Cannes Report - Thursday, May 23
BY JOHN HARKNESS
CANNES - The Dardennes Brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre, became the most unexpected Palme d'Or winners ever when the David Cronenberg jury tapped their film in 1999 to the shock of, well, everybody. It's true, though, that after that jury picked the amateur actors who starred in Bruno Dumont's L'Humanite for the festival's acting awards, anything was possible.
Well, the brothers are back with The Son, the story of a woodshop teacher who becomes obsessed with one of his students to the point of stalking him. Which is an interesting subject for the Dardennes, given their style. The Son is shot in exactly the same style as Rosetta - hand-held and up close, with the camera following the main character tightly enough that we get time to note that leading actor Olivier Gourmet seems to have a rather nasty boil behind his right ear. I don't think I've spent this much time looking at the back of an actor's head since my last exposure to Bela Tarr, the cineaste laureate of shooting people walking away from the camera.
In essence, the Dardennes's camera stalks the main character, occasionally dropping back to eavesdrop when he encounters another character. It's an exceedingly functional if claustrophobic style, and it raises some mildly interesting questions about the voyeuristic functions of cinema - or it would if the characters in their films didn't spend so much time eating sandwiches or showing a student how to cut proper mortises into a picture frame.
If the best service you could perform for Hollywood cinema would be to seize every copy of Syd Field's books on screenwriting (Screenplay: The Foundations Of Screenwriting is a book studied with Talmudic intensity, not just by wannabe screenwriters but by Hollywood development execs - read and you'll be able to call the events in any studio movie before they happen), then the best service you could perform for low-budget foreign filmmakers is to give them a copy.
Memo to low-budget filmmakers in Pakistan, Belgium, Iran, Hungary and everywhere else: WATCHING A CHARACTER WALK FROM POINT A TO POINT B ISN'T VERY FUCKING INTERESTING. Unless it's Maggie Cheung in In The Mood For Love, of course, whom Olivier Gourmet definitely isn't. He'd look kind of silly in those sheath dresses, anyway.
The Son is one of those movies that you can feel sucking the very life from your bones - it's as if it's destroying your immune system and giving you Epstein-Barr Syndrome. It's actually less interesting than Unknown Pleasures, the Chinese slacker movie about a couple of unemployed 19-year-olds hanging around talking about maybe doing stuff. I wondered yesterday if it might be great. It turned out that it wasn't, but at least it had a certain touristic interest, being shot in China and all. Loved the shots of the nuclear reactor cooling towers, though not much else.
PHONE FREAKS
Exactly what on earth could possibly be so important that a person needs to spend every waking hour attached to a telephone? You see the cellphone junkies all over the place here, talking until the last possible second before the screening begins, firing up and checking messages as the credits start to roll, checking their palm pilots and pagers as they stroll along the Croisette eating lunch between calls to whomever.
They're wired, they're linked, they're connected, they're calling people standing four feet away from them so they can figure out where they're going for dinner. Get close enough to overhear some of the conversations and you'll hear people who never got over the doctor cutting the umbilicus.
I find the really distressing ones to be those people who have cell phones that aren't visible as phones - some guy was walking up and down the press room balcony, chattering in Italian and gesturing with both hands, and I thought some poor delusional person had gotten into the Palais, or perhaps one of my colleagues had all of a sudden snapped. Turns out he was wearing one of those no-hands phones with the microphone a bulge in a piece of wire hanging by his face. Someone should tell them that if you have enough links between yourself and your job, then what you have is a chain.
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