The Notebook is covering Cannes with an on-going correspondence between critic Leonardo Goi and editor Daniel Kasman.

Lux Æterna

Dear Leo,

I’m quite a bit more ambivalent about Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood than you. Its violent climactic revision of 1969 Hollywood history seems like a much thinner, cheaper, and as you (positively) indicate, more nostalgic version of the ballsy visions of finishing off Nazi Germany and slavery in Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. I’m still thinking my way through this culmination, and especially how as a concept I’m quite suspicious, yet I couldn’t help but find the ending (of a Tarantino movie!) very touching.

Last minute additions to the Cannes lineup are de rigueur at this festival, which not only announces films finished in the nick of time (this year, the Tarantino and Kechiche, last year Ayka, and the year before Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here), but also add the spice of unpredictability to the final days before the festival. Among this year’s late entries was the announcement that Gaspar Noé had a new film, Lux Æterna—but of the odd length of 50 minutes and shown at midnight. It proved a welcome dose of mad flourish and unexpectedly found itself in dialog with two other films of experiential spirituality, Jeanne and A Hidden Life. That it was commissioned by Saint Laurent explains a lot (Luca Guadagnino is at the Directors’ Fortnight for similar reasons, with a 35-minute film commissioned by Valentino), but never gets in the way of Noé’s three-part story of a chaotic film shoot that, as it falls apart, achieves the sublime. In fact, the length is to the film’s benefit, for Lux Æterna’s middle section, which follows multiple characters around the harried set of a witch-themed film directed by Béatrice Dalle and starring Charlotte Gainsbourg (both playing themselves), is as purposely hellish and aggravating to watch as much of Noé’s last film, Climax. Split screens, multiple camera views of the same action, and maze-like wandering around the set dynamize this behind-the-scenes view but hardly add much new: Portraying a film set as bitchy, busy, a logistical muddle, and full of doubt, anger, opportunists, sycophants, and double-crossing got stale several decades ago. However, it’s the book-ends to this centerpiece that provide the film’s content (first) and powerhouse climax (finale). Lux Æterna’s prologue quotes Dreyer on making movies into art—later quotes by Godard, Fassbinder, and Buñuel punctuate throughout with self-reflexively portentous title cards—and we see scene of the old woman being dropped into the flames in Day of Wrath, followed by a comment about the actress suffering on set before her character is killed. This sets the stage for a modern day evocation of witchcraft, female suffering and martyrdom, and since the film forgoes an epilepsy warning with a quote from Dostoevsky about the ecstasy experienced before a fit, we can anticipate a full-body evocation.

At the film’s opening, Dalle and Gainsborough recline on leather chairs on the film set, idly chatting about acting, playing witches, sleazy producers, rarely dating good men, and awkward sex scenes. This is shown in simultaneous split-screen from different angles isolating each actress, a simple but effective evocation of simultaneity and commiseration hand-in-hand with isolation. Dalle does most of the talking and sets the stage for topics of bodily sacrifice, humiliation, and the sexy and classy (her words) on-screen death of being burnt at the stake. This becomes relevant as the day’s shoot finally gets underway filming what clearly looks like a terrible idea for a scene—or is it an ad shoot for Saint Laurent?—of three skinny models in skimpy, tacky cocktail dresses tied to stakes in front of a giant LED screen showing smoldering flames. But as Gainsbourg takes her place at the stake, and just as frustration sets in at all the backstage shenanigans, the grating, forced hysteria of the turmoil of making a film, Noe cuts all the bullshit. And cuts the lights too—and then cues the strobe lights. The climactic finale, eye-bleeding and eardrum bursting, is a multi-color, multi-screen stroboscopic incineration of the film shoot (which shuts down amid the cacophony), of Dalle (who writhes in ecstatic turmoil), and above all of Gainsbourgh on the stake, following in the path of Falconetti, Bergman, and Florence Carrez.

The immolation makes a brazen but by no means irresponsible conclusion: That actresses go through hell to create art, that artists surviving in the inferno of commercial imperatives are suffering saints, that misogyny lives on in new forms, and that those who give their body and soul to the light of the silver screen deserve to be honored if not worshipped for their sacrifice for us. Amen. The film ends with a quote from Buñuel, “thank god I’m an atheist,” which one might take as a cynical inclusion by Noé except that what is left implicit is that while great surrealist may not believe in God, he does believe in the cinema.

Parasite

Lux Æterna is a film of bravura: the boldness of its conception, and the length it will go to achieve it in aggressive vulgarity. Parasite, by contrast, is a film of virtuosity: Bong Joon-ho directs each scene, sequence, and the film itself with a precision, dexterity, and effectiveness as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. It is not. I wrote in my festival introduction lamenting where a filmmaker like John Carpenter could be found at Cannes in this day and age, and lo and behold, Bong has not just raised his hand but leapt up eager to prove himself one of the master storytellers of popular cinema. Parasite is thrilling in its deft ingenuity and razor sharp in its critique, the perfect buffer in Cannes’ competition against more strained examples of art and prestige cinema. 

As if created as a response to two films last year, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, with its stark contrast between the new rich and poor in South Korea, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, with its downtrodden family willing to do bad things to survive a life in the shadow of society, Parasite funnels the outrage of class disparity into a swift, blackly comic story of a poor family ingratiating and integrating itself into the lives of their rich doubles by any means necessary. Introduced living in a half-basement outside which men constantly vomit and piss, the florid parents of the family (Song Kang-ho, a long-time Bong lead, and Chang Hyae-jin) are unemployed and their wily children (Choi Woo-shik and Park So-dam) haven’t completed college. A chance provided by a friend moving abroad gives the son an opportunity to bluff his way into tutoring the daughter of an elite family. This family is a mirror for their own—svelte father (Lee Sun-kyun, from Hong Sang-soo’s Oki’s Movie and Our Sunhi), elegant helicopter mother (Cho Yo-jeong), teenage daughter (Jung Ziso), and young son (Jung Hyeon-jun)—and lives in an architectural marvel of a house, all open floor plan, top to bottom windows, wood floors, glossy everything, and a castle-like wall surrounding the garden. From his new position, the son contrives to get his sister hired as an art tutor for the family’s youngest, and it’s only a matter of time before the household’s existing staff is comically but ruthlessly replaced by their parents. But if they can so easily take over the positions of others—the film here echoing Werner Herzog’s Family Romance LLC. in people's reliance on roleplaying in everyday life—this also means their newly achieved status at the top of the bottom is just as perilous: As they are now, others were before, and indeed others may be after as well. 

Like Carpenter, Brian De Palma, and to a degree, Steven Spielberg, Bong Joon-ho is a filmmaker who uses storyboards to calibrate his storytelling to not for the sake of pretty pictures and antiseptic predetermination, but rather to orchestrate action and suspense for maximum speed, rhythm, and impact. His frames are alive with activity and spatial detail, not just fleshing out the mise en scène of his world, but teasing and elucidating space to move us from action to action, idea to idea, frequently playing with what we know or don’t know such that the film, however grim in behavior, is constantly surprising and comic. In particular, the film has a field day with the modernist mansion in which much of the story hijinks occur, a playground of spaces to navigate in different ways: run, hide, fight, play, inside, outside, upstairs, down, the basement and the depths, much with a view of the pristine garden.

Parasite’s centering on this house, a world unto itself, is reminiscent of Snowpiercer's allegorical train, but this new film avoids the unevenness that plagued that film and Bong's even more ambitious follow-up, Okja. The more constrained setting and concept transforms Parasite into a kind of Gothic farce, updating a drafty chateau or creaky Victorian mansion to the pinnacle of contemporary Korean prosperity, and haunting it from within by invaders masquerading as servants. Or are they simply servants? “This is very metaphorical,” the tutor wryly remarks at more than one point. He alone idly daydreams of marrying his rich student and officially joining her family, but financial gain does not seem his family’s plan: They are simply and ruthlessly focused on achieving and maintaining their place in the mansion. Thus the film isn’t about class mobility but rather about fighting—in this film, first with brazen callousness and lack of empathy, and eventually violently and bloodily—to be top servant. To go beyond class barriers is also beyond the range of most imaginations. This is a brutally cynical view, and you shouldn’t expect psychological insight or even judgment for any character, rich or poor, for Parasite is a vivid work of behaviorist cinema, seeing what people do under specific circumstances in a specific environment. Not unlike Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You, it portrays the inexorability of a system where those at the bottom thrash in death throes to maintain their position there. As its ghastly flourishes mount to Grand Guignol heights, the cut-throat desperation of our poor heroes gets more and more dissonant and horrific. But Bong’s filmmaking keeps firing on all cylinders, and from top to bottom Parasite gleefully and with dextrous cleverness balances on the line between the horrid and hilarious.

Though we still have several more premieres to go, I have little doubt, Leo, that Parasite is the best film in the Cannes Film Festival's main competition.

Warmly,

Danny

from The Daily Notebook http://bit.ly/2JylVh3

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NEWS

The late Machiko Kyo in Cannes, c. 1960.

• Machiko Kyo, the star of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, and Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell, has passed away at the age of 95. 

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• The 2nd trailer for Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, which expands further upon the film's storytelling ambitions, comic tone, and inspired casting.

• Janus Films has released the trailer for its new restoration of Paris is Burning, Jennie Livingston's seminal 1990 documentary on New York City drag ball culture.

 

• Ahead of its June 21 release, the final trailer for Toy Story 4 promises road trip adventures and, as per usual, some existential mayhem regarding what it means to be a child's toy.

• Exclusive clips by way of Cannes, each depicting intimate encounters. Abel Ferrara's Tommaso follows an American artist and his young wife and daughter in Rome; Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life tells the story of an Austrian soldier who refuses to fight for Nazi Germany. Read editor Daniel Kasman's review of A Hidden Life here.

RECOMMENDED READING

French director Mati Diop at her Cannes photo call.

• French filmmaker Mati Diop is the first black woman filmmaker to compete at Cannes with her debut feature Atlantic. In an interview with the New York Times, Diop details the genesis of her Senegal-set project, which reckons with neocolonialism and migration as inspired by Penelope, the wife of Odysseus.
• Indiewire has compiled a survey of the cinematographers for the 54 feature films premiering at Cannes detailing the cameras and lenses they chose for their films and why.
• Sheila O'Malley examines the relationship between Sigourney Weaver's Ripley and Michael Biehn's Corporal Hicks in James Cameron's Aliens, which exists among "the continuum of tough guys and tough dames, who come together against the societal odds, to meet on equal terms."

The set of Rumble Fish (1983).

• American Cinematographer has revived an integral article from their archives: director of photography Stephen H. Burum, on the verge of shooting Brian De Palma's Body Double, reflects on the many aesthetic ambitions undertaken while shooting Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish.
• Over at Vulture Anjelica Jade boldly argues for Star Trek: Deep Space 9's place in the black TV and science fiction canon, and more largely, the mainstream inclusivity of the African-American experience.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

Joji Koyama & Tujiko Noriko's Kuro.

• The dreamy soundtrack for Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko's Kuro, which we previously showed on MUBI in summer of 2018, is now available on various streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music.
• Ahead of a rare screening of the original Cannes premiered cut of Southland Tales, director Richard Kelly discusses his misunderstood apocalyptic epic and its differences between the films two versions.

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

• The posthumous release of Raúl Ruiz’s The Wandering Soap Opera, made in a student workshop, reveals Ruiz's involvement in teaching and its enablement of a freer creative process.
• In an interview with Beatrice Loayza, Joanna Hogg discusses her latest The Souvenir, exclusive spaces, and the influence of stratification on human behavior.
• Our Cannes coverage carries on with the latest from Leonardo Goi, who reviews Quentin Tarantino's Hollywood elegy Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää's Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, which examines grief through the prism of BDSM.

EXTRAS

• The American iconoclast John Cassavetes shares his truth.

john cassavetes gloriously ranting about the youth, cultural tastemakers & how he really is the best is a BIG mood. pic.twitter.com/ivNMEh9X7N

— momtaza mehri (@RuffneckRefugee) May 14, 2019

 

from The Daily Notebook http://bit.ly/2QfICXP

The Notebook is covering Cannes with an on-going correspondence between critic Leonardo Goi and editor Daniel Kasman.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

Dear Danny,

In an interview with Esquire ahead of the world premiere of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino said something I kept going back to all throughout his latest feature and Palme d’Or contender. “I think of it like my memory piece. Alfonso [Cuarón] had Roma and Mexico City, 1970. I had L. A. and 1969. This is me. (…) And this is my love letter to L.A.”

Yesterday, May 21, Cannes woke up to Tarantino’s day. I’d been told there would be days like this, days when the buzz around the Palais du Cinema felt stronger, and the press room would empty out earlier than usual, with critics and festival-goers queuing and fighting for a spot in what was trumpeted as the film of the festival—at least as far as the pre-screening hype went. As I fought for one myself, a whopping three hours ahead of schedule, I tried to make sense of Tarantino’s words. And as I left the Debussy theater a little over two and a half hours after I miraculously made my way into it, the analogy with Cuarón’s Golden Lion winner, however far-fetched it may have seemed initially, sounded a lot more plausible.

Once Upon a Time rests on what is very possibly Quentin Tarantino’s most audacious narrative scaffolding since Pulp Fiction. Nestled inside it as a whole array of metafictional references, cinematic nods, and ellipses. It’s a film that unfurls as a movie within a movie, seesawing between archive and fiction. But it is also—and here’s why the reference to Cuarón’s black-and-white elegy to his own hometown feels so apt—the kind of film made by someone who’s so selflessly in love with a specific time and place that he conjures up a redemption song that’s at once historically faithful to its mood and vibe, and endearingly revisionist.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Hollywood actor Rick Dalton, and Brad Pitt his stunt double, Cliff Booth. Once a household name for his roles in the black-and-white NBC western series Bounty Law and a handful of other period pieces (one where an eye-patched DiCaprio torches Nazis with a flamethrower hearkening back to the revenge spree of Inglourious Basterds), the actor decides to break away from TV altogether in hopes of landing more respectable roles in auteur cinema. And now pays the price for his hubris. Much like Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thomson in Birdman, the ghost of past roles follows Dalton like a straight-jacket. Once a western actor, always a western actor; worse, once a villain in a western, always a loser. “Who’s going to kick the shit out of you next time?” sarcastically croaks a bespectacled Al Pacino, pitching for the job as Rick’s agent, eager to smash this potential client’s delusions of grandeur and divert him back to his natural habitat—U.S.-set westerns, or their Italian, spaghetti rendition.

There’s nothing short of wrenching in the way DiCaprio lets his stuttering, insecure Dalton fight against an industry that keeps relegating him to its margins, and nothing short of endearing in the bromance with his stunt-cum-confidante-cum-driver-cum-best (and possibly only) friend, Pitt’s Cliff. “You’re Rick-Fuckin’-Dalton,” Pitt shouts at DiCaprio as he watches the fallen star hobble around studios, a smoker’s cough and a lingering hangover pleating his body to the ground. Curiously, Pitt is a has-been in his own right. However much he likes to claim he still “carries [Dalton’s] load,” he hasn’t worked as stuntman in a long while, courtesy of a delirious, on-set fistfight with none other than Bruce Lee (one in a long series of referential confrontations Once Upon a Time is peppered with). More a factotum aide than a stunt double, Cliff happily helps Rick with all sorts of chores, parkour-ing up and down his hillside Hollywood house and cruising through L.A. aboard his boss’s car. 

But this is not so much a work relationship as a true, greater-than-life friendship. The pair may not refer to it as such until a poignant finale, but you do believe DiCaprio’s smile when he tells Pitt to stay over for some pizza and TV together, the chemistry enveloping the two in a male friendship for the ages, surpassing in banter and masculine affection even the best of Pulp Fiction’s John Travolta-Samuel L. Jackson, and Django Unchained’s Christoph Waltz-Jamie Foxx.

Opposite Rick’s home stands the mansion of the hottest new name in town, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), and his wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), here hobnobbing with the Hollywood crème in a restless spiral of parties à la Great Gatsby. And indeed, there’s something frustratingly spell-binding about Rick’s next-door neighbors, like living opposite Xanadu and being forced to sit and watch from your own living room as a platoon of stars and guests enter a world that will remain forever shut to uninvited and unworthy guests.

And opposite the glitzy world of Hollywood studios and hillside villas is the movable universe of the hippie girls hitchhiking the streets of 1969 Los Angeles. It’s an army of young women with perfectly chiseled faces and arms of sinew; in Tarantino’s reverie, even when they happily dig into a pile of waste to scavenge for food, they retain the mesmeric vibe of ethereal muses, more like models plucked out of some Benetton spring collection than the deranged and stomach-churning hippies that made Joaquin Phoenix’s scream in horror in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (a movie which, both in content and tone, would make for an interesting double bill here).

TV and silver screens sprout everywhere. There’s the drive-in theater opposite Pitt’s caravan, the smaller screens offering flashes of DiCaprio’s roles, and the cinema Robbie’s Tate sits to re-watch her performance in the last installment of the Matt Helm saga, Phil Karlson’s 1968 Wrecking Crew. For this is a film by a movie-lover and about movie-lovers, people who, like Rick, may be succumbing to a cannibalistic industry, but are still unmistakably in awe of the medium. Even Charles Manson’s hippies at the sinister Spahn Ranch flock to the commune’s only TV to marvel at cop shows. And while there are moments DiCaprio’s wide-eyed enthusiasm at his younger, celluloid-crystallized self feels like a distant echo of Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, there is also a sense of child-like wonder to these moments, channeled most expressively by Robbie’s Tate. Much of the discourse around Once Upon a Time will likely zero in on the outstanding Pitt-DiCaprio duo, but Robbie truly does grace each scene she’s in with effortless bravado, her Tate smiling at her image on the silver screen with an contagious, engrossing blend of innocence and stupor.

By the time Once Upon a Time enters its last hour and an ultra-violent, bonkers last act, Tarantino has conjured up a nostalgic elegy that swells the screen into a glorious, perpetual late summer evening. It billows with the tunes of "California Dreamin’" and "Mrs. Robinson," resuscitates in the impeccable production design by Barbara Ling, thrums to the sounds of cars roaming the streets of Hollywood, the chatter and chaffing of alcohol-propelled dinner table conversations. A six months' ellipsis skyrockets Rick and Cliff on their way home from a work stint in Italy. The Italian spaghetti western Rick starred in, of dubious quality and even more dubious titles (Kill Me Quick Gringo, Said the Gringo) have earned the actor a wife and some cash to spend. But a woman means the cash will run faster, he tells Cliff. It’s the end of the ride. And as the two brace for a last bender together, a triumph of wry comedy and gore violence, Once Upon a Time hits a finale of outrageous, dizzying, maddening beauty. It's a stark contrast from the somewhat melancholic and lighthearted mood of the previous segments, but in the end, it speaks the same heartwarming tone Tarantino's love letter had kicked off with. A bittersweet finale for what is possibly the director's most nostalgic and heartfelt work to date.

Dogs Don't Wear Pants

May 21 may well have been Tarantino’s day, but it was a glorious one throughout. Early in the morning, in the bounty that is the Directors’ Fortnight, I caught up with another festival charmer, Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää's Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, an engrossing and darkly comic rumination on mourning dwelling into a man’s grief through the least likely —and in hindsight, best-suited—prism possible: BDSM.

The man in question is the taciturn, introvert heart surgeon Juha (Pekka Strang). Having lost his wife in a drowning accident some years prior, and left alone to raise their only daughter, now a teenager, the forty-something doesn’t seem as much interested in processing and overcoming the loss as he is in dwelling in his late wife’s memory with a near morbid intensity. Valkeapää and Juhana Lumme’s script crafts Juha as a wonderful exercise in contrasts: the clinical and borderline OCD precision with which the doctor keeps house and clothes impeccably tidy juxtaposed to his private persona, an emotionally paralyzed man indulging in desperate masturbation sessions, head wrapped in the late wife’s shirts, her perfume sprayed on his skin.

It’s not a question of healing from pain, but of stretching it as wide as can go. For the memories and flashbacks Juha must relive to ensure her memory endures only accentuate his loneliness. To remember, in this sense, is to stir up pain, in a sadistic and achingly nostalgic process Juha simply cannot escape from. And this is the crucial point upon which Valkeapää’s feature stands. For when a visit to a local tattoo studio where Juha’s daughter is to get her mouth pierced leads him to bump into a dominatrix in the middle of a session, Mona (Krista Kosonen), the encounter—and the pain the young woman unflinchingly inflicts upon him—opens up a whole new world. Chocked and grasping for air, much like his own wife must have done as she plunged deeper into water, Juha is magically restituted to the lake she disappeared into, Pietari Peltola’s cinematography crafting underwater reveries where husband and wife are reunited in engrossing underwater embraces, and the abyss around them acquires the consistency of something warm and whimsical, an amniotic liquid.

BDSM, and the pain it promises, beckons Juha into a transient state of bliss, a secret if flickering peaceful world no other self-destructive practice could grant him access to. It’s an epiphany that turns his life upside down. Having become one of Mona’s regulars, the man submits himself to all sorts of dom-sub role-playing, until the long-awaited moment the girl chains his naked, humiliated body to a chair, sits on his lap, and proceeds to suffocate him with a plastic bag.

There is nothing particularly sexual about these encounters. Valkeapää steers well clear of the romanticized, adulterated, and downright laughable depiction of the BDSM space trumpeted by the likes of the Fifty Shades franchise. Pain, not sex, is what’s at stake here. And should this not be clear enough by the feverish and imploring stare Juha darts at Mona as he begs her to hurt him in every single way possible, Dogs features a few stomach-churning moments in which said torture plays out in full, with a surgical attention to detail. In those moments, I am not ashamed to confess I was happy to focus on my notes and take my eyes off the screen.

And yet Dogs titillates as an unmistakably, if darkly, piece of comedy. There is something viciously captivating in watching Juha juxtapose his reserved, aloof public self to the clumsy and wide-eyed addict he turns under Mona’s merciless glare—and Strang’s ability to alternate an ice-cool swagger to outbursts of anger and desperation dons Dogs a certain electricity, the feeling of things stretched out an inch before breaking point. The BDSM routines too intersperse gravitas with chuckles, offering some respite in between all the pain, and gracing Mona’s routines with a goofy aura.

But even when Dogs hits its most lighthearted moments, it remains a story of mourning, of a man’s inability to picture a life beyond his wife’s passing. And the lesson it parcels out amid the leather-black humor and wrenching longing is that there is no right or wrong way to grieve. As Mona and Juha meet again for a final dance, an ending of liberating and cathartic beauty, Strang twirling in an outburst of happiness, I found myself entranced by their mesmeric chemistry.

Here’s hoping that my next few days here will prove to be just as riveting.

Leo

from The Daily Notebook http://bit.ly/30KGqMW

The Notebook is covering Cannes with an on-going correspondence between critic Leonardo Goi and editor Daniel Kasman.

Family Romance, LLC.

Dear Leo,

Believe it or not, the freshest film to premiere thus far at Cannes is by a 76-year-old. Werner Herzog’s prodigious output over the last decade, especially in the documentary field, may have produced a weariness or skepticism to new films from the New German Cinema master, but his second film to premiere in 2019, Family Romance, LLC., is something special indeed. Self-financed and shot by Herzog himself on location in Japan, it has the raw immediacy of gonzo adventure undertaken with minimal planning but maximum enthusiasm. Grabbing hold of a tantalizingly strange Japanese phenomenon brought to wider attention by a 2018 New Yorker article, Herzog seems to have bypassed or preempted the inevitable Hollywood adaptation of this story and flown directly to Japan to create something spontaneously and freely, thereby capturing it sublime oddity and insight. 

The subject at hand is the titular company which effectively rents actors to stand in for any person the client desires.  The film opens with a business man loitering in a park, eyeing passersby, and as the camera finds the same adolescent girl pacing back and forth before him, suspicion mounts. The man accosts the girl, asking if she is Mahiro, and declaring that he is her long-lost father who abandoned her in as a child. Shy but willing, she and he proceed on a lurching and awkward date in the park, discussing personal detail and snapping selfies amid cherry blossoms. Only in the subsequent scene do we learn that the man, Yuichi Ishii, runs the company profiled by the New Yorker, Family Romance, and is an actor hired by Mahiro's mother to stand in for her father. Whether the girl knows this is a ruse or simply therapy is not clear.

Also not clear—and herein lies the film’s tremendous strangeness—is what the filmmaker’s relationship is to what is before the camera. The father-daughter rendezvous—several of which form the core of the film—looks like it has been caught on the fly, yet it is not shot like a documentary but rather a vérité fiction, with no acknowledgment from those on-camera that they’re being filmed and many cuts and angle changes that suggests subtly dramatic staging. This ambiguity gets all the weirder and more complicated as we are privy to other clients of Ishii and his firm: they stand in for a bride’s alcoholic father, Ishii replaces a guilty railway employee in a chewing-out by his boss; and his team re-enact a woman’s surprise lottery win. Many of these clients become visibly moved over Ishii’s enactments, startlingly moments that lead one to think that what we’re seeing is in fact documentary footage of the man doing his job as an emotional, dramatic surrogate. But Herzog’s staging of these scenes, the camera placement and self-effacement of the production (there are no documentary signpost like explanative title cards or voiceovers), suggest something even more profound: the possibility we are watching people re-enact re-enactments. For Ishii that would imply, dizzyingly, he is acting for Herzog as himself acting as whomever for his client. For his clients, this means re-experiencing an essential act of substitution in their lives but with the additional, meta knowledge that not only is this not real, it is a faked version of the not real.

Obviously, the mind boggles. Herzog shoots all this (himself!) with the utmost rawness of aesthetics: consumer video, location shooting, drone shots, and ruthless cutting, making the determination of this line between fiction and documentary as blurry as it can be. This sensation of a spur-of-the-moment production makes what is before the camera feel all the more peculiar; the ungainly texture evokes an awkward, confrontative realness even if this may also be part of the film’s playful, coy presentation. Just about every ritual we see before the camera, as well as the not-infrequent emotional responses of the participants, are filmed in a manner that renders it uncanny, off-kilter, and a touch surreal.  The film also includes more quintessentially Herzogian flourishes like an encounter in the park with a troupe of pantomiming swordfighters reminiscent of Blow-Up’s mimed tennis game, the appearance of a fortune-telling robot dragon vending machine, a visit by Ishii to a funeral home that lets still-living clients pretend to be dead, and a research trip by Ishii to a hotel staffed by cyborgs that feature robotic fish in its aquarium. “It’s impossible to know what’s in their minds,” the hotel manager says of his mechanical staff. The same is no doubt also true of both the human surrogates and those who need them.

Most artificial of all, but no less moving, are the story beats clearly introduced in the film to give it a narrative structure and closure, namely the problem of Mahiro becoming too attached to her father replacement to such a degree that her mother invites Ishii to live with him. This spurs Ishii to existential (and paranoid) self-reflection, wondering if his own family has been hired by someone to play his loved ones. Patently contrived, this ending is pitch-perfect in sealing Family Romance, LLC.’s awestruck encounters with the social, psychological, and emotional borderlines of human relationships and needs. As in Jessica Hausner’s surprisingly consonant Little Joe, Herzog is here prompting questions about the nature of authentic relationships and the perhaps misplaced or fragile value of that authenticity in our modern world.

A Hidden Life

Werner Herzog is one of the few working filmmakers for whom you feel an electric encounter with the world that he is filming, an awe and fascination with what is before the camera and can be transmitted through it. Another of these rare practitioners is Terrence Malick, who returns to the Cannes competition (The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or in 2011) with A Hidden Life, an adaptation of the real story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer who refused to join Hitler’s Wehrmacht, was arrested for this, and eventually executed. The film opens in the small mountain town of St. Radegund and astonishing visions of mountains embracing a verdant and idyllic landscape, home for the life, work, and love of Jägerstätter and his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner). This is an idealized, innocent utopia like the South Pacific islands in The Thin Red Line or pre-Columbus America in The New World, an exaltation of the balance between human world and natural, anchored by a love swimming between person and person, person and land. Archive footage of Hitler, much of it pulled from Triumph of the Will  introduces the spark of human evil that, as in those films through war and colonists, will corrupt paradise.

While the setting may appear similar to other Malick films, the dilemma at the film’s heart is quite different, as it is about actively rejecting, both bodily and spiritually, taking part in this spread of evil. Jägerstätter, a fervent Catholic whose devout faith makes up a great deal of the film’s questioning monologues, makes the choice to turn away from fighting for the Germans and being complicit in the darkness spreading across the land. After this typically glorious introduction to paradise there is a period of gradual souring of the purity in St. Radegund as the town becomes converted to the German cause and starts ostracizing the Jägerstätters over the father’s nonconformity. Finally, there is Franz's arrest—and in this long section of a nearly three-hour movie, Jägerstätter is imprisoned and the movie transforms into one of the rare films of spiritual imprisonment, akin to Joan of Arc adaptations (including echoing similarities to Bruno Dumont’s Jeanne, which you wrote about) or the apostasy stories of the two versions of Silence. Jägerstätter is asked to renounce his anti-Hitler beliefs in order to be possibly be released or at least reprieved, and he instead holds true. This is the section of the film that has most in common with Malick’s most abstract dramas, Knight of Cups and Song to Song, where narrative time and the trappings of the period setting both fall away and characters and figures pace around the frame, asking unanswered questions of each other and themselves. Juxtaposed to the lonely freedom of Fani back on the farm, holding her own in a strong feminine independence unusual for the filmmaker, A Hidden Life boldly dedicates a dominant part of itself to evoking imprisonment of space and of the soul. Only one year passes in prison, but in the film Malick renders this sequence without markers of time, an endless isolation and containment whose only succor is the light that pierces through prison windows and letters of love from home.

Malick has spent the last several films increasingly deconstructing conventional filmmaking and reenforcing his unique film language. As his productions have gotten more spare and in turn more abstract, he has also left behind the specificity of setting found in The Thin Red Line and The New World that, for many viewers, helped anchor or even excuse what many took to be directorial flourishes: The wandering camera, the poetic internal ruminations spoken in voice over, the seemingly random incursions into the drama of non-narrative characters or moments, and frequent cutaways to nature. But these are not quirks, they are building blocks, and in subsequent films Malick daringly broke down his cinema even more to its basic elements, barely staging what any would consider dramatic scenes in favor of two main kinds of human interaction: Two or more people running, touching, tumbling, fleeing, goofing, and otherwise finding joys in playfulness; and two or more people shuffling around in shyness, consternation, thoughtfulness, or confrontation. Rarely does anyone have a dialogue, and instead one character will talk to another in such a manner it almost feels like one is a figment of the imagination of the other, an external, expressionist utterance of a doubt or feeling inside. Barely has a scene begun, a conversation started, when Malick will cut to a new image, a new staging of the scene, and new lines, as if we’re seeing multiple fractured versions of the same singular expression, whether of joy or doubt. This lack of conventional dramaturgy is a technique, not a flaw. Whether it works for an audience wide or small is another question, but it most certainly is a coherent and, for me, frequently tremendous and moving approach not to storytelling but to the evocation of the spirit. Rarely does a filmmaker photograph the world, whether moments of delight between a family or of the sun breaking over a mountain, as if these are new images. Malick is always looking for new images; for him, a shot of the sun isn’t another shot of the sun, but rather it’s a sun never previously seen. In the film there is a moment of possible self-portraiture, of a church painter in St. Radegund who says that he “help[s] people look up from those pews and dream.” In A Hidden Life you constantly have the sensation that each image, however superfluous, is needed, perhaps desperately. You may disagree with that necessity, but how many films insist, are so sure that what they share is an essential revelation? 

These films' attraction to what Herzog would call ecstatic truth understandably wears down many people, especially since their doubled, tripled, quadrupled emphasis on similar motifs both inside and between the films frequently has a dulling effect which takes away from the majesty of the imagery rather than amplifying it, as no doubt intended. Nevertheless, the Austrian setting, with its dramatically curving hillsides, stark mountain ranges, and Old World farmsteads, houses, and church, prove a revitalizing subject for Malick and his new cinematographer, Jörg Widmer, a long-time camera operator for Malick who replaces Emmanuel Lubezki with no noticeable drop in quality of natural light or invention of composition. Shooting with extremely wide lenses, the the world spills around its characters, bending and bowing, rendered bracing and unusual. Immersion and wonder is the desire, and the fact that Malick is working on a VR piece makes a great deal of sense, since with that technology perhaps he can place the viewer even closer to glory. 

In St. Radegund, Malick’s approach is nearly as fresh as it was in The New World, genuinely breathtaking at times and evoked through two touching, genuine embodiments by the actors. In prison, the film becomes as frustrated as its protagonist and far more trying an experience, yet it conjures easily for Franz and for us the absence of the outdoors, of freedom, of play, of fulfillment, and of lightness.  Shot all the way back in the summer of 2016, during the American presidential campaigns and the increased popularity of Austria's far-right political party, the film’s central protest, which is in fact a very private one—Jägerstätter is constantly told no one will hear of his moral stance, that “no one will be changed” by his sacrifice—speaks with unusual direct address to this present moment. “This is what happens when the world dies, but men survive,” remarks St. Radegund’s Nazi-sympathizing mayor. Going to the bishop to protest her husband’s imprisonment, Fani is told of the Church's collaborative position: “let every man be subject to the power above them,” referring to the Third Reich. From this utterance, Malick cuts to a shot of monks carefully tending the church garden, and it is quite clear what power we should be exalting.

Warmly,

Danny

from The Daily Notebook http://bit.ly/2wbZjKA

The Notebook is covering Cannes with an on-going correspondence between critic Leonardo Goi and editor Daniel Kasman.

Jeanne

Dear Danny,

The day I first met Bruno Dumont, a blistering hot August afternoon in a hotel perched atop the hills of Locarno, was also the day before production for his latest film, Jeanne (Joan of Arc), was due to kick off. A sequel to his 2017 Jeannette, a musical period-piece on the childhood of Joan of Arc which had world premiered in Cannes and had continued its festival tour with a bow in the Swiss Alps, Jeanne had big shoes to fill. Scored by French electro-musician Igorrr and choreographed by Philippe Decouflé, Jeannette dwelled into the formative years of the 15th century French martyr through the most unlikely—and original—rubric imaginable: heavy metal music. For a heroine incessantly dissected and celebrated by decades of cinema history (from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc to Philippe Ramos’ 2011 The Silence of Joan), Jeannette felt like a long overdue departure toward more inventive and rollicking pastures. And it also signaled a shift away from the insularity of Dumont’s first seminal works, and a continued interest in sequels, Jeanne being the director’s second after the sci-fi 4-part comedy series P’tit Quinquin and its follow-up, CoinCoin and the Extra Humans. 

So you can understand my anticipation when Cannes director Thierry Frémaux announced, a few weeks ago, that Jeanne had found a slot in the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar. I entered the Debussy theatre bracing for another display of death-metal mayhem, but it only took a few minutes for Jeanne to reveal that things had changed. No longer scored by Igorrr but the melodic French pop singer Christophe—and thus sadly exempted from the head-banging dances that enveloped Jeannette, members of the clergy, saints and soldiers—Jeanne feels a lot more somber and a lot less playful than its predecessor. To be sure, part of the renewed gravitas owes to the sheer fact that History, and Joan’s role in it, has taken a dramatic turn. Where Jeannette had homed in on The Maid of Orleans’ childhood and teenage years, with then-8-year-old actress Lise Leplat Prudhomme to star in the first segment and the older Jeanne Voisin to incarnate Joan as a teenager, Jeanne covers the last three years in the girl's life, circa 1428 to 1431, and is premised on a neatly divided three-part scaffolding: Joan at war with the English; Joan at war with the clergy who accuse her of heresy; Joan’s last prison days ahead of the horrific fate she’s sentenced to.

Formally, the austere mood translates in a more static and solemn shot composition. Decouflé’s routines and Igorrr’s score had injected much dynamism into Jeannette’s talk-heavy script, making up for the lack of battle scenes with all-out-bonkers performances that both did their fair share of narrative heavy-lifting and loosened up some hardcore theological disquisitions. By contrast, Jeanne strikes as a lot less musical than Jeannette had been. Where Igorrr’s music had served as a near-omnipresent collagen, Christophe’s tunes are sporadic, scarce presences. And the few times the French singer’s falsetto bursts into songs inspired by the source material for Dumont’s adaptation of the Joan of Arc saga—the play by Belle Époque writer Charles Péguy, “The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc”—characters and camera remain motionless, the latter often fixed on Lise Leplat Prudhomme as she stares in fourth-wall breaking shots while Christophe’s songs play out in full. And blessed with a magnetic and preternatural stage presence as the 10-year-old may be, a fiery stare that dons her prolonged close-ups a hypnotic vibe, the gimmick soon loses steam.

That said, casting Prudhomme as the eponymous Jeanne turned out to be a terrific choice. Speaking in Locarno, Dumont said Jeanne had been envisaged with Jeannette’s Jean Voisin as lead, but the actress had several concerns with the role, and the collaboration ended abruptly. It was a blessing in disguise. By having 10-year-old Prudhomme play a soon-to-be martyr six year younger than the real-life Joan would have been in 1428, Dumont’s stunt adds an interesting spin to the history of the cinematic Joans who came before her (interestingly, the second youngest actress to step in the saint’s shoes was 19-year-old Jean Seberg in Otto Preminger’s 1957 Saint Joan; the oldest, 39-year-old Ingrid Bergman’s in Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 Joan of Arc at the Stake). But the choice also brings the heroine far closer to the audience than an older actress might have allowed.

Watching Prudhomme confront church elders and senior army folks, a clunky armor wrapped around the body of an angelical 10-year-old girl concurrently fighting a foreign enemy and a calcified, patriarchal Church, is the type of dissonance that allows Dumont to both stir empathy for an unjustly executed child (it is no coincidence the adults keep calling her so), and also underscore her indomitable no-nonsense swagger vis-à-vis the stony world of the grownups she’s up against. And in a last segment that unfolds as an interminable debate on theology, free will and faith, Prudhomme’s mix of vulnerability and courage offers some respite from the otherwise complex, ivory-tower elucubrations.

Like him or not, Dumont’s ability to navigate budget constraints and to conjure up a poetic imagery from the simplest interplay between man and nature is a talent to behold. Much like in Jeannette, production values are here kept to a bare minimum, David Chambille’s camera following Jeanne and fellow soldiers roaming the dunes of Northern France, or craning around the spellbinding marbles of Amiens Cathedral. Battles are non-existent, or rather, invoked through gorgeously choreographed pageantry of horses, shot from above. And while Jeanne is unlikely to earn Dumont new acolytes, and more likely to baffle even the most fervent of devotees for some of its more tedious, head-scratching segments, it achieves, much like Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or contender A Hidden Life, the miraculous feat of simultaneously jibing at a dogmatic religious institution, while celebrating faith in all its mystery and baffling beauty.

The Lighthouse

The day after Dumont’s latest the sky above the Croisette hung cerebral and gloomy, a fitting prelude to the sinister aura of what was possibly the hottest entry in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight: Robert Eggers’ follow up to his fulminating 2015 horror The Witch, the Willem Dafoe- and Robert Pattinson-starring The Lighthouse. Much like Eggers’ debut had left an indelible mark for its playful devilry, Eggers’ latest is an entrancing and feverish descent into hell, peppered and sustained by a dark, alcohol-fueled, wry comic edge. To say that The Lighthouse far exceeded the cloud of expectations it came wrapped in is a polite understatement. It’s been almost twenty-four hours since I left the Croisette theatre and the crowd that rose in a standing ovation for Eggers, Dafoe, and Pattinson—and I am yet to recover from all I saw. 

Shot on black-and-white film and set in the 1890s in a barren island off the coast of Nova Scotia, The Lighthouse follows Dafoe’s Thomas Wake and Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow, lighthouse keepers due to serve in the remote piece of Atlantic rock for a four-week stint. For apprentice Pattinson, this amounts to a plethora of demeaning chores, from tending to the cistern, swabbing liquor-stained floors, and emptying buckets of shit into the raging sea. No point in even thinking about tending to the actual lighthouse chamber; as Dafoe’s spirited-eyed, spiky-haired and rotten-toothed ex-sailor bellows among liquor-propelled dinners, the light is strictly off limits. Why on earth that may be is a question the script, penned by Eggers and his brother Max, hints at by means of haunting and spine-tingling reveries, with Pattinson’s Winslow, a deranged cross between a Prometheus and Icarus, slowly plunging into the same fate previous aides of Dafoe’s allegedly succumbed to: unhinged madness.

To be watching The Lighthouse is to join in the same journey. It is to submit to a disquieting, stomach-churning manic dream of a film which, despite harboring no jump scare moments, engulfs one in a terrifying embrace accentuated by Mark Korven’s score, here playing with low strings and threatening fog horns. It is a tale that revels on the outstanding performances of its leads, a two-men’s drama that stretches far beyond the confines of a godforsaken island and its lighthouse, and draws from a pantheon of centuries-old heroes and mythical archetypes, from Captain Ahab to Triton, from Sisyphus to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.

In this sense, the beauty of The Lighthouse resides in his timelessness. This is a film that exists beyond time, a folkloric tale that harkens back to ancestral struggles between wrathful gods and men’s hubris. Dafoe and Pattinson spend half their time fighting each other and the other half enveloped in tender, boozy embraces. A near-tangible tension permeates each and every exchange, but there are moments of comedic liftoff too, stirred up by the 19th century dialogue and the clumsy, toxic chemistry between Wake, a flatulent cross between an evangelical pastor and a pirate, and the bookish-turned-alcoholic-turned-paranoid Winslow.

And it just looks gorgeous. Eggers, whose meticulousness and attention to period details had graced The Witch with a mesmeric look, opts for old 35mm cameras on Orthochromatic stock. An early standard in filmmaking eventually replaced for its tendency to make skin tones too dark, it does wonders to capture the hues of candlelit dinner conversations, the mud and dirt covering the pair’s faces, turning the scarcely furbished interiors into nightmarish ink drawings. The few moments cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s camera ventures outside the confines of the dim-lit interiors to capture a misty, aluminium sky, the light feels almost unbearably bright. For this remains a tale of darkness, with a boxy Academy ratio that only accentuates the feeling of claustrophobia, and a lighthouse whose lugubrious beam doesn't thrust people into light, but only brings them closer to insanity.

I recall your last dispatch ending with a wish—you hoped the movies I’ve been watching could be just as entertaining as the last three you wrote about. I fear "entertaining" would not be a right fit for either Jeanne or The Lighthouse. But Dumont’s poetic imagery and the savage beauty of Eggers’ sophomore picture are things to behold and marvel at, and two of the many reasons this first trip to Cannes is turning into an unforgettable experience.

More from me again soon,

Leo

from The Daily Notebook http://bit.ly/2EnnY39

The Taiwan Film Institute has released a two-minute (but nonetheless impressive) clip demonstrating the before and after of the digital restoration process for Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1982 film Cheerful Wind, a romantic comedy that follows the relationship between a photographer and the blind man who becomes the subject of her latest work. Though Cheerful Wind seems a more lighthearted example, Hou's observations of the political skeleton that envelops everyday life appear to be an overall and very strong influence on Devotion, an atmospheric horror video game by Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games.

Set in Taiwan between 1980 to 1986, the game pairs a bloodied tale of family and religion against a backdrop of political suppression—the timeline takes place during the last days of Taiwan's White Terror, a period of martial law from 1947 to 1987, marked by the mass execution and imprisonment of thousands deemed anti-government, spies, or communist sympathizers. Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness (1989) reckons with the White Terror as it unfolded in the 1940s; from that film Devotion borrows its dark tones of blue, orange, and red, as well as its images of rituals as they intertwine to tighten familial bonds. By playing the game—which guides the player through first-person perspective through a purgatorial loop of haunted rooms that continually mutate—one encounters the bursts of emotion (including terror) that simmer and flicker throughout Hou's portraits of Taiwan, devastation and dreams externalized.

from The Daily Notebook http://bit.ly/2VuLh0M

The Notebook is covering Cannes with an on-going correspondence between critic Leonardo Goi and editor Daniel Kasman.

Zombi Child

Dear Leo,

Your last dispatch pinpointed works of social realist cinema here in Cannes, alongside a quintessential art-house picture. I have no bias for or against any of these idioms, each and all can be used to make a great film, but often at festivals I long for the smarts for entertainment that genre cinema can promise. Genre movies exemplify in the most vivid sense a truism of the art of the cinema, that it relies on the building blocks of cliches, the language and toolkit of conventions and archetypes. Because of this, to expect most movies to do something new or fresh in some ways feels antithetical to the art, founded as it is on iteration and variation on shared popular ideas. To surprise an audience within the confines of expectations—that is a subtle and impressive accomplishment, and is why here at Cannes the swerving Brazilian film Bacurau was such a pleasure. This is likewise true of Bertrand Bonello’s new film, Zombi Child, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight. (His last, the millennial terrorism thriller Nocturama, was rumored to be too touchy a subject to be programmed anywhere along the Croisette.) A bit of a zombi film, a bit of an all-girls boarding school reverie, the film jolts our expectations for both through audacious cross-cutting and maintaining a silkily mysterious atmosphere of uncertain direction.

Opening in 1962 Haiti, Clairvius (Mackenson Bijou) is cursed and partially killed through voodoo, buried not-quite-dead, and resurrected to toil as a mindless zombi in a sugar plantation. (“Zombi” without an “e” indicates the voodoo belief of those who exist between life and death, unlike the horror fiction conceit of the living dead.) Regaining some sense of his life, Clairvius's shrouded vision catching flashes of color and images of his wife, and he escapes the plantation through the countryside. The story behind this saga is revealed much later, and in the meantime Bonello basks in sepulchral day-for-night shadows and the sorrow of human exploitation that extends beyond the grave. Cut into this is a story set in today’s France, with a white teen beauty, Fanny (Louise Labèque), as its heroine who attends classes at the elite Légion d'honneur boarding school populated by the children of the country’s most lauded citizens. Taught about the failed legacy of the French Revolution in class, she yearns privately for the school break which will put her back in the arms of her boyfriend. The thread between this very privileged and isolated present and the Haitian past is connected by Fanny’s friend at school, Melissa (Wislanda Louimat), a solitary Haitian orphan whose parents died in the 2010 earthquake. Fanny invites Melissa to join her dorky, previously all-white secret literary sorority, and as we learn more about this regal, melancholy black girl the more the uncanniness of the Haitian story start to seep into the present. “We all look like corpses anyway,” one girl dryly notes. Fanny seeks to soothe her boy troubles by a visit to Melissa’s aunt (Katiana Milfort), a mambo or female voodoo priestess, and by the time Melissa starts making strange growling noises in the dormitory toilet at night the film has effectively cross-pollinated France’s colonial past with its not-so-distant present. 

Like Mrs. Hyde, Serge Bozon’s recent riff on Robert Louis Stevenson, Bertrand Bonello is cleverly appropriating the visuals, atmosphere, and ideas of pulpy genre cinema but applying them towards more conceptual ends. That is to say, Zombi Child is not a horror film—unless one perhaps rightfully sees the faint consciousness of colonial legacies in new generations horrific, at least intellectually. The film takes a bold and mostly earned gambit in so juxtaposing past and present, Haiti and boarding school, black and white, man and woman, and the struggle to return to life with the struggle of first love. Obviously the risk is to cheapen the legacy, to use the Haitian story—which is based on a real person—and the film’s awe of voodoo belief and practice as window dressing for an exercise in style. But this a line Bonello has always flirted with, not the least in his last films about terrorism, Yves Saint Laurent, and a turn-of-the-century brothel. The director chooses vivid, iconographic subjects to anchor not just his formidable aesthetic prowess—Zombi Child is a sleekly beautiful film with a great score by the director, and its lambent mystery and unpredictability is impressively sustained—but to allow his stories to go beyond drama and stretch his ideas and sensations to the level of grandeur. The film daringly asks what could this young white French woman of today, with her passionate adolescent love, have to do with Haiti, with the island’s traditions, and with its history of exploitation and misery, and with its ultimate independence. In a bravura finale, shifting cuts between all parts and thereby inextricably syncing them across times, countries, desires, and histories, the film convincingly suggests that people can change and things can get better. 

Zombies, or at least people eerily becoming those who are not themselves, are in fact popping up everywhere on the Croisette, including in Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s first competition film, as well as first in English, Little Joe. An eco-remix of Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the Monsanto age, it tells of Alice (Emily Beecham), a plant geneticist who is crafting a flower whose scent instills happiness. The trouble is, among the murky ethics of its laboratory creation are hints that its pollen may also render humans unusually devoted to the plant’s survival, subtly transforming their personalities to ensure the flowers thrive. Or so suggests a mentally unstable biologist at the lab in an increasingly desperate manner. Others think the woman is crazy. From this premise, which is by turns uncanny and dryly comic, Hausner seesaws between Alice and us believing this flowery monstrosity is a threat to humanity and writing off the changes in people being a result of exaggeration, paranoia, and coincidence.

Alice is a divorced mother of an adolescent boy she mostly sees only over take-out dinners, and when she suspects he’s been exposed to the pollen, both her boy and others explain this is simply the age children change. Her boss and her co-workers, including an obsequiously romantically inclined one (a perfectly cast Ben Whishaw, utilizing his weaselly, insinuating qualities), also swing from exhibiting symptoms to appearing quite rational. The increasing suspicions and isolation of the paranoid is inextricably tied to Alice’s situation as a workaholic woman struggled to juggle her personal and professional life—as is the increasing guilt over her culpability in the morals of her creation. After all, she and her cohorts are engineering unnatural creations that manipulate emotions for the purpose of consumer profit. Whether or not a pollen-based virus is slowly taking over this corner of the United Kingdom is one worry, the other is whether engineered happiness can or should replace genuine sadness. The first fear is fit for a horror film, the second for a withering assessment of the direction of our technocratic culture.

As in Hausner’s film Lourdes, about a handicapped woman seeking the famous miracle of the French town, Little Joe effectively maintains a central ambiguity, oscillating between proof of the unthinkable, followed by refutation of that proof. Indeed, by the film’s end, characters can be found literally voicing the suspicions of both the audience and of Alice, placing the film in the tradition of Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing, which views a woman’s sense that the world is being organized against her with sympathy but refuses, at least for a while, to confirm or deny this anxiety. Hausner and her cinematographer have always preferred a spare mise-en-scène and here thrive in the antiseptic setting of the lab, beautifully color-designing spearmint lab coats to match office chairs, giving Alice sharply coordinated outfits, and generally making any scene look like an Instagram lifestyle snap. Hausner was doing this well before the affluent side of the internet embraced a cool white and pastel-oriented harmony, and here it is used to wry effect, accentuating the satirization of a person, a company, and a cultural environment that would desire such a monstrous plant—and undoubtedly market it in similar hues. Emily Beecham embodies this central ambivalence very well indeed, portraying a modern Frankenstein and the appeal of the evolutionary creation and the life sacrificed to engineer it. The film remarkably is both sympathetic to her increasing dread as it is deeply skeptical of what she may have wrought. Significantly, this is-it or isn't-it approach that comes from Hausner’s deliberate modulation of tone and story results in a film without an obvious arc or even a climax. There is nothing here like outburst of mad appeal desperately found at the end of Don Siegel’s 1956 film.  The softness with which Little Joe ends is hardly satisfying, but in a way is all the more devastating for showing the insidiously calm way horror can be integrated into our daily lives.

First Love

Both Bonello and Hausner use popular genre cinema as a funnel for their ideas. Takashi Miike, here at the Directors’ Fortnight with First Love, has no such ambitions. There are a few ideas here, but the main one is to delight with surprise, energy, and violence. A baroquely plotted but otherwise straight-forward thriller, it intertwines yakuza and Chinese gang turf wars with the story of a orphaned boxer (Masataka Kubota) with no ties to anyone and little hope in life beyond fighting. It takes a while to set all the film's strands in motion, folding in first a drug-addicted young woman (Sakurako Konishi) selling her body to work off her father's debt to the gangsters, and then a scam that a corrupt cop and one of the yakuza (Shôta Sometani) pull to steal a drug shipment, but once everything is in place First Love flings itself effectively from antic to antic, violence to violence.

And brutal and bloody the film is, but told as much as an action film as it is a dark comedy in the vein of the Coen brothers’ more morbid humor, since just about everything that could go wrong with the drug heist does, and the bad luck laid upon the boxer—who gets his first knockout and is told he’s dying of a tumor—and the forced prostitute—who both Japanese and Chinese gangs think took the shipment, and is suffering withdrawal hallucinations of her abusive father—shoves them together to dodge fists, bullets, and swords. As often in the cinema of Takashi Miike, this hero and heroine are miscreants and outcasts, and they have to bond to survive the self-destructive brutality of gang violence and the wicked—as it’s self-described by multiple yakuza—lot among which they’ve fallen. Miike escalates the violence adroitly until everyone ends up in a hardware store with a multitude of weapons easily on hand, and the film descends into a remarkably vicious, yet frequently comic, and practically endless battle to the death. And it’s not just the men dealing out the pain: particularly notable inclusions are a drunk female member of the Chinese gang who venerates the aged yakuza code of honor from old movies, and the film’s most iconic figure, a drug dealer’s girl, widowed in the slaughter, who goes on a carnal quest for vengeance. Whatever the English-language title may suggest, this is in no way a love story, but believe it or not, Miike caps all this with an abrupt but very moving final image of normalcy for the outcast couple. It is an unexpected gesture that underlines just what is at stake amid all the desperation and savagery, comic and otherwise, in this terrific picture.

I hope, Leo, that you have seen films as entertaining as these, which certainly give me hope for the rest of the festival.

Warmly,

Danny

from The Daily Notebook http://bit.ly/2Jsh1SE

The Notebook is covering Cannes with an on-going correspondence between critic Leonardo Goi and editor Daniel Kasman.

A White, White Day

Dear Danny,

Among the many veteran’s tips you gave me on our first Cannes rendezvous was a polite reminder to fish for gems outside the red-carpeted slots of the official competition, and yesterday I heeded the call, queuing for my first screening at the Critics’ Week, Hlynur Pálmason’s A White, White Day. It was not the first time I stumbled into the Icelandic 34-year-old. Back in Locarno, in 2017, I’d been able to catch his debut feature, the visceral study of masculinity and festival darling Winter Brothers. And if the latter had heralded the Reykjavik-native as new name to reckon with, his new film only adds more evidence to the director's talent.

Having lost his wife in a car accident, police chief Ingimundur (Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson, of Fantastic Beasts, Justice League, and Everest fame) processes grief by channeling all his energies on fixing up a house for his daughter, Elín (Elma Stefania Agustsdottir), and granddaughter Salka (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir). It’s a remote and pastel-colored retreat perched atop a hill a few minutes’ walk by the sea, a landscape of belittling and untamed beauty which Maria von Hausswolff’s cinematography beckons us into through a gorgeously studied series of mounted-camera tableaux, editor Julius Krebs Damsbo cutting from one season to the next, the house changing as the sprawling immensity that engulfs it intermittently dilates and contracts in a sea of mist.

A harsh and unforgiving environment finds a fitting embodiment in Sigurdsson’s imposing and laconic Ingimundur, anger and pain brewing under an ice-cold stare that only softens in the presence of his beloved 8-year-old Salka. “I just want to build a house,” the man tells a psychiatrist who seems completely out of sync with his patient’s trauma, and tosses him a half-hearted suggestions like “practice self-compassion” and “stop being so self-critical.” To no avail, of course. Ingimundur’s grief is a viscous presence that wraps the new house like glue. A White, White Day may well pivot on a loss of devastating magnitude, but what’s most tragic about it is that the accident triggers a pain and vulnerability Ingimundur cannot bring himself to make public—not even to the young Salka. In a work that thrives on its attention to small, quiet gestures, there is a whole film in the split-second Sigurdsson glances furtively around him before clutching an old shirt found inside a box of his wife’s belongings, and covers his face with it, breathing in.

Much like Winter Brothers had offered an excursion into the ways austere settings shape those who inhabit them—zeroing in on the poisonous feud between two siblings working in a remote chalk-mining factory—A White, White Day conjures up another study of environment and subjectivity, of public and private spheres, a tale of spellbinding and perturbing beauty. Cannes hasn’t even reached its midpoint yet, but as of my fourth night in this movable feast, Pálmason’s second feature stands as the most disquieting and touching experience so far—and however far we may luckily still be from the festival’s end, something tells me I shall return to Sigurdsson’s performance long after my time here will come to a close.

Watching Ingimundur find a respite from grief in Salka, moments of grandpa-granddaughter tenderness interspersing a tale of aching loneliness, I was jolted back to the multilayered family dynamics of the Official Competition entry I had seen the night before, Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You. In many ways, Loach’s latest felt like a sequel to his 2016 Palm d’Or winner, I, Daniel Blake (the English cineaste’s second Palm after his first win in 2006 for The Wind That Shakes the Barley). Set again in the same Newcastle that Dave Johns’ Daniel had roamed in a hopeless search for jobs, Loach's new film homes in on a family of four, delivery man Ricky (Kris Hitchen), home-care nurse Abby (Debbie Honeywood), their teenage son Seb (Rhys Stone), and daughter Liza Jane (Katie Proctor).

And though Ricky’s circumstances may first stand out as slightly better than they had been for Daniel, it only takes a few moments for Loach to spell out the full extent of the man’s misery. Plunged into endless debt after the collapse of the Northern Bank, forced to give up a house he’d bought and to rely on evanescent and short-lived jobs for years on end, Ricky sells body and soul to a delivery company that relies exclusively on independent contractors, and promises fast cash in exchange for 14-hours-a-day shifts, six days a week. “You’re a trooper,” heartless boss Maloney (Ross Brewster) welcomes Ricky, sugarcoating the lack of basic rights and the faintest trace of benefits with a bombastic invite to become “the master of your own destiny.”

Sorry We Missed You continues Loach’s excursions into poverty-stricken Britain, but conjures up a tale of Sisyphean endurance filled with more life and anger than its 2016 predecessor, largely because of the indomitable energy with which Ricky’s family struggles to survive against all odds. It is in the confines of their house that Loach’s achieves some of his most heart-wrenching material. Mired in a job market plagued with rampant privatizations, a collapsed welfare state, and ruled by the quintessentially neoliberal law of the survival of the fittest, everyday intramural rituals are the only antidote against a gig economy that shatters the very people it purports to shore up. There’s something ineffably moving in watching Liza Jane put away her parents’ dishes while the two lie exhausted and asleep in front of the TV, something wrecking in the struggle father and daughter undertake to squeeze in some time together in between his impossibly tight delivery schedule. “I wish we just didn’t have to fight so much,” she tells him over a strictly monitored two-minute work break, and it is the first in a long series of domestic heart to hearts that manage to stir up empathy without ever sensationalizing the family’s suffering, or undermining the astounding dignity with which they pull through.

Traditional tropes resurface, from Loach’s penchant for football rivalries to his interest in the genealogy—and ultimately, disintegration—of workers’ rights in the face of a pernicious gig economy. It is disheartening to notice just how much has changed since the strikes and struggles workers undertook in the heat of the Thatcher years. “You work from 7:30 in the morning till 9 at night?” one of Abby’s elderly patients asks her, after reminiscing and waxing proudly over some 1980s strikes, eyes bugging out in indignation: “what happened to the 8-hour job?”

Les misérables

This emphasis on the history of continuities between past and present social injustices served as the backbone of another official competition entry, Ladj Ly’s debut feature Les misérables. Overtly explicit in its allegiance to Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel—from the title to the geographical setting, located as it is in the crime-plagued Parisian banlieue of Les Bosquets, in the eastern Montfermeil district where Hugo’s Thénardiers’ Inn stood—Ly homes in on a handful of rough present-day French housing projects only to find out that very little, in the past 150 years, seems to have changed.

Police officer Stéphane (Damien Bonnard) has just joined the local street crime unit, patrolling Les Bosquets next to Gwada (Djibril Zonga) and the revoltingly corrupted and cynical Chris (Alexis Manenti, nailing a performance of unhinged brutality that makes for moments of intramural tension à la Training Day). The trio cruises around projects seesawing between beguilingly friendly interactions with Bosquets residents, and others when the sheer scope of the cops’ brutality and wanton violence comes into full, sickening view with Chris happily frisking attractive underage girls and bashing up whoever dares to cross his path. Entry point into a corrupted universe that exists over and against the rule of law the police ought to enforce, Stéphane guides us with wide-eyed angst into a labyrinth of constantly shifting power relations. Part of Les misérables’ allure is to witness the cops negotiate their scope of action and authority with trusted locals, including a man known by the sobriquet “The Mayor” (Steve Tientcheu), the hood’s market stalls manager and de facto intermediary between police and community, and Salah (Almamy Kanouté), a reformed jihadi turned kebab shop owner who parcels out teachings to local young men with a proud, breezily becalmed aura.

Tension brews over the course of Stéphane’s first day at work, Chris’ ruthless bullying poking ordinary citizens as much as the unit’s newbie, until things take a turn for the worst when a confrontation with the neighborhood kids ends in a terrible accident involving Gwada and local boy Issa (Issa Perica). It’s a pivotal juncture that shatters the delicate equilibrium between cops and the Bosquets crowd, and skyrockets what had so far unspooled as your textbook corrupted cop film into something far more visceral and magnetic. Chris’ crooked cop may well the single most clear-cut villain here (down to the delusional paean of macho authority he shouts to The Mayor and his own thugs: “I am the law!”), but it is interesting to note Ly seems to afford all characters, including the most viciously abject ones, a behind-the-scene look at the history of loneliness, grief, and alienation each of them carries. To be sure, this doesn’t amount to any redemptive cop storyline, but it is interesting to see Ly blurring (if ever so slightly) the moral compass around his broken men.

And just when a dusk-tinged montage threatens to bookend the whole drama peddling a facile they-are-all-in-the-same-boat reminder, Les misérables propels you into a fast-paced last act of staggering violence, as the neighborhood kids take their revenge on the adults around them (interestingly, both on the cops as well as “The Mayor” and his crooks), chasing Stéphane, Gwada, and Chris into the projects, in a prolonged siege that feels as suffocating as it is visually entrancing. It’s an inter-generational upheaval which brought me back to a Berlinale entry from earlier this year and that would make for an interesting double bill, Claudio Giovannesi’s Piranhas—an ethnography of Naples’ teenage gangs fighting against (and ultimately replacing) a whole underworld of grownup thugs. An atmosphere of acrid anger and desperation permeates these early festival days, as you aptly wrote in your last dispatch. These last few works I saw only corroborate the feeling.

More from me soon,

Leo

from The Daily Notebook http://bit.ly/2w5enJN

Above: The Dead Don’t Die by Jim Jarmusch (USA).

Maybe if they re-introduced a Best Poster palme to Cannes things would get better. I’ve been doing this Competition round-up for nine years now and, though there are always stand-outs, in general there is nothing much to get excited about. Of course the poster usually comes later, after the films have been picked up for distribution—the best posters here, like those for The Dead Don’t Die and Parasite, are those that already have impending theatrical releases—and many of these films have barely finished editing before they’re rushed to the Croisette, so I shouldn’t complain. But at the same time this is the most prestigious film festival in the world, so you might expect a better turnout.

There seem to be fewer posters than ever this year; usually there are three or four I can’t track down, this year I’ve only been able to find key art for 12 out of the 21 films in competition. Nothing yet for Terrence Malick, Ken Loach, nor Arnaud Desplechin, nor for the first woman of color to have ever directed a film in competition at Cannes, Mati Diop. I will add them if they turn up during the festival; in the meantime, here are all the posters from the Competition in alphabetical order by English-language title.

Above: Bacarau by Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles (Brazil).

Above: Frankie by Ira Sachs (USA/France/Portugal/Belgium).

Above: Matthias and Maxime by Xavier Dolan (Canada).

Above: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino (USA).

Above: Pain and Glory by Pedro Almodóvar (Spain).

Above: Parasite by Bong Joon-ho (South Korea).

Above: Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Céline Sciamma (France).

Above: Sibyl by Justine Triet (France).

Above: The Traitor by Marco Bellocchio (Italy).

Above: The Wild Goose Lake by Diao Yinan (China).

Above: Young Ahmed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Belgium).

Still to come:

Atlantique by Mati Diop (France/Senegal)

The Whistlers by Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania/France/Germany)

A Hidden Life by Terrence Malick (USA/Germany)

It Must Be Heaven by Elia Suleiman (France/Canada)

Les misérables by Ladj Ly (France)

Little Joe by Jessica Hausner (Austria/Germany/UK)

Mektoub My Love: Intermezzo by Abdellatif Kechiche (France)

Oh Mercy! by Arnaud Desplechin (France)

Sorry We Missed You by Ken Loach (UK)

See previous Cannes Competition poster round-ups here: 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011. And follow me on Twitter for any updates to this year’s crop.

from The Daily Notebook http://bit.ly/2w4rriB

Disarming in their skittery vulnerability and unyielding portrayals of human disaffection, the films of Joanna Hogg have simmered under-the-radar since her powerful feature debut Unrelated (2007). Critical appraisals of her body of work have correctly found common ground between Hogg’s approach and a number of canonical cinematic heavyweights, but any list of touchstones will blur into obsoletion as the breadth and peculiar combination of the cinephile, photographer, and artist’s collection of interests and inspirations meld into a singular auteurism. 

Hogg’s latest film, The Souvenir, arrived at Sundance this year with a resounding bang. The portrait of an artist as a young woman, Hogg’s fourth feature is based on her own experiences as a film student in 1980s London. Hogg surrogate Julie (Honor Swinton-Byrne) is a 24-year-old living in a smart flat financed by her wealthy parents (her terrifically dowdy mother, played by Tilda Swinton, lives aways in a magnificent countryside estate). But Julie longs to break through the restrictive bubble of her existence, pitching, in one memorably cringe-worthy scene, her idea for an art film about shipyard laborers in Sunderland (a working class region far north of the capital). A house-party encounter with a slightly older man, a wry, magnetic Foreign Office worker by the name of Anthony (Tom Burke, channeling an Orson Wellsian swagger), snowballs into the naif-ish Julie’s first great romance and tragedy, simultaneously opening up the young woman to new experiences, while taking a toll on her artistic production.  

Buoyed by delicate eroticism and drifting back and forth between staid, observational formalism and quivering naturalism, The Souvenir unfolds as a work of imperfect memory. As in her usual fashion, Hogg has no interest in holding the audience’s hands through easily plottable events; the effect is one of putting places and faces together in an act of dreamy, but potent recollection.

I spoke to the British director by phone prior to the U.S. release of The Souvenir on May 17th. One foot in promotion, the other in the throes of pre-production for part two of The Souvenir, Hogg talked about casting Swinton-Byrne, character building as autofiction, and “forcing [herself] out of a groove.” 

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NOTEBOOK: You’ve worked with Tilda Swinton in the past, in your first short film, Caprice, in ‘86. How did you decide to cast her daughter Honor and Tilda together for The Souvenir?

JOANNA HOGG: Well, I’d been looking for years for an opportunity to work with Tilda again. It’s amazing how time passes so quickly. I’ve always thought it’d be wonderful for her to play the mother in The Souvenir. But then I thought, well I should probably get the daughter first. Time went by and I hadn’t found the right [person] for Julie. [But] I had to act fast because who knew how much longer Tilda would be available. So I [officially] decided to cast Tilda, and I don't remember the timing but I was getting desperate for my Julie. I was meeting all sorts of actors and non-actors, and I was looking for someone who could believably be an artist, or a filmmaker. Someone who is more comfortable behind the camera than in front of the camera. Whenever I’d meet an actress I’d think “well, they’re an actress.” Their job is to be in front of the camera. And I wanted a person who wouldn’t necessarily even look that comfortable [in front of a camera]. It was a difficult thing, and as per usual I tend to think in a documentary light and I started looking for someone who is a filmmaker or a student filmmaker.

Time went by and I asked Tilda, “Well, do you know anybody?” I always ask people and friends for ideas. That’s how I cast the main part in Unrelated. There was a moment when Tilda and I looked at each other and thought about Honor. I knew Honor already, but we were almost too close [at that point] that it had never occurred to me. It was the same with Viv Albertine in Exhibition. It was through a good friend of mine, and her advice when I was desperate to find the wife [character] in that film. I should know this by now and not be surprised.

NOTEBOOK: Did it take any convincing or was Honor immediately sold?

HOGG: She pretty quickly responded. To the point where I was like, “well you should take your time and not rush into it.” I wanted her to feel comfortable with the decision. And the decision was not just to make one film, but two films.

NOTEBOOK: So the vision has always been to make two films?

HOGG: Yes. 

NOTEBOOK: Honor is wonderful. She’s so vulnerable and insecure but there’s also this honesty in her face, this authenticity that simultaneously feels very powerful. So many of your female protagonists convey a similar sensibility.

HOGG: Perhaps because I see myself quite vulnerable in some ways. And quite awkward. I don’t want this to be a reflection of myself, but [in The Souvenir] I’m speaking about an experience that’s so personal that I’ve got to have an actual conversation with the character, even if it's just about one facet of me. I don’t mean that in a narcissistic way, but for [someone] to play a version [of me] in front of the camera, there’s got to be some kind of affinity between me and them.   

NOTEBOOK: In Archipelago you do this but it feels more omniscient than tethered to one character. In any case the point of view is not just strictly female.

HOGG: I was doing that in Archipelago. I did feel a connection to [Tom Hiddleston’s character] Edward, that was a part of me. I think I had some of myself in the sister character as well, as well as the mother character. Perhaps it was more spread out, but I was interested in that with Edward. Sometimes it's easier to speak about certain difficult issues if you do transference onto someone else, especially a transference to someone of a different sex. But I think that particular subject in Archipelago—it needed to be a young man. Because it was talking about being tough or the difficulty of being tough. The difficulty for a man to be vulnerable.

NOTEBOOK: Your first three films take place in insular, exclusive spaces: you go from vacationing in Tuscany in Unrelated, to vacationing in the Scilly Isles in Archipelago, and then we’re confined to this wonderful but also really claustrophobic house in Exhibition. Things get progressively smaller. There’s an insularity of spirit in The Souvenir, but Julie travels and goes to different places: her mom’s house in the country, school, art galleries, et cetera. It’s much more sprawling in comparison. 

HOGG: Yeah, I was really aware of that. And I was very excited by that. That larger canvass was incredibly exciting. And you’ll feel that in the second part to an even greater degree. I’m not sure what that impetus is about, but I am feeling compelled to paint in larger strokes. I always respond to a challenge, and I was aware with my first three films that I could just get into a particular groove and I wanted to force myself out of it. I felt I was getting a bit too comfortable.

NOTEBOOK: In a way that impetus to explore and “force yourself out of a groove” relates to the issues in The Souvenir concerning Julie’s artistic endeavors. Her desire to penetrate a different reality other than her own, which she acknowledges is stifling and limited. I’m thinking of the various moments when Julie discusses her desire to make a film about shipyard laborers in Sunderland.  

HOGG: That [project] was actually something I wanted to do at that stage in my life. But like Julie who doesn’t actually finish that project, I don’t think I was ready to look outside myself in that way. Or ready to make that project in that point in time. I didn’t have enough experience—life experience or experience making films.

NOTEBOOK: In past interviews, you’ve objected to critics saying your work is about class [Hogg laughs]. But The Souvenir, which is one of your more personal, reflexive works—I think—and I see the commentary on privilege as more explicit, more felt, because it has to do with the circumstances of your life, your opportunities.

HOGG: I wouldn’t say that I’m even addressing [class]. It’s a fact of that time. Of being who I was and mixing with the people I was mixing with. It’s the unavoidable fact of “how [did I] grow up?” What forms you as a person. One’s environment and habits are a part of that. I suppose I’m interested in [class], but I’m more interested in how that affects behavior. So I’m not interested in class per se. I don’t meet someone and go, “oh I’m interested in getting to know what class you belong to,” but I am interested in how that affects your place in the world and how people behave with each other. I suppose I’m looking at it from a certain stance, from the side, with one eye open for it.

On many levels it’s not interesting to me. In the U.K. there is an obsession with it to the point where it’s not even relevant. Because the stratifications are changed and changing so much, so the traditional class systems of the U.K. are outdated. If there’s any class system there’s a new one. It’s different talking about it here [in the U.S.] than in the U.K. I do notice stratas of people here. And in some ways you’re more class conscious here than we are. [This] ties into the sorts of behavior I’m interested in. If I’m in a restaurant here, especially in L.A., I’m sitting down and I’m putting in an order for something to eat, so I ask the person who brought me the menus and the water for what I want. And usually they say, “no I can’t take your order. You’ve got to ask someone else.” There are some people who are helping at a restaurant who can’t your order. That restaurant dynamic [is unique]. 

NOTEBOOK: Historically you’ve not been one to use much music in your films. Exhibition has no score. That’s not the case in The Souvenir. 

HOGG: [In my past films] normally [that absence of music] is me giving myself license to change my mind because I do enjoy music. In The Souvenir I use it particularly as a way of conjuring up that time period. It was very important to bring music into [the film]. Because music was very present in life for me at that time. It was like a musical madeleine [moment] for me, that brought back some memories. I didn’t want to be a slave to that early ‘80s period, particularly with the set design, but the soundtrack I found was a good way to create a certain impression.  

[There was] one thing I missed in the sound mixing stage of making The Souvenir—the space to create a soundscape without music. In Exhibition we created music out of the sounds of the environment, the sounds of the house. There wasn’t a similar space in The Souvenir. But also the editing would’ve been different. I wanted a faster rhythm in The Souvenir. Maybe in part two there will be more opportunity for that.

NOTEBOOK: Speaking of rhythm and space, you have a very particular style of shooting and framing a shot. The way you return to intimate spaces feels ritualistic. Spaces and ways of seeing seem to take on the psychologies of their inhabitants. 

HOGG: [In The Souvenir] we did have the gift of the wall of mirrors which I had in my original flat. A whole wall full of fragmented, framed mirrors. So that presented [a certain way] of seeing. The space does dictate that to an extent. When I find certain angles in a room I like I do return to those. I’m aware of that when I’m shooting. The real challenge in The Souvenir was Julie’s flat—we built the set, and we built it as if it were a real location. So we couldn’t remove a wall if we needed to. It also wasn’t a big space to shoot in. I was restricted. Only certain angles really worked.

NOTEBOOK: I had a conversation with a friend and we talked about your films as approaching reality as a mystery to be solved, as a gradual uncovering of a person’s nature. I think this is particularly true in The Souvenir, though I find your films always grapple with the question of how truth and reality are interrelated, or not.

HOGG: As I hear your interpretation, I think it does directly feed into the second part that we’re about to shoot. And I think we’re taking those ideas possibly a step further. I don’t think I would’ve worded it that way, but it’s also very hard for me to see outside of my own words. But [The Souvenir] is about more of a search for truth through a number of different [experiences].

It’s interesting because I’m needing to do two things at once. I need to talk about part one but I’m also in the middle of working on part two. The second part is about Julie being a filmmaker and her personal search for truth, which is an aspect [that is personal] for me. So there’s a lot of reverberations and connections around. And I’m trying to complete a picture, instead of thinking, “well, what I’m doing now has nothing to do with what I’m about to do.” So in a sense I’m being stretched apart, but it’s also allowing me to reconcile the two pictures and think of them together as one.

from The Daily Notebook http://bit.ly/2Yz8jpm