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Nov 20, 2008 4:56 PM CST |
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An oft-quoted remark making the rounds here at the Cannes Film Festival at the moment is this: singer Christine Aguilera asked in an interview, “Where is the Cannes Film Festival?” Where, indeed? It’s certainly nothing that resembles any logical activity. If beings from outer space observed the hordes who choose to sit in air conditioned darkness to watch images flitting on the screen, as they move from one theater to another, they might well be puzzled by the strangeness of the custom. The big hit here in Cannes, at least for Americans, is definitely the out-of-competition screening of the latest film by Woody Allen, Match Point. Allen’s first British film stars Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys Myers in a classic parody of a young man’s rise in society and the terrible consequences. The characters in Gus Van Sant’s new film, Last Days, are not interested in rising upward—this film is more about falling. It centers on the last days of a drugged-out singer at a beautiful huge country estate, surrounded by an entourage which is sucking him for money. Van Sant’s film is obviously based on the end of the life of singer Kurt Cobain. Van Sant continues in the style of his last film, Elephant, in constructing a kind of subjective meditation with camerawork that’s mostly handheld, and an introspective mood as Blake, the singer in the film, stumbles and mumbles his way through it. Illuminating it is not, and if your search is for some glimmer of insight into an artist's creative process, you are on the wrong path. The film has drawn widely divergent opinions most of them negative—only the intellectual French press immediately anointed it as a masterpiece. A hot ticket item here in Cannes, along with the premiere of the new Star Wars movie, was the Hong Kong action thriller, Election, by Johnny To. The election in this film focuses on the succession of a leader of the Triad organized crime organization in Hong Kong, but it is as contested as President George Bush’s win over Al Gore. The decisions here are made not in the courts but on the dark streets of Hong Kong. The weapons of choice are anything that bashes or slices. Bashing someone’s head in or running over him with a car or truck is a popular means of trying to get your way. Election is very talky and has a big cast of characters that makes it difficult to keep track, especially with names like Big Ice or Whistler. The battle for the chairman ends up as a contest between two candidates: Lok and Big D. Big D. will stop at nothing —bribing the voting Triad members and then killing them if they don’t vote his way. It’s a very noisy film with an irritatingly pulsating musical score. It also seems to raise the level of violence even for a Hong Kong action film where the action sequences are often more stylized and have a comic undertone. Here the violence is closer to that of American films: hit the character over the head and do it again and again and again. That’s why Be with Me, the new film from Singapore by Eric Khoo, is such a complete contrast. Khoo is the talented director of Me-Pok Transistor Man, who is making films in Singapore where film censorship is one of the world’s most restrictive. Be with Me consists of three, interlocking love stories played out in contemporary Singapore as the various characters search for love. The central story is that of an aging teacher, whose life story we learn from her autobiography which serves as the film’s narration. But the narration is not audible but expressed to us entirely by subtitles. The character is both deaf and blind. This obviously poses an enormous challenge. But the ultimately moving theme of the film establishes both her optimism and her resilience. She leads a productive life teaching at a school for the blind. She, herself, learned to speak—and to speak English—through the kindness of others by being sent to an American school. Ultimately she connects with a grieving widower whose talent to touch her—and others—comes through his skill as a cook. One of the wonders of Be with Me is how unsentimental it is&mdas;proving that a quiet realism still has the potential for more emotional impact than chopped up bloody body parts scattered over a rain-soaked highway in a so-called “action thriller”. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview from the Cannes Festival—which, dear Christine Aguilera, is in Cannes, France. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
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