminate the world. Pedro Almodóvar was unlucky that, with so many great films screened, his Broken Embraces, a complicated fantasy about a blind filmmaker, in which Penélope Cruz does nothing less than embody the hopes of cinema, seemed like just another good film. One of the weaknesses of recent Cannes has been the lamentable French films but this year we got not only Resnais but also Jacques Audiard's A Prophet. Although set in a jail, it is a Mafia rather than a prison movie. Its unknown star, Tahar Ramin, moves from humiliated underling to gang boss in a multilingual haze of violence, in which Corsican and Maghrebian Arabic jostle with French in a plot which is both complex and gripping. Ramin is set, if I'm any judge, for French superstar status. One who has achieved that over five decades is Johnny Hallyday, and he turns in a magnificent performance in Johnnie To's Vengeance. I say ‘performance’ but what Hallyday lends to this Hong Kong film is his unbelievably ravaged features, in which every pleasure and every vice are written deeply into his face. Ken Loach is one of the greatest directors working and without doubt the greatest contemporary exponent of the aesthetics of Italian neorealism. However, his films about the past, of which the Palme d'Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley was a prime example, are cockeyed about history and dedicated to the celebration of violence. Luckily Looking for Eric is about the present and is a wonderful self-help film, with Eric Cantona acting as a life coach to a postman whose family and work relations are in a mess. It is a touching and funny film with a simple ideological message: ‘the people united will never be defeated’. It's very good to see a communist film that one can applaud. Michael Haneke is a great director but I suspect that The White Ribbon, the story of a Protestant village in northern Germany in the year before the outbreak of the First World War, is his masterpiece. As I have got older, Europe's suicide in 1914 seems more and more the defining historical event of our era, and Haneke's film makes a major contribution to diagnosing Europe's terminal state. As the German village that we are watching disintegrates before our eyes into abuse and cruelty, we are watching not just Germany but Europe, not just one country but a whole ideal of civilisation that is about to prove itself a hollow lie. At one very simple and prosaic level, Cannes 2009 proved that Cannes remains the world's pre-eminent film festival, a fortnight which really does offer the very best of world cinema. The transition from Gilles Jacob to Thierry Frémaux has been long and much commented on. However, this year one can definitively say that Frémaux has built on Jacob's foundations and now offers a festival boasting an even greater range of cinema, particularly in its new commitment to documentary. At a more complex level, Cannes 2009 offered renewed faith in the cinema. It was hard to spot common elements other than the fact than many of the films were very long and that this must have been the most violent competition of all time. But both The Prophet and The White Ribbon needed two and a half hours to tell their complicated stories, and all one can say about the violence is that reality continues to outstrip its representation by a comfortable distance. Tarantino's film Inglourious Basterds enraged some, particularly Americans, for its portrayal of an American Jewish unit behind German lines which engaged in indiscriminate torture and murder. Yet, it was difficult to take Tarantino's fable as anything but a prolonged cinematic joke with one or two of the set pieces, particularly Michael Fassbender (again) and a German Gestapo officer in a French bar, destined for film immortality. At the same time the film never amounted to more than the sum of its parts and will leave Tarantino fans hoping that their genius can shake his cinephilia into one more great film. For there were great films in Cannes and they provided angles on the world with a variety and profusion which suggested that, as we enter a period of cultural revaluation, film will remain as central as it has ever been to an understanding of ourselves and our world. This would have pleased the ghosts that throng La Croisette. For if you have been coming to Cannes for twenty-five years, then it is the dead as well as the living who patrol the seafront. As the sleep ration goes down and the alcohol intake goes up, T. S. Eliot's conversation with the ghost of a dead friend that ends ‘Little Gidding’ becomes a daily event. In February Hercules Belleville died. Jeremy Thomas's right-hand man at Recorded Pictures, long-time collaborator of Roman Polanski, Hal Ashby and Bernardo Bertolucci. Hercules was a close friend, particularly at Cannes, where we would, like girlfriends, phone each other six times a day, censor each other's dress and behaviour, exchange gossip and plot the night ahead. I kept hearing his voice throughout the festival, and his final judgement was conclusive: ‘Great, mate. Just great.’