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Cannes 2018 Days 7, 8 & 9: A Fantastic Final Few Days

Cannes 2018 Days 7, 8 & 9: A Fantastic Final Few Days

The festival has finally come to an end, and my, has it been incredible. After enduring a first five-day stretch saturated with films that ranged from ‘eh, it’s okay I guess’ to ‘eh, it’s pretty good I guess’, we’ve been rewarded with a succession of fantastic, jaw-dropping cinematic showpieces. Perhaps the best compliment I can give them is that they were enough to prolong the wait ’til my inevitable Cannes burnout.

Here we have the divisive ( Lars von Trier and David Robert Mitchell say hi) and the universally acclaimed (as a half-Chinese myself, I’m so proud of how well East Asia has performed this festival), as well as a little film flying (or Millenium Falcon-ing) under the radar called Solo… here’s my last batch of writeups, for your reading pleasure.

The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier)

Cannes 2018 Days 7, 8 & 9: A Fantastic Final Few Days
The House That Jack Built (2018) – source: Zentropa-Christian Geisnaes

Cannes’ middle-aged enfant terrible is back with a knowingly self-indulgent serial killer drama that doubles as an elaborate, extraordinary self-study. It saw over a hundred walkouts during its Gala screening, and I can empathise with those who bailed: we see Matt Dillon’s eponymous Jack engage in all kinds of horror – emotional torment, body mutilation, you name it.

I, however, was riveted. There’s a point to the provocation, thinly-veiled and targeted directly at the viewer: The House That Jack Built is a confession piece, an explanation of its director’s thorny, perhaps reprehensible actions (his comments on Hitler during his last Cannes outing directly referenced) that takes the form of an apology and an alibi simultaneously. If you can stomach the varying degrees of torture, and invest in the self-obsession,  then there’s entertainment to be found in watching Von Trier contrive his way towards justification. You may not agree with him, but he crafts a damn good story for his argument’s basis.

Only Von Trier can allegorise the creative process through a sociopathic serial killer – it’s gratuitous, grisly, and completely apt. Once the rollicking five-or-so chapters (each chapter being a killing ‘chosen at random’) come to a close, the hellish proceedings become literal, which sees Jack (and in turn, Von Trier), face judgement. The use of cinemagraphs may draw parallels with Melancholia, but the sublime surrealism is something else altogether. It’s quite poignant, actually: a remarkable feat for a troubled man who indulges in troubling others.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard)

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) – source: Disney Studios Motion Pictures

There’s a whole galaxy there, but Ron Howard doesn’t seem to realise it. His Han Solo prequel is a pedestrian journey through a series of inconsequential set-pieces, where character development of its iconic protagonist is irritatingly stuck to the surface. We learn how he got his surname, how he got his blaster, how he befriended Chewbacca, etc, which is all well and good – but if you’re going to make a Solo prequel, you may as well justify its existence by giving us a Bildungsroman of sorts.

Instead, its Alden Ehrenreich (a superb actor, but you can feel him straining for likeness over homage) and co. flitting between a heist movie and a western, with little reason to invest in either. Solo is best when it operates under the guise of a romance, and there’s one swooning moment between Solo and Emilia Clarke’s Qi’ra (finally a great movie role for Clarke to flaunt her talent) that’s reminiscent of classic Bond, but this luvvy-duvvy strand is undernourished, suffocated under the weight of trivial plot diversions.

After the refreshing bravery of The Last Jedi, Disney has played the next space-sprawling entry in its saga safe. The vivid palette of stark red and black shades is lost, too, replaced by an ugly grey. And the less said about the incessant score, which often drowns out emotional heft in place of contrived dramaturgy, the better. But Solo’s biggest problem is that it ultimately lacks reason to exist; I don’t think a Han Solo prequel is a fundamentally flawed idea, but in a galaxy so full of potential, it feels all-too familiar.

Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell)

Under The Silver Lake (2017) – source: A24

David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to It Follows tries to do so much (and, for my money, probably succeeds), that cramming it into a 300-word thinkpiece feels like an impossible task. A shaggy-dog noir that has Andrew Garfield’s persistent anti-hero traversing the underbelly of LA to find a missing girl, there’s an insurmountable number of ways to read into its dense narrative – and perhaps that process of reading into it is exactly the point.

Beginning as a direct homage to The Long Goodbye (complete with a hippie neighbour in the nude), Under the Silver Lake gradually becomes an entirely new beast. Garfield uncovers codes and secret messages, hidden in video games or albums or underneath Isaac Newton’s head. It’s inscrutable, extreme absurdism taken absolutely seriously. The resolution, deliberately anti-climactic, hardly matters – it’s the journey that’s important, and as Garfield struggles to read into what it all means, the audience is left doing likewise.

That’s not mentioning a doggie murderer on the loose, a knife-wielding seductress or a composer that reveals he’s written all the lyrics to pop classics. The latter plot point, accompanied by the Hollywood sign looming large in the frame, and several actors lamenting that they ‘did one indie film and hardly made a penny’ may have an audience embracing a reading of Mitchell’s own struggles as an independent director and the populism that runs rife; a sort-of repurposing of Inherent Vice’s concerns with capitalism for a modern Hollywood climate. I’m still undecided, however, whether the rampant objectification of women is a critique of the climate or simply just giving in to it.

But, importantly, the dangling plot threads and problematic questions Under the Silver Lake poses have me salivating for a second stab at interpreting it. Amid the thick fog of irreverent plot details lies a pathetic and selfish man at its centre – his story is tragic, but hardly undeserved, and the closing images are telling. It’s a lot to process – I think it may be a modern masterpiece? Who knows. The parrot has the answers, but good luck making out what it’s trying to say.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018) – source: Bai Linghai

The best film of Cannes goes to Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a sleepy dreamscape that features an extraordinary second-half turn. Initially moving like molasses, Gan focuses on framing, lurid colour schemes and a terrific, minimalist, guitar-strumming score to maintain interest. We follow Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue), an ex-gang member, I think, who visits his hometown in search of a woman he briefly met and had fallen in love with.

Images flit in non-linear, poetic fashion; a rhapsodic collage of memory that proves its title isn’t the only thing it shares with Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes. These details, seemingly inconsequential, feed into a jaw-dropping second-half sequence that arises when our protagonist wakes up in an empty cinema and dons his 3D glasses. The audience follows suit.

What comes next is a 3D long-take, lasting an hour, that may be the greatest on-screen representation of what dreams feel like. It’s a melancholic odyssey through one man’s latent guilt and missed opportunities, which sees him bid farewell to his mother all over again, and fall in love with a woman who’s suspiciously similar to the one he’s looking for. This segment takes place in winter solstice, and the night seems frozen in time, but for Luo, it’s tragically moving too quickly. It’s an exquisite feat of filmmaking that makes the case for 3D as more than a passing fad; an ambitious, richly textured and deeply poignant journey into the recesses of a discontented man.

Burning (Lee Chang-dong)

Burning (2018) – source: Pinehousefilm

An hour into the unassuming first act of Lee Chang-dong’s terrific Burning, I had no idea where it was going. It begins sedately, with extreme introvert Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in) taken by the romantic advances of Haemi (Jun Jong-seo), a childhood acquaintance. She leaves Jongsu to look after her cat, only to return from holiday with another man: the richer, more confident, and placidly threatening Ben (Steven Yeun) in tow. What follows is a startling succession of events that rips genre boundaries in two – a phenomenal exercise in sustaining tension that culminates with a gratifying and retrospectively inevitable payoff.

Class politics are at play here; at one point, Jongsu likens Ben to ‘Gatsby’ – though Ben is certainly no tragic rags-to-riches protagonist. But it feels under-developed, or at least, window-dressing to spruce up an intense narrative. No matter: there’s more thematic morsels on offer.  Chang-dong limits information and lets his audience do the work – burning greenhouses take on a symbolic meaning, and the infatuations of the young and rich are laid bare. He also, somehow, manages to find room to craft some of the most extraordinarily tense car chases put to screen; the sheer unpredictability of Burning’s narrative is thrilling to watch unfold.

And at the centre of everything are three incredible performances: Yoo Ah-in is slack-jawed and convincingly passive, a witness to mayhem whose subtle arc sees him develop agency towards a shocking finale. Jun Jong-seo is riveting, an adorable faux-pixie dream girl whose dusk-silhouetted dance heralds a highlight of the festival. And Yeun, making the move back to Korean shores from The Walking Dead, is transfixing, a sadistic, composed figure wielding a friendly facade. There’s surely more to unpick here on second viewing: Chang-dong has spun a philosophical, slow-burn yarn that remains constantly gripping through its entire 148-minute runtime.

Capernaum (Nadine Labaki)

Capernaum (2018) – source: Fares Sokhn

The festival ends as it began, really: with a well-intentioned and considerably flawed examination of a harsh current-affairs climate. Here it takes place in Lebanon, where a young boy struggles to survive as he traverses the urban landscape with an extraordinarily-performed baby (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole). Labaki’s intent to showcase the realism of Lebanon’s poverty is undermined instantly, however, by a farcical and ultimately silly framing device: the boy, Zain (Zain Al Rafeea), is suing his parents for ‘giving him life’.

Zain’s retelling of his struggles – especially during a middle stretch where he abandons his family and babysits for an illegal immigrant – are largely fascinating, but urgency is hampered whenever returning to this ridiculous court-based conceit. It doesn’t help that Labaki piles on the sentimentality, seemingly unaware that the inherently harrowing premise is reason enough to care. In fact, while watching I began wondering whether Capernaum was a self-reflexive study on the idea of sentimentality – nope, it succumbs to it instead.

The third act is perhaps the worst offender, destroying any nuance Capernaum teases, and doing away with some potentially heart-rendering material. At one point, Zain’s mother visits him to deliver the ‘good news’ that she’s pregnant – it’s torturous stuff in an over-populated, poverty-stricken world, but its not left to settle; two-minutes later, Zain is spoon-feeding the audience on exactly why welcoming another child into this world is a bad idea. It epitomises Labaki’s dramatic mishandling of her material, which is more a disappointment than an irreversible condemnation – the feat she pulls in directing her actors is phenomenal. It’s just a shame that they’re stuck in a saccharine poverty-porno. The I, Daniel Blake of the festival, then.

Overview And Awards

It’s been French, fun, frustrating, farcical and freally fgood: there’s no place like Cannes, and the promise of hectic charm, bloated programming, limited sleep and queues longer than the latest Nuri Bilge Ceylan certainly didn’t disappoint. It’s been politically charged – moreso than usual – with a stunning 82-women march on the red carpet surely about to bleed into Palme d’Or decision making.

I’ll be giving next year a spin, but for now, I’ll leave you with my Cannes award picks – not the films I predict to win, but the films that deserve to.

Palme d’Or: Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

Grand Prix: Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell)

Jury Prize: Burning (Lee Chang-dong)

Best Actress: Zhao Tao (Ash is Purest White)

Best Actor: Yoo Ah-in (Burning)

Best Director: Jean-Luc Godard (The Image Book)

Best Screenplay: Burning (Lee Chang-dong)

Un Certain RegardLong Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)

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