CANNES -- Life Is A Miracle, or How To Win The Palme -- As there's almost nothing I like more than getting up to see a 150 minute movie from Bosnia at 8:30 in the morning.
Well, there's several things I like more than that, including being whacked on the forehead with a hammer, which brings us to Emir Kusturica's Life Is A Miracle. Kusturica has an uncanny record at this festival.
He's had three films in competition and won the Palme d'Or twice, for Underground and When Father Was Away on Business, and Best Director for Time Of The Gypsies, a pretty neat trick for a movie which ends with its young hero's vision, in the final moments of his life, of what can only be described as ìthe white turkey of deathî. You'd think that sort of thing would immediately get people on the jury giggling. I know I did.
I've been pondering this, mostly as I trudged down the hill for his latest, Life Is A Miracle, which is set in a village in Bosnia in 1992. What we can determine from the latest film is what it takes to win the Palme D'Or -- and this thing is an instant contender. A friend of mine was sitting near Quentin Tarantino, and he apparently really liked it.
Jam-pack the narrative with incident, occasionally breaking into awkwardly staged musical numbers during which people fall down. A lot. The formal term for this style of narrative is ìone damn thing after anotherî. Make sure that every musical number in the score sounds like every other musical number in the score, so that the audience can't get that lurching Slavic band music out of his head. (See also ìbeing whacked on the forehead with a hammer.î)
Make sure that none of the characters listen to the other characters, so that there's a lot of yelling.
Preferably while drunk. This leads to what some critics refer to as characters who have a ìnaked emotional honestyî.
Really, they're just loud drunks. Or, like the hero's mom in Life Is A Miracle, they're crazy.
The crazy character -- in this case, the hero's mom -- is really the only sane character. This is known as a Laingian insight into the human condition, or more formally, ìthe old switcherooî
Kusturica's films are the art movie equivelant of a really whacky Hong Kong sword movie, something like Eagle Shooting Heroes, where you can't parse the plot, at times you can't be sure of the characters' genders -- Brigitte Lin has never been more ravishingly androgynous -- and at times, when you least expect it, someone turns up in a gorilla suit. I believe it was Dovzhenko, in his Essays On Montage, who wrote ìthe only thing better than a movie with someone in a gorilla suit is a movie with someone in a giant gorilla suit.. But no one puts forth Eagle Shooting Heroes as anything more than a silly, highly entertaining movie whose director (Jeff Lau) is indulging his taste for whacky comedy. Eagle Shooting Heroes makes just as much sense as Life is a Miracle, or Underground, but no one suggests that it's a metaphor for the human condition. Maybe we should.
Which is probably disrespectful to someone who everyone thinks is a great cinematic artist.
Kusturica's a hell of a director -- you don't juggle as many narrative balls as he does in Life Is A Miracle without knowing a lot about film making.
He's also someone whose films pitch directly into an assortment of festival jury prejudices. He's dealing with serious topics. His films can be oppressively long -- Underground ran over three hours at its Cannes premiere, and Time Of The Gypsies almost two and a half. As with the Oscars, there's a belief at film festivals that the longer a movie is, the greater its importance.
And there's a lot of metaphors. Metaphors are good. I think that the donkey that keeps blocking the railroad tracks -- and unfinished railroad that will join Bosnia to Serbia through a tunnel, probably a dark tunnel of ethnic suspicion -- is a metaphor for the UN Observers, but that's probably just me.
A Toute De Suite (Benoit Jacquot, Un Certain Regard) -- Setting this doomed romance in the 70s, veteran French director Benoit Jacquot (School Of The Flesh) makes the odd decision to film in black and white. The 70s are a colour decade -- yes there were some great black and white films made in the 70s (Manhattan, Eraserhead, La maman Et La Putain all come to mind), but even then, it filming in black and white was considered a dangerously arty genre or the sign of a desperately low budget, the 70s being the last era when it was cheaper to process black and white film than it was to process colour.
Isild de Besco, a rather toothy young actor, plays Lise, an art student living with her parents who meets a young man (Ouassini Embarek, from The Good Thief) who's made questionable career choices, culminating in his decision to rob a bank, which sends him on the run, with her along for the ride. It's an odd psychological drama, where one can never be sure whether the girl's in love with the guy until he vanishes and she sinks into near aphasia.
There's an odd way in which Jacquot's generally acute sense of character psychology abandons him once we get to the Greek section of the film -- almost none of the characters she meets make much sense. The film has a great, grainy look to it, though he really should have set it a few years earlier -- the 60s are a more black and white decade than the 70s.
Mondovino (Jonathan Nossiter, Competition) -- A sudden addition to the Competition -- it was in Un Certain Regard until the first day of the Festival -- is a grandly scaled documentary on the politics of the world of wine. At 158 minutes, it may tell you more about the world of wine than you actually want to know, if you're someone for whom a $25 bottle of Burgundy qualifies as a big indulgence. It certainly is for me. Nossiter, whose previous films have been small, exceedingly quirky dramas like Signs And Wonders and Sunday, drives around France and California Nick Broomfield-style with a tiny crew and a head full of questions famous winemakers (various Mondavis and Rothschilds), unfamous winemakers (folks you've never heard of) and influential critics and consultants and dealers.
It's about globalization folks, and a conspiracy between top critics and the California growers to ìnapa-fyî the world. And, if you're someone who drinks high end wine this is probably important. It's actually very interesting but I must fault Nossiter on two things, one technical, one not.
The film does not look good -- he's gone for a grab a shot, digital video shaky-cam technique (at times one wonders if his cameraperson is even looking through the viewfinder) and the sound is atrocious, which at times has one reading the subtitles on the English speaking characters. Second -- there's a good deal of visual padding in the transitions -- which might be nice in a travelogue sense if the film had been shot with any eye to visual beauty -- and the film could be shortened by 20 minutes without any damage to the information or the argument. Maybe they could have cut out the Argentinian bit. About 140 minutes in, we come back to the French village where the films starts and think ìaah, now we're done, but it's off to Argentina.
How obsessed do you have to be to want to see an extra 12 minutes on Argentinian wine-making?
