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Cannes Report - Saturday, May 25
WINDING DOWN
BY JOHN HARKNESS
CANNES, France – If you're tired of the awful weather in Toronto, you may want to skip down a couple of paras. At the very least, don't hate me because I'm sun-baked.
The sun came out yesterday. Well, it had been out – there have only been one or two rainy days through the whole festival – but yesterday the sun came out, the town lit up, the Mediterranean seemed bluer, the movies seemed better. Well, no, the last part is a lie, the movies didn't seem any better, but they didn't seem any worse either.
This is a much nicer place when the sun is out and the mistral isn't blowing.
Anyway, out of the sun and into the Salles for this morning's Competition film,
The Adversary, with Daniel Auteuil. Under Nicole Garcia's direction, Auteuil
(Un Coeur En Hiver and lots more) plays a seemingly happy bourgeois dad, a doctor who works at the
UN. Only he doesn't work at the UN and he may not be a doctor. Suddenly, this picture started to
look very familiar, and I realized that the true story Garcia's film is based on was also the
inspiration for Time Out ,
which is currently playing at the Carlton.
But this is a very different film. Time Out is interested in the way the protagonist passes his time amidst his subterfuge, the endless hours of apparent loafing while clutching a cell phone. The Adversary is much more concerned with the psychological devastation that's unleashed when the years of carefully constructed lies begin to unravel. Auteuil is one of the great naturalistic actors, born to play men with a quick intelligence and emotional problems, and Garcia gets a performance from him that's so good it may not even be noticed as a performance when the Cannes jury gets around to this category. Definitely one to keep an eye out for, because if it doesn't hit the Toronto festival in the fall (and it's got the right sort of profile for a gala screening), it will surely be released by someone.
GESUNDHEIT
Chihwaseon is the latest from Korean director Im Kwon-taek Im. I've not seen any
of his other 90-odd films, though his last,
Chunhyang, sits on my "to view" pile of videos at home and I'll eventually watch it. Unfortunately,
the stately pictorialism of Chihwaseon – a biography of painter Jang Seung-up, who was known for his
love of wine and women as well as his artistic talent – is not an incentive in this department.
It's a movie about hats. Something directors don't seem to realize is that a hat or two can just take over a movie. Take a look at The Last Waltz, for example, and then try to remember what song Dylan comes in with. Hard to do, but you won't forget that enormous white parade float of a hat that sits on his head. In Chihwaseon, the hero is a commoner who works as a servant while apprenticing to the master painters of his region, and they're always getting together to discuss his work.
This leads to scenes where five or six of these guys are sitting around wearing matching hats. I'm assuming they're historically accurate for Korea in the 1880s, but they look like something on a Pilgrim theme that Yves Saint Laurent might have whipped up for Audrey Hepburn. Mesmerizing, but I can't remember what any of these scenes are about ("Seung, you are a genius, you must study harder" – that sort of thing, until he proves his kung fu is stronger, I suppose). Yet the hats are burned into my retina.
I've got to get out of here. I think the sun is
melting my brain.....
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