After the film, I wandered through the shops, ogling the haute couture, buying the usual hundred-dollar brassiere. I succumbed to the shoe stores and bought a pair in woven orange leather. You begin to feel superficial and greedy here, so you might as well not fight it.
But Cannes wouldn’t be Cannes without the price tags and the bottom feeding. This is part of movie culture: filmmaking must marry hard cash and commercial constraints with artistic vision. And this year at Cannes, even though the festival was critically considered a mixed bag, there was abundant evidence that independent cinema is as robust as ever—regardless of what Hollywood does.
For me one discovery was Red Road. A first feature by Andrea Arnold, a forty-eight-year-old British director, this is an assured, suspenseful drama about a Glasgow woman who works for the city as a video surveillance operator. One day, her monitors catch the image of a couple making love in a field; the man turns out to be someone from her past, an ex-con who has clearly wreaked havoc in her life. First on her video monitors and then for real, she stalks him, confronts him, and moves through her desire for revenge to an ending that disarms our conceptions of gender, class, and forgiveness. Red Road also features an ambiguous scene of rough sex, something of a theme in movies at Cannes this year. I could never tell whether I was watching a rape or a consensual romp—an ambiguity David Cronenberg explored in the now-legendary staircase coupling of A History of Violence. The narrative use of video imagery in Red Road combined with the theme of voyeurism also evokes the cool aesthetic of Canadian director Atom Egoyan, except that this film represents a “female gaze” that seems to want to move beyond the isolation of the main characters. On the other hand, the film has one too many warm moments that involve a dog. But this film struck a new note.
On my last day, a mighty wind was blowing through the streets—alarming, almost like a film scene that presages catastrophe. When you walk out of the movie world and into weather like this, with the Mediterranean whipped up into whitecaps at noon, it can feel ominous. I slept in that morning, wearing an eye mask and earplugs with the doves hoo-hooting it out on the balcony. Overstimulation had set in. Watching three or four films a day, regardless of their content, is unavoidably aphrodisiac. It’s nothing personal; you’re just inflated by too many images and a steady diet of big-screen emotion. I think the loneliness of the critics at Cannes (a demographic that is overwhelmingly male) accounts for the fact that, by mid-festival, they tend to develop aesthetic crushes on otherwise indefensible actresses and movies.
Yesterday, I seat-banged my way out of two movies that didn’t hold, got turned away at the American Pavilion party, then stumbled into a reception at the Canadian Pavilion, where plates of reassuring cheese cubes were featured. That evening I saw Climates, a brilliant new film by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. His previous film, Distant, won the Grand Prix at Cannes three years ago. Climates is a magisterially paced portrait of the subtle shifts of feeling and power between a couple (played by the director, and his wife, Ebru Ceylan) on the verge of breaking up. It is Turkish Bergman; very little happens, powerful emotions are in play, and it is riveting. There are long-held, unforgettable scenes of thick snow falling on Ebru’s face as it registers love, hate, longing, and regret all at once. Shot in a high-definition digital format that renders the micro-texture of every surface while conveying the luminosity of film, Ceylan’s unerring eye reminds us what cinema can and can’t do—and how few words are required if the actors, the images, and the situations are eloquent. In a field of films dominated by male directors, Climates also stands out for the honesty with which the director portrays his deeply flawed male hero, who wants his old girlfriend back—but only on his terms.
Ceylan brings intelligence and a droll wit to claustrophobic stories in which mountains, weather, landscape, and hotel rooms all have the strength and presence of characters. Almodóvar amplifies his stars, letting us see their humanity and beauty. Spending time with these two directors makes you feel good about the future of filmmaking.
My star moments at Cannes this year were rare, as usual. I never know what to say to movie stars. One year, at a beachfront party, I did have a few laughs with Ian McKellen, who was trolling the function for party boys. And last year I ran into Charlotte Rampling so many times, I began to wonder whether she was stalking me. This year, I found myself drawn not to the stars themselves, but to the spectacle of the world press spying on them. Cannes is, after all, about pictures, and stars: the flashbulb moment of consummation says it all.
I saw this in action my last morning in Cannes when I went to the Club, a press refuge tucked away on the fourth floor of the Palais. It has a terrace that overlooks the Mediterranean, which was once again whipped into a froth by the crazy wind. Luxury yachts crowded the bay. A tired journalist in black leather pants was sound asleep on the white leather banquette. I heard a strange soundtrack of urgent, wind-carried cries, as if from a boatload of people drowning. I looked over the terrace; the cries were coming up from a photo call taking place on the grounds below. These are held beneath a flapping white canopy, with hundreds of photographers standing in tiers, armed with giant telephoto lenses. Some of them bring portable stepladders. Handlers lead the stars to a chest-level blue prop, where they pirouette, front and back, as the photographers shout their names—Monica! MonicaMonicaMonica...regarde ici!...Nick over here, Press Internationale... NickNickNick, s’il vous plait...
On this particular day, I heard them calling the name of a new star: AvrilAvrilAvril! The formerly media-shy, punk-pop skater girl from Napanee, Ontario, was encountering, perhaps for the first time, this great wall of hungry cameras. She already seemed accustomed to this glassy gaze, unlike Gena Rowlands, playing to a certain face in the front row. I watched the fledgling actress pose this way and that, as the jittery fireworks of the flashbulbs went on and on. It was the recent-edition Avril Lavigne, with long platinum-blonde tresses and grown-up, glamorous maquillage. As she smiled and basked, she looked like a baby floating in a warm bath—a celebrity-in-progress, surrendering to the baptism that is Cannes.
