This year's Cannes line-up is heavy on grim drama, although there are occasional laughs as well - intentional and otherwise, writes Michael Dwyer.
If the festival has made people cry, laugh, think, jump, scream, and if it has disappointed, it will last forever." So said Gilles Jacob, president of the Cannes Film Festival, upon being made a Commander of the Legion d'Honneur earlier this week.
Indeed, this year's competition entries have delivered on all those counts, although humour was fairly thin on the ground - unless you include the unintentionally funny new Lars von Trier movie, of which more shortly.
The dominant theme this year has been guilt, and so it continued through the central section of the event, principally in movies dealing with father-son relationships.
The outstanding film of the festival so far, David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, is set in the homely Indiana town of Millbrook, where everyone knows everyone else, and a popular focal point is the diner run by Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), who lives in domestic bliss with his lawyer wife (Maria Bello) and their two children.
This being a Cronenberg movie, that idyllic peace is certain to be shattered. It's not long before a couple of menacing thugs try to rob the diner. Stall faces up to the threat and takes their lives, and reluctantly finds himself cited as a local hero, becoming the subject of national media attention. In a parallel storyline, his teenage son (Ashton Holmes) struggles to resist the daily taunts of school bullies, until he, too, responds with abrupt violence.
Intelligently setting up a series of moral arguments around the themes he has established, Cronenberg borrows from the template of many classic westerns, as a man struggles to put violence behind him, and this dilemma is explored with directness and relevance in the contemporary context of a country that allows such lax gun laws and clearly has not learned any lessons from its own history of violence.
The movie's use of violence is sporadic, short and sharp, but jolting every time. The cast, which also includes Ed Harris and William Hurt, is remarkably impressive in a thoughtfully worked out and morally complex picture that retains an urgent narrative power from beginning to end.
Graphic novels provided the source material for both Cronenberg's film and the ultra-violent Sin City, on which Robert Rodriguez shares the directing credit with Frank Miller, the author of its three loosely overlapping stories. The setting is a rainswept, nocturnal world shot in gleaming black-and-white with colour highlighting, as it details the fate awaiting three men in an amoral environment.
Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is a tenacious cop with a heart condition on one last stress-packed day on the job. Marv (Mickey Rourke on vintage form) is an ex-convict using the most extreme forms of interrogation while on a quest for vengeance. And Dwight (Clive Owen, splendidly deadpan spouting clichés) is a private eye caught up in the murder of the venal cop Benicio Del Toro.
The women are mostly underdressed prostitutes who seem to function as objects of sex and violence until their bloodthirsty leader (Rosario Dawson) gets out her Uzi. There are, too, a corrupt cardinal (Rutger Hauer), a gangster's son (Nick Stahl) transformed into the hideous Yellow Bastard and Murphy (Arie Verveen), an Irish thug extolling the pleasures of bombing over guns and warning: "Never give an Irishman a cause for revenge."
Highly stylised, Sin City is essentially an exercise in elaborate production design and often gruesome special effects. It ultimately cannot disguise the fundamentally laboured nature of its dark tales punctuated with numerous outbursts of extreme violence that shock and startle as intended.
Carlos Reygadas, the Mexican director of Japón, gets right down to shock tactics in the opening scene of Battle in Heaven, as a flabby, naked middle-aged man named Marcos impassively receives oral sex from an equally undressed young woman. Lest there be any doubt, Reygadas cuts to an intense close-up. Several explicit sex scenes follow, one involving Marcos and his obese wife, along with some gratuitous violence and peculiar scenes, as when two young men emerge from a car outside a house and urinate over the baggage in the boot.
In the pivotal plotline, Marcos and his wife have kidnapped a baby with a view to raising a ransom, but this strand is left seriously underdeveloped and as implausible as the rest of this rambling picture.
A variation on that theme is treated with far greater concern and credibility in another competition entry, L'Enfant, the best film to date from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the socially concerned Belgian brothers who made Rosetta and Le Fils. The focus is on a young couple: Sonia (Deborah Francois) returns from hospital with her new son to find her lover, Bruno (Jérémie Renier), has sublet her apartment. Bruno is feckless and irresponsible, and although fit, drug-free and literate, makes no attempt to find work, choosing instead to live off theft.
We know he is not going to be a caring father to his baby son when we learn he didn't bother visiting Sonia and the boy in hospital. When a fence tells Bruno that people will pay to adopt a child, we have every reason to fear the worst. Of all the father-son dramas at Cannes this year, this is by far the scariest and most chilling, and it is infused with a crucial dramatic tension that never slackens its grip.
Showing in a Cannes sidebar, The King features Gael Garcia Bernal as a young man seeking out the father (William Hurt) he never knew, whereas Jim Jarmusch's charming competition entry, Broken Flowers, begins as a middle-aged womaniser, Don Johnston (Bill Murray), receives a letter from a former lover, advising him that she had a son by him and that their offspring, now 19, may try to contact him.
The letter isn't signed, but, encouraged by his internet-addicted neighbour (Jeffrey Wright), Johnston embarks on a tour of the women in his life from 20 years earlier. In trying to discover his son, he discovers a great deal about himself. This deceptively light serious comedy, sprinkled with droll throwaway humour and bittersweet observations, catches these reunions in all their awkwardness and embarrassments.
Looking even more hangdog and impassive than he was in Lost in Translation, Murray barely flickers an eyelid for most of the movie and yet manages to hold every scene with apparently effortless aplomb. Jarmusch has lined up a superb troupe to play the women in his life - Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy (the materfamilias of Six Feet Under), Tilda Swinton and Julie Delpy.
Even the slight running gag whereby people confuse Murray's Don Johnston with the similarly named Miami Vice actor is more original than anything in Lars von Trier's trying Manderlay, the second in his USA trilogy. This follows the experiences of the resilient Grace character played by Nicole Kidman in Dogville and now by Bryce Dallas Howard. What hasn't changed is the cheapskate and resolutely anti-cinematic cop-out of shooting it all on a visually boring soundstage with minimal props.
It's 1933 and Grace and her gangster daddy (Willem Dafoe) travel south to Alabama where, to her horror, slavery is still practised 70 years after it was officially abolished. Grace gets this sorted right away, although it helps that the old slave mistress (Lauren Bacall) conveniently drops dead after a few minutes. Then, Grace, the preachy cipher for von Trier himself, gets down to teaching them black folk about democracy, and they prove to be mighty docile, grateful students.
The movie has some garbled points to make about American imperialism, but is altogether too absurd to take seriously for a minute, given that it is so risibly scripted, saddling John Hurt again with torrents of heavy-handed voiceover, and is spectacularly naïve. It is also so insultingly patronising to black people that I'll be astonished if one Cannes jury member, novelist Toni Morrison, allows it within a sniff of aprize at tomorrow night's awards ceremony.
