(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in October 2009)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
This won the Palme
d’or at Cannes this year, and it’s a rare year when I don’t think much of
anyone disparaged the choice. Haneke is a stern taskmaster, sometimes giving
the sense that he intends his films as strong medicine for our fuzzyheaded
engagement with history, culture and the world. His best known film Funny Games is a violent drama about a
bourgeois family disrupted by thugs, designed both to masterfully push your
easy-response buttons and to shame you at your capitulation; recently he remade
his Austrian original for Hollywood, which might theoretically have led the
project a greater heart-of-the-beast resonance, but instead just seemed rather
forlorn. Sometimes, as in The Piano
Teacher perhaps, the films’ shudder value tends to overshadow all else, but
Cache and Code Unknown, among others, are superbly original, multi-faceted
examinations of our modern condition.
The White Ribbon is one of his most mesmerizing works, although at face value one of
the more conventional viewing experiences. In 1917, a small German village
starts to experience an unsettling series of strange accidents, tragedies and
brutalities; some of them explicable, others not. The community has few reference
points beyond its own boundaries: much of the commerce flows from the local
baron, whose feudal presence reigns over everything; the church goes
unchallenged; marriages are still negotiated through the parents. Beneath this
of course, much is hidden, but Haneke (who shoots the film in pristine,
awesomely controlled black and white) is extraordinarily subtle in what he
reveals. His narrator, the local schoolteacher, invites us at the start to read
the narrative as a contribution to understanding events that later happened in
the country, but for example there’s no anti-Semitism or explicit signposts
toward subsequent complicity. The film depicts both benevolence and malignity;
ultimately one can grab at Haneke’s masterfully arranged threads and ambiguities
and come away with a feeling of closure and compartmentalization, or else
conclude that almost nothing has been resolved or mitigated. In this sense, the
film brilliantly evokes the tangle of perspectives, from certainty (even if
hypocritical and manufactured) to despairing, that underlie war, or indeed any
national purpose.
The Informant! (Steven
Soderbergh)
Soderbergh is
surely one of the luckiest of all directors, approaching filmmaking as (in
Orson Welles’ phrase) the biggest train set a boy ever had; sufficiently
connected to get financing for movies representing little more than whims; a
fast enough worker that there’s always something new in the pipeline to
distract from recent under-achievements (already this year he’s released the
highly impressive, brave Che and the
lightly provocative The Girlfriend
Experience). If there’s a connecting theme to his work, it might be an
interest in networks of control and idealism, an admittedly big tent notion
accommodating tales of scrappy underdogs like Erin Brockovich, grim social analyses such as Traffic, or even the precision-engineered Ocean’s 11 narratives. You can fit The Informant! – which has already opened commercially (I actually
saw it after the festival) - in there too. In the early 90’s, a high-ranking
but (let’s say) flaky corporate executive spies on his colleagues for the FBI,
collecting evidence on price-fixing schemes, naively believing he’ll be lauded
as a crusading hero and his rise within the company will continue unchecked;
well, it doesn’t turn out that way.
Soderbergh
shoots the movie in a brisk off-the-cuff style, rather mysteriously plucking
some stylistic elements from the 70’s; it’s being marketed as a comedy,
although the extent to which it’s relatively light might also be a measure of
its toothlessness. Ultimately it’s a moderately interesting narrative and main
character, but a flat piece of work overall, not leaving you with much to
ponder afterwards. Maybe Soderbergh just makes it too easy to reach for this
analysis, but beyond settling on a few broad-brush strategies and gimmicks, you
wonder whether the material ever received his sufficient creative investment.
Bright Star (Jane Campion)
Campion’s first
film in six years continues her interest in feminine self-determination and
sexuality, but without any of the provocations of The Piano and In the Cut;
it’s an immensely surprising and moving work (also now playing commercially – I
saw this afterwards too). It chronicles the brief 19th century
romance of poet John Keats and seamstress Fanny Brawne, and even though the
film is Campion’s most delicate and ethereal, it might also ultimately be her
most intense (in the same kind of way that Scorsese claimed at the time,
perhaps a bit over-conceptually, that The
Age of Innocence was his most violent work). Between Keats’ physical
weakness, Brawne’s lack of worldliness, and the constraints of the times,
there’s barely a hint of sexuality; it’s as if they channeled all their
possibility into the creation of a shared sensibility, a heightened sensation
of the present moment (“as if I was dissolving,” as Keats puts it). Campion’s
finesse is dazzling, retaining objectivity while allowing full rein to the
expressive possibilities of butterflies, cats and English lawns.
At the start of
the narrative, Brawne is something of a fashion innovator, and more
economically successful than Keats, but this seems to dissipate as the film
goes on, suggesting the inherently regressive aspects of a great love. The
frequent discussion of financial constraints, and the character of Keats’ much
more grounded and rough-edged best friend dispel any sense that the film can
only idealize creativity (one of its most charming elements is Brawne’s failure
to grasp much of Keats’ work); yet in the end it’s as blissful a work of
commemoration as you can imagine. The entire cast is ideal, but Abbie Cornish
is particularly exquisite as Fanny.
And Overall…
Well, as always, I
can only comment on my own little piece of it, but I had a good Festival. My
test for that is pretty straightforward – it means I saw far more good movies
than bad, and the scheduling fell nicely into place (nowadays I don’t really
like to see more than a couple of movies a day, and I also like to confine it
mostly to the daytime, so you see I operate under self-imposed constraints).
Among my greatest pleasures: Les herbes
folles, Hadewijch, Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl, L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot, The White Ribbon and perhaps most of all Claire
Denis’ White Material. Enter the Void wins a pennant
for unduly occupying your mind once it’s over.
I saw no
celebrities, went to no parties or other events…just saw mostly foreign movies,
and made sure still to get my exercise and not to let my diet slip (that’s the
Dr. Jack prescription for healthy movie going folks). The higher-profile side
of it seemed like the usual mixed bag: George Clooney obviously nailed every
step, but Megan Fox’s
Jennifer’s Body was the emblematic
example of a movie with immense festival heat, but leaving barely a footprint
in the world thereafter. And where did all the buzz go during the last four
days anyway? Talk about excessive front-loading. And as I wrote earlier, the
Festival didn’t deserve all that nonsense about its Tel Aviv tribute. Still,
that all fell safely into the no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity quadrant. Overall,
seemed like a hit to me!
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