What happens to all these throbbing films that prowl Cannes? From Cosmopolis to Holy Motors, it's been a bumpy ride this year and we've run out of fuel. Where's that white limousine when you need one?
Cannes ends for me as it began, in the abiding darkness of the morning screening. Two rows down a man is snoring; across the aisle a woman is coughing. From time to time, the cougher wakes the snorer and there follows a few minutes of relative peace before he resumes his gentle buzz-saw rhythm. This festival has grown sick and tired and ready for bed.
But wait. Wake up, don't die just yet. A film is playing and it might be a winner. Up on the screen, Robert Pattinson's hollow-eyed young plutocrat is being ferried across a creepy metaphysical Manhattan, all but entombed in his white limousine. "What happens to all these throbbing limousines that prowl the city?" he wonders at one point. "Where do they spend the night?" It is a line that prompts a ripple of laughter for those who sat through Holy Motors three days before, and saw those white limos lined up in an underground garage, talking to each other, their tail-lights blinking. In Cannes, at this late stage, the films start talking to each other too.
Cosmopolis, praise be, is flat-out marvellous, a 21st-century American horror story, haunted by "the glow of cyber-capitalism". David Cronenberg does an elegant job of converting Don DeLillo's chilly, mysterious prose to the screen, while the performances have just the right wonky, off-kilter intensity. I particularly liked Mathieu Amalric's brief appearance as a pie-hurling anti-globalisation protester. More films should include a cameo for Amalric as the phantom pie-thrower.
My hopes are high for the wartime saga In the Fog, by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, though it turns out to be another of those infuriating Cannes near-misses: an iron-clad dreadnought of a picture, impressive in its way but lacking the flash and fire of Loznitsa's previous picture, My Joy. I stumble out deflated; that old familiar feeling.
Where is the lightness, or the thrill of discovery? This has, on the whole, been a festival of laborious lift-offs and bumpy descents; of also-rans and almost-greats. The weather has been lousy, while the competition has seemed altogether more spotty than in previous years. Over the past 10-days we've witnessed a couple of worthy, bloated heavyweights (Into the Fog, Beyond the Hills), a trio of nimble, punchy middleweights (Jagten, Killing Them Softly, Rust and Bone) along with a great gaggle of glass-chinned losers.
Three films, I think, loom head and shoulders above the other combatants – and these pictures could scarcely be more different from one another. Michael Haneke's Amour was a stately, tender chamber-piece, superbly played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva; Cosmopolis a lithe, liquid glide over the surface of millennial fears. And then there was Holy Motors, that jaunty, flamboyant circus of a movie, replete with fairytale ghouls, talking cars and a mad interlude of accordion folk. Who knows what will win? It's time to leave, my brain is soup. Here's hoping it's a film with a white limousine.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/may/25/cannes-2012-diary-day-10
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