Cannes diary: day two

On somnambulism, glamor and puppets

(I realize the Palme d'Or has been announced, and Cannes is but a residual memory now, but I'll continue posting these anyway.)

Seeing My Blueberry Nights first was one of my primary objectives of going to Cannes, and I just couldn’t pass up the chance of seeing it before anybody else. So, after missing last night’s premiere, I was hell bent on getting into the ‘Day After Screening,’ a special repeat screening for competition films held at the Salle du 60e, the theater erected on a rooftop specially for the festival’s 60^th anniversary. Nobody, however, told me that the theater only seated 400 people, and I was greeted by a snaking long queue a few hundred feet away from the theater. This, despite arriving an hour before the screening was due to start. The madness of film buffs and their obsessions over Wong Kar Wai…

Needless to say how disappointed I was over not getting in, but nothing could beat the crushing disappointment that was Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Ploy, which I saw at a market screening after lunch, before it premiered at the Director’s Fortnight section. How it was even selected and how it quickly gained so much praise is way beyond me. Reuniting with his 6ixtynin9 star Lalita Panyopas, I expected (like many) a return to his crowd-pleasing style of filmmaking that brought about the wonderfully flavored yet irrepressibly dark Monrak Transistor. Instead, Pen-Ek seems to have gone off the deep end, getting more and more abstract with every film he makes. I admit I’d really loved Last Life in the Universe, and, despite some false notes, Invisible Waves was not half as bad as many people made it out to be, but Ploy – whoa ho – is a completely different beast altogether.

The film is spare and empty, with barely a premise to string everything together, which would be fine if it had stayed that way without straining to be something else. Harkening back to the 70s experimental Robert Altman films, it starts out as a dreamy exercise in somnambulism, the jetlagged state (that I was in while watching the movie) in which dream and reality seem equally real – and unreal. The problem, though, is that Pen-Ek introduces so many characters (six major characters in total, including a couple that only fucks throughout the entire movie) and plot strands into a complex story, then completely abandons them, leaving the film to flounder and gasp for air in empty stares. It is easy to mistake its clean lines and smooth camera moves as minimalism, but the movie is anything but minimalistic. Frustrated at not being able to tie up its strands together, it introduces even more bizarro plot twists (and singing sequences) that would make David Lynch proud, yoking them together with a tenuous mood that threatens to unravel into nothingness all the time. In short, it feels like a whole lot of sound and fury, but none of the real thing.

Now, as in Last Life in the Universe, Pen-Ek’s movies don’t have to make sense to be really affecting and evocative. Pen-Ek himself has said that he often didn’t know what his movies meant or how they are meant to turn out in the end. I think the capriciousness of filmmakers depends a lot on how much the audience is willing to indulge, and, for him (and us) to find a meaning to his own work, it would take a dollop of trust and a whole course in patience to connect to the material. And the amount of trust and patience depends on how much feeling the movie can enlighten, which is hard in this case. The dreaminess he tries to evoke feels very much like emptiness, and he gives one the impression of a spoilt filmmaker pushing around morsels on his plate rather than taking a huge chomp out of his ideas, just because he can. Sooner or later (or around the musical sequence, seriously), the (really) jetlagged brain will stop trying to find meaning in any of his characters, illogicalities appear for no reason, events stop connecting to each other, and there is completely no point in watching the film at all.

The thing that irked me the most was the acting, or what little was demanded of them, even more so when all things considered, Pen-Ek’s greatest strengths is way with actors (see Monrak Transistor). Casting huge stars in the roles of common people, even menial tasks like emptying an ashtray and making a bed are utterly unconvincing. You’d expect the actions to be more deliberate and familiar, but in little actions like this, they inadvertently break fourth wall. Allan Dwan, one of Hollywood’s great silent era directors, once recounted an anecdote about Gloria Swanson, who was made to ride the subway everyday and work as a counter-girl to open up her body language to tasks which otherwise would be ordinarily out of her way. If only Pen-Ek had done the same with his actors.

After a half-completed screening (there were no English subtitles) of Therese by Alain Cavalier (whose work was being retro-ed at the Director’s Fortnight section), my day ended with the gala of Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon. It being the premiere, with cast and crew present, it was a tight squeeze getting in, but well worth it as squeezing together with me was none other than J. Hoberman from the Village Voice, fighting hard to get past security to scale the blue-carpet steps of the Debussy. The theater was packed to the rafters with a palpable sense of excitement before the screening started. Stars dotted the landscape galore, – is that Shu Qi I spy talking to Chang Chen? – and indignant film people were fighting for seats in the free-seating theater. This, and the lines for the WKW film yesterday (and later, the Coen brothers’ film), reminds me of how important Cannes really is, despite all the noise and superficial glamor its critics often complain about. Never is film more important than when in Cannes, and the sad reality of the films shown here is that in spite of all their after parties and red-carpet excitement, the filmmakers would have to fight for distributors and worry about box-office receipts after the festival is over. Alas, a WKW or the Coen brothers film playing to a full-house with long lines and people fighting to get in will probably be playing to empty cinemas alongside blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean 3. There is no chance in the world that these auteurs would get their work out to the public if not for a glamorous festival like Cannes, and that is probably its main conviction, despite how laughable all the fanfare might seem after. Case in point, it’s the first Hou film I’ve been to with the audience this excited. People were cheering at every name in the opening credits, and taking photos of the Cannes logo that preceded the film. Finally, and this is probably true of all film festivals, movie-crazy people are the majority.

The film which unspooled, if nothing else, deserved a place in the main competition. Compared to many of the Palme d’Or nominees, Hou’s film was every bit as philosophical but was, most importantly, extremely light. Depicting the story-less story of a puppeteer (Juliette Binoche) raising her son with his Taiwanese babysitter in Paris, the film, which was originally meant to be a remake of Le Ballon Rouge, inevitably turned out to be a Hou film through and through. In fact, his light touch makes it slightly reminiscent of Café Lumiere, – Hou’s tribute to Ozu – more heavy on dialog though no less lyrical. He revisits familiar themes in The Puppetmaster, about life and art, – about how our lives resemble puppets without strings, and the strange ways which, through the course of our lives, we connect to the people around us – but he does not try to offer any ‘profound’ insights or epiphanies. Instead, like always, he uses life as his raw material and takes away the elements that make life sometimes confusing and overwhelming, framing it in his perspective and offering some poetic images as the red balloon floats through Paris, unguided and unwilled, through its course. It is as if it is being tied to invisible strings from the heavens, as all the characters’ lives are.