Cannes Day Ten

Only five films today rather than the usual six or seven as my day’s final screening turned out to be a collection of shorts rather than the Icelandic film “A White, White Day,” one of the Critics Week three award winners that had been scheduled to play along with the other two award winners at the Miramar in its final three time slots.  I, at least, got to see the other two.  They, as did every other film I saw today, featured a smoking scene at a moment of stress in the story.



The first of the day occurred when Xavier Dolan screams at his mother in “Matthias and Maxine,”  “you don’t have to smoke the moment you get up.”  Dolan clearly has mother issues.  This is his third film with extreme shouting matches between mother and son.  It’s not the thrust of the story this time, just a side story.  Rather the movie centers around Dolan and his best friend Matthias, who is now a married lawyer, despite having had a gay relationship with Dolan that is still simmering.  Dolan is on the verge of going off to Australia for two years.  As is Dolan’s signature, heated exchanges, snide comments and characters telling one another off lace the film from start to finish.  At a final farewell party everyone present is brought to stunned silence when Matthias lashes out at Dolan referring to him as “ink stain,” as the Dolan character is disfigured with a red Gorbachev-like blotch covering the right side of his face. This dialogue-laced story won’t expand Dolan’s audience, but those who appreciate his style won’t be disappointed.



The day’s next two films, “Oh Mercy” taking place in Roubaix, France and “Summer of Changsha” taking place in Changsha, China, feature police interrogations where the person on the hot seat asks for a cigarette.  “Oh Mercy” began as if it could be another “Les Miserables” with a young, eager, idealistic cop new to the job trying to solve first a crime of arson, then murder.  It doesn’t have the intensity of “Les Miserables,” as rather than street action it focuses on the prolonged interrogations of two young women accused of murder with a quartet of cops trying to break them.



An older cop who is awaiting his resignation to be accepted is working on one final murder case in “Summer of Changsha.”  There are an abundance of wrinkles to the case, beginning with the sister of the murder victim telling the police her brother appeared to her in a dream and told her where his dismembered body could be found.  The woman has been brought in by the police to see if she can identify a hand that has washed up. She recognizes it as her brothers from a childhood scar. The woman has a complicated back story and may not be as innocent as she seems.  She too needs a cigarette when the pressure builds up for her.



A severed hand prances around Paris in the animated film “I Lost My Body” that was awarded the top prize by the Critics Week jury.  The hand is secondary though to a love story between a pizza delivery guy and a librarian.  The story is strong enough that one forgets that one is watching an animated film until the hand makes a periodic appearance.  The guy is smart and sensitive.  A furniture-maker he apprentices himself to starts to ask him if he has a lighter than catches himself saying “of course not” realizing he’s not the type to be a smoker.  



Jesse Eisenberg stars in the Irish film “Vivarium” that was also a Critics Week award-winner.  He and his girl friend are looking for a house and follow a salesman to a vast suburban development that no one has moved into.  The salesman disappears and they can’t find their way out of the development actually running out of gas after hours of driving around.  They keep returning to the house the agent showed them.  They can’t escape.  



This sci-fi thriller is meant to be some kind of metaphor of being trapped in suburbia.  Eisenberg starts dIgging a hole hoping to end up in Australia.  And guess what, it turns out he’s digging their graves.  He too becomes so stressed that while sitting in the sanctuary of the car with his wife, he lights up a cigarette defying his wife who shouts, “Not in my car.”  When it became clear this movie wasn’t going anywhere, it became almost as tedious as yesterday’s “Liberté.”



Critic Week screenings are preceded by a short or two, so I didn’t realize I was in for a series of them at the next screening.  A Danish short that starts out in a supermarket where a young woman encounters a friend who had recently blocked her on Facebook looked like it might be the Icelandic film I was anticipating.  When it wasn’t, I was wishing this had been a feature especially when they leave the supermarket separately and ride off on their bikes melding into the flow of other cyclists in Copenhagen.  An hour plus of shorts to end the day was a stark contrast to the four-hour film by Abdellatif Kechiche that awaited me at 8:30 the next morning in the Palais.