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Maybe it’s the ludicrous weather or the knock-on effects of that Brandon Cronenberg movie, but I’m six days into the festival and it seems I’ve already run out of steam. For the first time since my arrival, I actually went a full 24 hours without seeing a movie after yesterday’s Haneke screening, and today I’ve seen only one film.
Room 237 is the first documentary feature from Rodney Ascher (whose recent work also includes this inexplicable Andrew WK/Soulja Boy/Matt & Kim collaboration). It premiered earlier this year at Sundance and now appears in Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight strand — a sort of dumping ground for films too weird and/or bad for Un Certain Regard. Luckily, it’s the former in this case.
Narrated by five of The Shining‘s most obsessive devotees, Room 237 presents their oddball theories (one thinks the film’s a metaphor for the Holocaust, another that it’s Kubrick’s admission that he helped fake the moon landing) alongside original footage from the film, beautifully assembled to present their outlandish ideas in the most persuasive light. At 102 minutes, it drastically outstays its welcome, but there’s something quite charming about Ascher’s refusal to outright dismiss his subjects’ hallucinations.
So, what have I been doing with all this spare time now that I’ve reduced my average daily film consumption down to under two hours? Well, as you can see I’ve now had my obligatory festival McDonalds (complete with a tiny can of Heineken), which I’m pleased to report was delicious. I’ve also organised my change, broken an umbrella and lost a bow tie. Live fast, die young.
I hesitate to call anything that doesn’t contain a single record scratch, festival laurel or MPAA certificate a ‘trailer’, but whatever you call it, this first look at Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is all kinds of exciting. And despite the four-year acting hiatus necessitated by his Casey Affleck collaboration I’m Still Here, there’s no evidence to suggest that Joaqy Joaquin is out of practice. Bring on October 12th.
Today’s diary will be considerably shorter than usual for two reasons:
1. The weather has decided in its infinite wisdom to turn shitty, so I’ve spent most of today in the flat eating cheese.
2. I saw the new Michael Haneke movie Amour this morning and I’m still recovering.
Destined to be the most universally acclaimed film of the festival, Amour is Haneke’s least tricksy movie to date, foregoing the heavy-handed metaphors and self-conscious irony that occasionally weighed down his earlier work to deliver a two-hour portrait of human existence at its most fucking-hell-when-will-it-end brutal.
Hot young octogenarians Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva star as Georges and Anne (character names Haneke has used throughout his career) — an elderly couple living out their retirement in Paris. The opening scene gives away the ending, making the remainder of the film a relentless tumble into the hell of ageing, seemingly just as terrifying a prospect for the non-OAP audience as for Haneke’s grey-haired lovers, if the stifled sobs that echoed around the press screening are anything to go by.
The film has already shot its director to the upper echelons of the Palme d’Or odds, second only to Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami and his Tokyo-set drama Like Someone in Love. A win for Haneke would make him the quickest repeat champion in the festival’s history, after his sombre black and white morality jamboree The White Ribbon took home the Palme in 2009. Amour is a better film — maybe even his best? — and will take some beating as my film of the festival.
Cannes critics can be a bit sniffy about stuff they perceive as ‘below the festival’. Last year, Drive proved a little too Hollywood for some of them; this year, Lawless is causing the upset. With its A-list cast and linear narrative (lame!), John Hillcoat’s first film since 2009′s lacklustre The Road has someway to go to earn the respect of its worthier, European-er peers. It largely gets there.
I still wish he’d go back to his formative goofy comic roles, but Shia LaBoeuf is undeniably engaging as the youngest of the three Bondurant brothers — a set of have-a-go bootleggers in Prohibition-era Virginia. Tom Hardy plays oldest brother Forrest, and manages to aptly convey most of his dialogue through the use of carefully nuanced grunts. And Guy Pearce! I haven’t been this surprised by him since he signed on for Bedtime Stories.
After more than two hours of continuous bootlegging hijinks there’s no denying it’s a one-note film, but what a lovely note it is.
One of the more talked-about films in Cannes’s secondary Un Certain Regard strand is Antiviral, the directorial debut of a young filmmaker named Brandon Cronenberg. You may already be familiar with his dad, who has some film or other in the main competition.
Antiviral is primarily concerned with — get ready for a RADICAL SUBJECT MATTER — society’s obsession with celebrity, and imagines a not-too-distant future in which fans pay large sums of money to voluntarily contract the illnesses of their celebrity idols. If you’ve ever bought a copy of OK! Magazine, he’s talking about you here.
There’s not much to the film beyond that premise, so if the notion that celebrity obsession might be unhealthy isn’t enough to blow your mind wide open, this might not be the film for you. Especially given that Brandon’s cunning plan to step out of his father’s shadow is basically to plagiarise every movie he’s ever made. In short, this should tell you everything you need to know:
As the day drew to a close and the sun set over the Côte d’Azur, I decided there could be no better way to end the day than by queuing for two hours for the new Thomas Vinterberg movie The Hunt, only to not get in. And that’s exactly what I did.
We should never have gotten complacent. After three days of glorious sunshine, our casual summer wear was made a mockery of today when the heavens opened and the rain began to fall. After a late one last night, I failed to wake up for opted to skip the 8:30am screening of Matteo Garrone’s Italian reality television satire Reality and instead made my way to the midday showing of Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, screening out of competition in the Grand Théâtre Lumière.
A few broad Hollywood blockbusters tend make their way into the programme each year, wedged uncomfortably between the Audiards and the Hanekes of the competition, and Dreamworks Animation have got an especially consistent attendance record. Both Shrek and Shrek 2 actually competed for the Palme d’Or (losing out to The Son’s Room and Fahrenheit 9/11 respectively) and since then, most of their films have had some kind of presence at the festival.
There’s something very odd about watching a kids film in the company of a 2000 adult critics, all inexplicably laughing at every pratfall and lame innuendo. It’s as if all the inherent snobbishness of the festival has suddenly vanished, and you can’t help but wish such an honour had been bestowed upon something a little more deserving than Madagascar 3.
Better than its predecessor but worse than most other things, the film sees Alex, Marty and the other two idiots traveling across Europe Cars-2-stylee in a horribly contrived scheme to return to New York. It fucks with the franchise rulebook — the animals now talk freely in front of humans — and has a weird pro-animal-circus stance that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, but if you voluntarily agree to watch a new Madagascar movie, you’ve no real right to be disappointed by what is essentially a repeat of the first movie with a few new penis jokes.
From the ridiculous to the sublime, the day’s second film was Beasts of the Southern Wild, which quite justifiably won the grand jury prize back at Sundance in January. Its a father-daughter story told in alternating bursts of exuberance and melancholy, featuring one of the all-time great child performances from six-year-old newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis. It might be a little while before it makes it over to the UK, but you’ll want to devour this beautiful monster of a film the first chance you get.
Then I went to a yacht party. Yep, me. On a yacht. A real one. It didn’t actually leave the harbour and the party only went on until 8pm, but still, I felt pretty special.
The final film of the day was a 10:15pm screening of Laurence Anyways, the new one from hot young bastard Xavier Dolan (pictured above receiving a standing ovation – his third in Cannes by the age of 23). The film’s excellent, but at a cost. As if making a movie about transgender identity wasn’t challenging enough in the first place, Dolan has tested his industry heft to the very limit and delivered a 159-minute, 1.37:1-aspect-ratio, mostly-episodic relationship drama set across an eleven year period. Needless to say, it doesn’t all hold together, but there’s a lot to love in this sprawling, melodramatic shambles, and Dolan still does attractive young people walking in slow-motion to electropop better than anyone else.
And wait until you see the title card — holy mother of fuck.
Room 237 is the first documentary feature from Rodney Ascher (whose recent work also includes this inexplicable Andrew WK/Soulja Boy/Matt & Kim collaboration). It premiered earlier this year at Sundance and now appears in Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight strand — a sort of dumping ground for films too weird and/or bad for Un Certain Regard. Luckily, it’s the former in this case.
One of the more talked-about films in Cannes’s secondary Un Certain Regard strand is Antiviral, the directorial debut of a young filmmaker named Brandon Cronenberg. You may already be familiar with his dad, who has 
snobbishness of the festival has suddenly vanished, and you can’t help but wish such an honour had been bestowed upon something a little more deserving than Madagascar 3.
