I must start with a clarification: I've given you a wrong steer, I now don't think the Abbas Kiarostami film Certified Copy will be making too many waves at the awards on Sunday. I don't think the Palme D'Or is heading that way, although, at a push, it's possible that some thanks-for-coming awards might well be in the bag. In a nutshell, I was very disappointed. A tipster who liked the film described it as Viaggio In Italia meets Before Sunset, and I immediately took that to mean that the content would be similar to that of the former, with the light, romantic tone of the latter.
In retrospect, it was a very literal comparison – the film follows Before Sunset's real-time structure, while the content is almost exactly that of Viaggio In Italia. And I really don't like Viaggio In Italia. Set in Italy, the film stars Juliette Binoche as a French single mother who becomes attracted to a British writer (opera singer William Shimell) and takes him on a trip to a nearby town in Tuscany. Over time, it is revealed that they are actually a married couple whose marriage has lost its spark, and this is their 15th anniversary. Kudos is due to the Iranian Kiarostami for stretching a bit, but the wooden dialogue was a chore, and Shimell's performance made the film airless and unengaging. To tell you the truth, I couldn't wait to get out.
Much, much lighter in tone (which is putting it mildly) were Gregg Araki's Kaboom (pictured, a midnight screening) and Quentin Dupieux's Rubber. Inspired by a conversation with John Waters, Kaboom is a kind of screwball teen sex comedy, in which a sexually ambiguous high-schooler (Thomas Dekker) is plagued by visions of a corridor, an apartment door to a room numbered 19 and a dumpster. To say any more would rob this entertaining romp of its main weapon: surprise. At times it's like Clueless, at others like Donnie Darko, and the cast (including Britain's Juno Temple) has a fine time with the anarchic premise. The tagline says “Sex, drugs and the end of the fucking world”, which is a pretty decent summary.
Likewise, Rubber has been described as “the killer tyre movie”, which it certainly is. Filmed in California, it's a funny, dream-like meta-comedy in which a tyre rises from slumber in the desert and, after an altercation with a motorist, develops a psychopathic hatred of all human beings, going on a murderous rampage in a nearby one-horse town. Yes, this is exactly what happens. After a hilarious speech about the importance of “no sense” in films as diverse as JFK, ET and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the film gets underway with a team of spectators watching the film through binoculars. These are the film's audience, making comments like, “Is it in colour or black and white?” and “Does it have subtitles?”, before annoying the cast so much that, midway through, they try to poison them. Rubber polarised audiences pretty comprehensively, but Chris and I really liked this surrealist comedy, especially co-star Roxanne Mesquida as the mysterious mean girl who captures Robert The Tyre's heart.
On a more serious note, Lucy Walker's Countdown To Zero brought some heavyweight political gravitas to the festival, in the shape of outed CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, who lends her expertise to this compelling doc about the need to get rid of “loose nukes” -- the scary amount of nuclear devices (some 23,000) that are stockpiled in various corners of the globe. Mixing facts, figures and anecdotal evidence, the film is an Inconvenient Truth-style wake-up call about the very real possibility of a terrorist nuclear attack.
It seems bizarre at first, but the film makes the case that only disarmament by the biggest world powers will lead to world peace. I didn't quite get this at first, but not only is there a high statistical possibility of nuclear bombs being activated by accident, the more there are, the more can be stolen and traded. And given that Al Qaeda is desperate to get hold of (or even make) one, this is a very real possibility too. Very different to Walker's usual docs (Blind Sight, Waste Land), Countdown To Zero is a documentary with a very real agenda, and its chilling description of a nuclear attack cannot be shrugged off too easily.
Charles Ferguson's doc Inside Job was pretty good too, an account of the recent financial scandal in America. This is was as infuriating as Walker's doc was terrifying, and Matt Damon's measured narration lends a lot of dignity to the film's shocking findings. Basically, Wall Street traders are alpha males, world finance is their casino, and we are paying the bill. If the system were regulated, the economic crisis would never have happened. But, as the film shows, there will never be any such regulations – as there used to be, immediately after the Wall Street Crash – because the financial advisors to the US government are part of that system, a parallel, virtual world that basically bets on the real world and bilks it for billions while working people go bust.
The film's technical jargon is pretty baffling, especially on the subject of derivatives (which, to be fair, not many people really understand), but in an excellent moment of clarity the film reveals that research on human beings has shown that experiments in which human beings are rewarded with money activate the same pleasure sensors that are driven wild by cocaine. That just about said it all.
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