I was the first to park a bike at 8:15 this morning at the new, long-needed bike rack in front of the Debussy. There are 22 arches, enough to accommodate 44 bikes. Cyclists used to lock their bikes to the palm-ornamented barriers in front of the Debussy until “no bike parking” signs went up a couple of years ago, forcing us further away.
I was relieved as I approached the security check for the first time this year at the Palais that there wasn’t a pile of confiscated food and bottles, indicating that they may be more lenient than in the past. I had left my water bottle on my bike and had tried to hide my food for the day in secret pockets in my pack and vest. The guard just gave a quick look into the main pocket of my pack without probing the other smaller zippered compartments. I scampered up the several flights of stairs to the balcony in relief for the first of the 21 films in Competition—Jim Jarmusch’s vampire comedy “The Dead Don’t Die” starring Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sivigney. After nothing but subtitled films yesterday I felt a wave of easy familiarity when the film opened with Murray and Driver sitting in the front seat of a police car and they started speaking unaccented English.
Jarmusch provided chuckles aplenty from the very start with his signature understated wit coming from a host of off-beat characters including Steve Buscemi sitting at the counter in a diner wearing a “Make America White Again” hat talking with Danny Glover. The zombies don’t show up for awhile and when they do, the killing is less gruesome than the horror genre usually provides, with the gentle humor continuing to predominate. Tilda Swinton as a wacky Scottish funeral parlor operator in this small one-diner town could have stolen the picture if she’d had a larger role. But as with the picture as a whole, she wasn’t fully developed, making this more of a pleasant ditty of a film, than anything of much significance.
“Queens of the Field” was the first of three French films on my docket for the day. It was one of five films on soccer I spotted in the program, all in the Market other than a documentary on Diego Maradonna with an Out of Competition slot. The Queens are a group of women, many of whom are wives of the men who play soccer for the town team, who have been recruited to replace the men on the team who all have been suspended for their final three games of the season for getting into a fight in a game that resulted in the assault of a referee.
The town team, which had a rich 90-year history, is in danger of being relegated to a lower level, essentially putting it out of existence if it doesn’t gain at least a tie in one of the remaining three games. None of the men in town are in favor of the women playing soccer. Even the coach is initially adamantly opposed to the idea. The wealthy husband of one of the wives goes to extreme measure to sabotage her and the team. Only a couple of the women have any soccer experience. They are decimated in their first game, but then manage to recruit a former National-level player who is out on parole, who makes them competitive. They still have much to overcome. The plot doesn’t lag at any moment as they persevere.
I thought arriving an hour ahead of time for the two o’clock screening of the first Un Certain Regard film at the Debussy, “Bull” from the US, would be plenty of time. I even paused to fill my water bottle, which I was greatly regretting when I saw how long the line was and how slowly it was moving. As it was, I was the very last person to gain entrance to the 2,300-seat theater and was allowed to sit in a prime reserved seat that hadn’t been needed just as the lights dimmed. Evidently the word was out to the merits of this very fine film about a delinquent 14-year old girl living in a rundown neighborhood outside of Houston. Her mother is in prison and is being looked after by her very perturbed grandmother.
The girl wins the favor of her older delinquent friends by inviting them to crash the home of a black neighbor, a former bull rider, who goes away on weekends to work in rodeos in the very dangerous job of distracting bulls after they’ve thrown their riders. They drink his alcohol and pop his pills and have a wild time. When he returns home and finds his house trashed, he knows she is responsible and calls the police. The grandmother begs the guy not to press charges and let her grandchild clean the house. Thus develops a friendship between these two very authentic personalities. This was cinema-verité at its finest, an all-round exceptional film that will receive much attention in the months to come.
I didn’t expect to gain entry to the less than one hundred seat screening room showing “Grand Isle” starring Nicholas Cage, especially after it was given prominence in the day’s “Screen” magazine schedule of Market screenings. But it was less than half full. Cage plays an alcoholic Vietnam vet married to a former lounge singer. They are living in her family’s large home in Louisiana. Cage terrorizes a young man, a former military man himself, who comes to repair his fence, while his wife tries to seduce him. The plot becomes so far-fetched and convoluted that Cage and everyone else who ended up in this fiasco ought to be doing everything in their power to destroy every print or copy of it. The first-time director introduced it saying there would be no credits, as he was putting the final touches on the film. How he ever convinced Cage to submit to this would make a better movie than the movie itself. No one else in the film looked as if they’d ever acted in anything other than community theater. It was a full-on embarrassment and disaster.
I quickly put it behind me with the intensely real, socially-conscious “Battle of the Classes,” a French film about the struggles of a boy to survive in a school outside of Paris where he is the only white. The film opens with his parents talking with a real estate agent about selling their condo in Pairs. The father is a 40-year old drummer in a punk band long past it’s prime, and the mother an accomplished lawyer. The extreme idealist father doesn’t want to sell it for more than the 200,000 euros they paid for it a decade ago, while the agent says they are crazy as it is worth more than twice that and they’ll need all that to afford the house they want to buy for 450,000 euros in the neighborhood the lawyer, who is of Arabic descent, grew up in. She is more of a realist than he, so they do get 399,000 euros for it.
Their values mostly coincide, and they both agree that they don’t want to take their son out of his public school as all the other white parents are doing, putting their children in better private schools not dominated by blacks and Arabs. When their son continues to have a hard time of it, particularly mocked for being an atheist condemned to hell by all his religious classmates, they try to transfer him to another public school by pretending to live in its district. The black woman in charge was a fan of his dad’s punk band and remembers his song about fucking the Pope in the ass and is quite appalled when they try to cheat the system, accusing them of being worse than right-wingers. There is considerable substance to this film as the parents attempt to resolve their son’s predicament.
I was greatly looking forward to my next screening, a return of Kim Ki-Duk, the South Korean provocateur, whose breakout film, “The Isle,” was the most audacious film of 2000, and the first of several startlingly original films. But it has been quite a few years since he has offered a film. And what was playing here was just two screenings, both in theaters of less than 50 seats. Back in his heyday there would have been hundreds lined up to see his next. But this time there were just a handful standing off to the side when I showed up. A sign said “Guests Only.” And that was being adhered to. I hung out a bit hoping the guardian might relent and let the few of us uninvited in if there were empty seats, but there was none of that.
My delay prevented me from getting in to see the special screening of “Easy Rider” in the Buñuel two flights of stairs up. I joined the line, but fell twenty-five people short. That at least allowed me to bike to the Croisette for the final Director’s Fortnight screening of the night—a French surreal black comedy, “Deerskin.”
A goofy guy infatuated with his vintage deerskin jacket with tassles offers people money to let him film them throwing their jackets in the trunk of his car and saying, “I’ll never wear a jacket again,” then drives off with their jackets saying, “I have proof you don’t want your jacket.” He checks into a remote hotel and tells a bartender he is shooting a movie. She says she is an aspiring film editor. She is as much of a schmuck as him and withdraws all her money to help him make the movie he pretends to be shooting after he enlists her to edit it. There are chuckles along the way though this harmless, inconsequential film won’t find an audience beyond the film fest and small art theater circuit.
I’ve gone two days without a documentary, maybe a first. Every time I crossed paths with Ralph today he was raving about a doc about the street photographer Jim Marshall he saw while I was watching the soccer movie. If I’d only been turned away from the Nicholas Cage movie I would have seen a doc on the chef Diana Kennedy.
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