CANNES 2012: AMOUR, LAURENCE ANYWAYS and RUST AND BONE—By Ryan Lattanzio

Thanks to the good people at the San Francisco Film Society, the Consulate General of France in SF, the French American Cultural Society and La Semaine de la Critique, I was sent last week to the 65th Cannes International Film Festival as a critic and jury member. Six days into the festival, and I have managed to see a ton of films both good and bad, and I am living the dream of the magpie cinephile.

To start, the best film I have seen so far in the Main Competition is Michael Haneke's Amour. Who knew that the Austrian provocateur behind such films as The Seventh Continent (1989), The Piano Teacher (2001), Cache (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009 Palme d'Or winner) was capable of feeling anything? Amour is the director's most emotional, tender film to date. It marks a shift in his career that resembles late Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer: restrained, pensive and deeply felt.

Amour is about love, of course, but it is also two hours of a woman dying. Yet Haneke renders this depressing material redemptive and utterly compelling. It's as good a rumination as any about getting old and getting on in life.

The film is also a tribute to seasoned French actors, starring Jean Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as Georges and Anne, an elderly married couple whose amour is put to the greatest test of all when Anne suffers a stroke that paralyzes half of her body. Georges, with the help of his daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert), must care for Anne in the final months of her life. We know from the outset that she is going to die. The film opens with police breaking into the couple's apartment to find Anne splayed on the bed amid a funereal bouquet. Natch, in Haneke tradition, this image cuts to the title card Amour.

Trintignant is my pick for Best Actor at the festival, which ends on the 27th when the Palme d'Or and other awards are announced. As Georges, he is calm, sensible and devoted to his wife, yet we also see the personal toll Anne's condition takes on him in several unsettling dream sequences which punctuate this lovely, elegiac film.

With the exception of one crucial scene, Amour never leaves the apartment, which looks more like the chateau in Bergman's Cries and Whispers than a bourgeois flat. We are confined to these large rooms with Georges and Anne for two hours, but instead of suffocating, it's riveting. Haneke does not sanitize with cliches or sentimentality, and like all his films, Amour is starkly realized, but this time with more heart than head (something new for Mr. Haneke, otherwise known for his cinema of nihilism and dread). I walked out of the theater completely wrecked. I didn't know Haneke could make me feel such feelings.

Another excellent film, this one from the Un Certain Regard category, is enfant terrible Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways. With this glam epic, Dolan has made his most personal film yet. All he had to do was not cast himself in it.

With its huge, episodic structure spanning 10 years in the life of a couple, Laurence—shot with vibrant color in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio that immediately evokes Dolan's cinephilic nostalgia—smacks of '90s era Pedro Almodovar in telling, through broad brush strokes and intimate moments, the story of a man who realizes he was meant to be a woman. The title character, played with sensitivity and bravado by Melvil Poupaud (a regular cast member of Ruiz and Ozon), becomes a transsexual over the course of the movie but his girlfriend Frederique (the effervescent Suzanne Clément whose performance recalls Kate Winslet's as the manic pixie dream girl in Eternal Sunshine) decides to stick with him. She wrestles with this decision for the rest of her life, as Laurence and Fred are constantly on-and-off, hot and cold.

Given that the film clocks in at nearly three hours, and though it feels surprisingly breezy, Laurence, like Dolan's coiffed pompadour, is going to need a pair of scissors if it's ever going to find an audience across the Atlantic. But it's a big, beautiful film, where we really get the sense that these two flawed but endlessly watchable people are crazy in love with each other. Dolan pumps '80s New Wave tunes, sometimes ad nauseum, into the film and its uber-'90s aesthetic (the shoulder pads, my god those shoulder pads). Sometimes his tendency to smear his style all over his substance does a disservice to the characters and the story, but Laurence is leaps beyond Dolan's previous efforts J'ai tue ma mere (2009) and Les amours imaginaires (2010). Though the 23-year-old director is not quite ready to sack his punk sensibilities and aesthetic attitudes, Laurence is a mature film, a near-masterpiece that's been one of my favorites at the festival.

A film I was far less thrilled with but one that is generating a lot of buzz around La Croisette is Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone, or as it is known in its very chewy French title De rouille et d'os. It is Audiard's follow-up to the 2009 political drama A Prophet. Like that film, Rust and Bone takes its characters and audience on a grand tour of emotional hell. Overwrought melodrama with some seriously good acting make up this otherwise flavorless picture about (you guessed it) two broken souls who come together amid the scraps of their personal tragedies.

As Stephanie, an orca trainer turned paraplegic after a random accident on the job, Marion Cotillard throws herself headlong into her stripped down, untreated performance. The role churns the actress through the wringer and finds her doing some brutal gymnastics of grief and otherwise. Cotillard, along with Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead) as Ali, a single dad, amateur boxer and antihero par excellence, could potentially nab the Best Actress prize. In one scene in a hospital—as much as I hate screaming scenes in hospitals—she articulates her emotions with rare fluency. I refuse to dispel the nature of her accident, as forthcoming American trailers no doubt will, but the way she cries out mes jambes, mes jambes is some of the most gut-wrenching, heart-crushing stuff I've witnessed at the festival.

With its contrived incident-driven plot, which is overly determinant of the characters' lives, the film stinks of Alejandro González Iñárritu gone out of control. But there is also, undoubtedly, a reckoning with cinema Americana, like that of Darren Aronofsky, with the film's trembling camera and gritty lens filter. But at the beating bloody heart of the film is the love story of Stephanie and Ali, who meet at a club where Ali is a bouncer. Beneath all the film's ramblings about working class malaise, and a narrative momentum that's frozen in melo-molasses, there is something so moving about the film that I cannot shake. Plus, it uses Katy Perry's pop ballad "Firework" in such an unexpectedly tender way, I couldn't help but feel my heart strings pulse and pull a little bit. Rust and Bone will be nominated for Academy Awards, mark my words, and it's really going to work with American audiences.

FRAMELINE34 2010—Michael Hawley Wraps It Up

By the time Frameline34's Closing Night film unspooled on Gay Pride Day, everyone seemed to agree it had been the organization's best festival in years. I'm not sure I concur, simply because imho the fest has been on a high for some time now. Or maybe I've just gotten good at sniffing out stuff I'll like, to the exclusion of what might work my last gay nerve. This year's films ranged from the frequently sublime to the occasionally unremarkable, but mileage varies and even those lesser works found receptive audiences. All told, I saw 34 programs—18 of them prior to the festival at press screenings, other festivals and on DVD screener. Here are some highlights of those I watched during Frameline34 proper.

We Were Here: Voices from the AIDS Years in San Francisco—If you caught the sneak preview of David Weissman's powerful new documentary, the experience no doubt overshadowed whatever else you might have seen during the 11-day festival. It proved to be unbearably cathartic for some, and anguished sobs could be heard emanating from all parts of the nearly sold-out Castro Theater. The film reflects back to a time—can it really be almost 30 years ago—when a disease turned this city into a war zone and the LGBT community rallied to care for its own. Weissman wisely chose to tell this story from the POV of five who were on the front lines, rather than through a multitude of voices. It received perhaps the longest Castro Theater standing ovation I've witnessed in 35 years, and afterwards Weissman had the audience sit in meditative silence before beginning the Q&A. The version we saw is still being tweaked, which is perhaps why the Frameline34 screening was a "sneak preview" rather than a premiere. It seemed pretty damn near perfect to me.

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls—My hat goes off to whoever programmed this documentary about yodeling lesbian twins from New Zealand immediately after We Were Here. It served as a counteractive tonic to the previous film's intensity, and was almost more fun than a festival screening has a right to be. Singer-comedian-activists Jools and Lynda Topp took to the Castro stage and kicked things off with a rousing, foot-stomping Maori welcoming song, and later returned to give the audience yodeling lessons. In between we were treated to Leanne Pooley's exceptionally well made and inspirational doc.

Sex, Leather Jackets and Cigarettes—I attended Yale film professor Ron Gregg's informative Frameline lecture, Gay Aesthetics and Iconography in the Films of Andy Warhol, which primed me for that same evening's program of two Warhol shorts and one near-feature, Vinyl. The latter is a tortured and rambling low-rent interpretation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, but it features a sock-o mid-section in which Warhol Factory beauty Gerard Malanga dances a furious frug to Martha and the Vandellas' "Nowhere to Hide." The song ends and then immediately begins again, Malanga dancing with even wilder abandon in the second go-round. Meanwhile, too-cool-for-school Edie Sedgwick does a seductive, sit-down dance off to the side. I just loved seeing this on a big screen in 16mm. In the YouTube clip below, fast-forward to the 3:30 mark for the dance, or watch from the beginning to see how that segment radically contrasts with the rest of the movie.



I Killed My Mother—I was wowed by this film when I first saw it at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, and feared the disappointment a second viewing might bring. But nothing doing. Watching it again with a packed, queer audience at the Castro, in lush 35mm, only convinced me that this brutally hilarious and touching tale of an uber-dysfunctional mother-son relationship is the most auspicious debut by a teenage powerhouse writer/director/actor in like … forever. Bravo Monsieur Xavier Dolan! Regent Releasing has picked this up for U.S. distribution and if we're lucky it'll be in theaters soon.

The Consul of Sodom—For close to 25 years, my friend and fellow Frameline fanatic Carlo and I have used the euphemism "masterpiece" to describe any non-porn film that contains full-frontal male nudity. If we say it in a loud, emphatic voice, it means there was also at least one erect penis. We both agreed that The Consul of Sodom was a MASTERPIECE! Genitalia aside, the film is a smart and passionate portrayal of Catalan poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, a gay man of privilege who fought to live an uncompromised life during a time a great repression. Michael Guillén has written eloquently about the film previously on The Evening Class.

On These Shoulders We Stand; William S. Burroughs: A Man Within—Although they pretty much stick to a talking heads and archival materials template, I appreciated these docs for the information they imparted. Most people are familiar with the history of LGBT rights in New York and San Francisco—but Los Angeles? Now I know all about L.A.'s "masquerading" law that was used to persecute both male and female cross-dressers, as well as the infamous 1968 police raid on The Patch bar. The film features some amazing old photos, several of which tend to get overused. What struck me about the Burroughs doc was its emphasis on the man's influence on punk rock. We get interviews with Patti Smith, Jello Biafra, Iggy Pop and best of all, video footage of a Sonic Youth pilgrimage to Burroughs' Kansas home. The true topper, however, is an audio clip of Burroughs singing Marlene Dietrich's "Falling in Love Again," in German!

Howl—Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's new film about Allen Ginsberg was much better than expected, at least when compared to the tepid reviews it received from Sundance and Berlin. The film's three distinctive strands don't always mesh, but the animated poem is glorious, the obscenity trial is engaging and James Franco gives the Ginsberg portrayal his all. This was Frameline34's closing night film and it was really neat seeing Franco grace the Castro Theater stage for the second time in less than a year.

Spring Fever—This film from Chinese director Lou Ye got universally crummy reviews at Cannes 2009, before shocking the naysayers with a prize for Best Screenplay. I found myself completely caught up during its first third—a vibrant and sexy look at modern urban Chinese living modern lives, with a multi-sexual ménage à quatre at its core. Then it got bogged down in a bunch of strained, unconvincing melodramatics that made me fear, as did Lou's previous film Summer Palace, that the damn thing might never ever end. And maybe I'm misreading, but Spring Fever appears to say some disturbing things about the poisonous effect gays have on the lives of straights. I expected Lou Ye to be cooler than that. Still, I'm grateful to Frameline for showing it—especially in 35mm—and letting me judge for myself.

Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.

PSIFF10: I KILLED MY MOTHER—An Evening Class Question and Q&A With Xavier Dolan, Anne Dorval, François Arnaud, & Patricia Tulasne

Who hasn't heard about the meteoric rise to notoriety of Xavier Dolan, the Québécois teenager whose first feature film J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother, 2009) received—not only an eight-minute standing ovation at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival—but, three awards from Cannes' Director's Fortnight? Festival audiences have embraced the energy and evident promise in Dolan's film, which has earned nominations and awards worldwide. I Killed My Mother arrived at PSIFF10 as Canada's submission for Best Foreign Language film at the 82nd Academy Awards®. Although it did not make the Oscars® shortlist, it did garner Anne Dorval PSIFF10's FIPRESCI Award for Best Actress "for her nuanced performance as a bruised and bruising matriarch mired in love/hate land with her teenage son."

Though Dolan has gained much worldly wisdom in just the past couple of years and is now all of 20, I had to ask:

Michael Guillén: As such a young artist, how are you coping with so much notoriety suddenly thrust on you with your first feature film? How is that feeling for you?

Xavier Dolan: It makes me nervous somehow. And some days I think that I don't have the energy nor the talent to deal with this. But then when you're in a group like this with your friends and traveling, you realize there is a total other side to the media experience, there are audiences that ask great questions and interesting things to those activities. Another thing too is that sometimes I question the enthusiasm around the movie. I wonder if the movie is being appreciated? Or if it's only because when I did it I was kind of young? Those are the interrogations through which I go some days. There are all kinds of questions and neuroses you get to deal with. But I think it's not so bad being selected in festivals. I think it's good.

On Writing the Script

Dolan: This film is actually inspired by and adapted from a novella that I had written when I was 16 in college. I had just dropped out of CEGEP, which is kind of equivalent to junior college here in the States. I had nothing to do but kill time and write movies so I wrote this film. I thought it would be irrelevant and of no interest to anyone because it was too personal and nobody would really care about it. So I put it back in a drawer and worked on other very bad screenplays, which unfortunately the actors had to read. Finally, I understood that I was working on those vainly so I took back I Killed My Mother and gave it to a friend who plays the teacher in the movie and she told me it could be worth investing time and energy into. That's basically how it all started. Then, of course, I thought I could play the lead because it's my story. When I wrote it, I thought maybe it would be the occasion to finally act. Originally I'm an actor; but, for years all my auditions resulted in the same broken record saying: "Too young, too old, too small, too tall" so I didn't act anymore and I missed that a lot.

On His Influences

Dolan: I have a lot of influences, but for this film I don't know if there are so many references I can give. I guess that I thought My Own Private Idaho would be something I would want to pay tribute to. It's not so obvious. The stories are not so similar. But the Super 8 images that you saw at the end, I had seen that bit in My Own Private Idaho and I thought it could be a nice way to end the movie. Other than that? I admire a lot of people; I admire Truffaut, Godard, Bergman. I don't think my movie is like their's. It's just a personal story. It's not really into homage, tributes or references.

On Casting His Actors

Dolan: I knew Anne [Dorval] and she had read several scripts that I had written that were not good. I came one day and said, "Listen, I know that you've read many things that were not essentially ready or fine-tuned; but, I have this screenplay that I just wrote and if you could take a look at it, that would be great." I met Patricia [Tulasne] on a movie that we shot together as actors, which was a terrible experience. She was my mother in that movie and we were killed with a shotgun. We had squibs and blood and all the blood was getting into my hair and it was horrible. The director was French and he was horrible. I met François [Arnaud] because he is a young actor from my generation. I saw a play in Montreal in which he had a role. That's basically how we came together. It's a rather stirring story for me because the project was refused by many people. It traveled from offices to offices, and to reviewers who didn't really believe in the film and didn't believe this would happen; but, some people never really left and always remained faithful throughout the experience, my best friends, the actors who were always there, and the producers.

On How the Experienced Actresses Felt
Being Directed By A Teenager

Anne Dorval: It was not just a guy who was 17 years old. He knew exactly what he wanted. It's easy when you meet people like him to abandon yourself. To let go of your fears.

Patricia Tulasne: He was really open to suggestions. If you had something to say, to propose, he was really open. It was easy to work with him. You were in coalition. We don't feel the difference of age.

François Arnaud: I'm not an actress.

On Whether His Parents Have Seen the Movie
and What They Had to Say

Dolan: Yes, they did. And they said, "Congratulations." My father is very proud and says out loud, "I'm not like this in real life." And he's right. My mother says that too, "I'm not like this in real life" and she's wrong. [Laughter.] Vengeance! She saw the film. There weren't a lot of words. We didn't get into an extensive conversation about it. She said, "I loved it. I cried and I laughed" and that's a great reaction: laughing and crying. It's what's expected. But we really didn't talk about it. Was she insulted? No. Well, maybe. Yes? Like I said, we didn't talk about it. I think time has to pass before we can reach that step of communication of talking about it as a work of art. We have to wait.

02/04/10 UPDATE: As reported at indieWIRE, the young people's jury of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) awarded the MovieSquad IFFR 2010 Award to Canadian Xavier Dolan's debut feature J’ai Tué Ma Mère. The award comes along with $2,000 to spend on promoting the film within the Netherlands.

Cross-published on Twitch.