Cannes 2015 roundup: in praise of slow-burners

It’s easy to feel regrets at the end of what has become something of a marathon festival. The speed with which everyone in the media is now expected to respond to the films one sees in Cannes is harsh on films that take time to sink in properly and kind to the sensory bombardment variety. My midway round-up might, for instance, have touched on Radu Muntean’s One Floor Below, one of the most quietly effective films of the early days, and equally on Nanni Moretti’s My Mother (Mia Madre), which has instant panache but felt thin at first only to deepen on reconsideration.

Muntean’s film follows the pattern of so many Romanian successes of recent years: a bleak and sticky situation develops around a potential crime that causes the build-up of psychological pressures of a Dostoyevskyan nature. Patrascu (Teodor Corban), a man who deals in car registrations, is climbing his apartment block stairs when he overhears a violent argument between a husband and his wife. The next day, the wife is found dead. When the police visit Patrascu, he says nothing, but Vali Dima (Julienne Postelnicu), the husband from the floor below, begins to infiltrate Patrascu’s life in small ways, wanting to repay his silence. How Patrascu deals with this is the poignant heart of a film of exact mood and intense, downplayed expression that keeps up the high standard of Romanian social realism as if it were a matter of course.

Chutzpah with delicacy: Nanni Moretti’s My Mother

My Mother came on with all the confidence you’d expect from as accomplished a director as Moretti – perhaps a little too much chutzpah for something that turned out to be so delicate. Film director Marguerita (the excellent Margherita Bhuy) is trying to battle through a difficult shoot while her mother is on her deathbed. Her main problem is her over-confident and under-prepared American lead actor Barry Huggins (John Turturro), while her brother Giovanni (Moretti) is being just a little too cool and sensible about their mother’s imminent demise, and Marguerita is plagued by the kind of memories that grieving brings on. With music cues that seem obvious at first but work every time (Arvo Part, Leonard Cohen) and a Turturro performance – including a hilarious goofball dance – that acts overacting out of the park, but counterpoints the theme of grieving nicely, My Mother is like the friend you only appreciate after they’ve gone home.

While we’re on what passed without comment, I’ll just say what a thrill it was to see Mad Max Fury Road on the big Debussy screen. This was certainly the blockbuster that has engaged me more than any other in the last half decade, a glorious genre romp of dazzling stunts, visceral images and terrific acting.

Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart

But let’s cut from the chase movie already on release to the film that’s grown on me most, Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart. This ambitious mini epic spans three periods in the lives that spin out from a classic love triangle. In 1999, Tao (Zhao Tao), a schoolteacher in Fenyang, is in love with cool coal miner Liang (Liang Jingdong), but being courted by oafish successful entrepreneur Jinsheng (Zhang Yi). When Jinsheng buys the mine where Liang works, and Tao accepts Jinsheng’s marriage proposal, Liang takes himself far away, to a more dangerous-looking mine in Handang. In 2014, Liang returns with a wife and daughter, in need of money to treat a fatal disease, while Tao, now divorced, is obliged to send her son back, after a brief visit, to his father, who’s about to emigrate to Australia.

There’s a third part set in Australia in 2025, which concerns the eventual fate of father and son, and it’s this latter part that originally gave me cause for concern, because there are implausibilities in the set-up and problems with the way the dialogue is spoken (a common tendency in this year’s Cannes). Nonetheless, through its sheer stylistic élan —especially its way of zoning out of transitions by playing with focus and smearing colours like spilled ink – and speedy capturings of transient moods, Mountains is a film I want to see again soon.

To turn now to the films seen in the last few days, let me commend, in passing, Kent Jones’s adroit and evocative documentary film of the iconic book of interviews Hitchcock/Truffaut, which turned out bizarrely to be one of the festival’s flashpoint screenings. (The Buñuel theatre filled up so fast that several people with top priority passes were locked out, a couple of whom reportedly took to screaming at Thierry Fremaux.)

An air of pointlessness: Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love

By contrast, I don’t have much praise for Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love, a two-hander in which Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu get to partner each other again as separated parents of a suicide son, drawn to Death Valley by a promise the son’s final letters force on them. It’s a harmless if slightly far-fetched afterlife conceit, and barrels forward on the momentum of monstrous Gerard and petite Isabelle making such an unlikely rematched couple. The acting is fine, especially from Huppert, but the vastness of the location is too flattened out to be more than a backdrop, and an air of pointlessness hangs over the whole production.

Deliberate idiocy? Gaspar Noé’s Love

And then there’s the perhaps deliberate idiocy of Gaspar Noé’s Love to consider. Shot and projected in 3D to little substantial effect, Love begins with its American protagonist, Murphy (Karl Glusman), waking up next to his young French wife Omi (Klara Kristin) and having his thoughts thought out loud for us to hear, “I feel so bad. Why did I take that shit?” etc. Murphy’s meant to be a bit of a dick – he feels trapped by the wife he inadvertently made pregnant, and indeed late on in this explicit paean to a lost bedmate he expounds on what it means to be a dick – but what it means for us viewers is spending too long in the company of one.

Murphy gets a phone message telling him his former girlfriend Electra (Aomi Muyock) has gone missing, and then spends the rest of the film recalling his affair with her, shown in explicit sexual detail with real intercourse (albeit mostly of a vanilla variety) clearly happening. Noe’s central idea is to portray the passion of a young couple in love, but what he succeeds in doing is conveying a set of cliches, some softcore sex and how boring watching that can get for non-participants. Rumour has it that the spoken-out-loud thoughts may now be removed, but nothing can save Love from the weak performances of the two leads.

Michel Franco’s Chronic, not the festival’s first study of grief, which won the Best Screenplay prize

The outstanding films of the final days, Dheepan and The Assassin, were both rewarded with top prizes, and I wrote about them here. The latterday film that best fits my slow-burn theme however was Michel Franco’s Chronic, which won the Best Screenplay award. Tim Roth plays an efficient, experienced agency nurse who cares for the dying, and the effort he’s put into understanding the techniques of that kind of work is obvious in every scene. It’s just unlucky for him that Vincent Lindon was in the better film, because they’re equally matched as far as the power of understatement is concerned. Like many another film in Cannes, its theme was the protracted nature of grief… but that’s another story, for another piece.