This blog will be, shall we say,
interesting, as I intend to go against the grain with two of the
competition titles. First up is John Hillcoat's Lawless, which
screened on Saturday in the gruelling 8.30am slot and immediately
divided critics. They seemed to split into two groups: everyone else
and me. On reflection, it was an odd film to place here, and festival
director Thierry Fremaux, emboldened by the success last year of
Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, maybe thought there'd be more room this
year for an auteurist genre movie. But if he was thinking that, he
was mistaken; the world's press take the competition very seriously,
and Lawless was judged and found wanting.
Lawless isn't as
self-consciously genre as Drive but, like its hero, it certainly has
focus. As with his previous films The Proposition and The Road, this
is an excellently assembled movie; leaving aside the performances, it
has pace and power in the visuals alone, recreating the rural
Prohibition era with a stylised authenticity that feels very modern
despite the accent on detail. It takes place in the county of
Franklin county, Virginia, where the Bondurant brothers – Forrest
(Tom Hardy), Jack (Shia LaBeouf) and Howard (Jason Clarke) – run a
moonshine business. It's a successful trade, but another racket comes
to town in the form of the corrupt, sadistic Special Agent Charlie
Rakes (Guy Pearce). In this world, the cops have even fewer scruples
than the gangsters, but the Bondurant boys hold firm against his
attempts to extort money from them, effectively declaring themselves
a war.
The film is narrated by Jack, who's not as tough as his
brothers but brighter, and LaBeouf is really very good in the role,
as fashionable as it is to dismiss him. Hardy, too, is impressive as
the hulking Forrest, a bear of a man who believes himself to be
invincible. Hillcoat's usual themes – family ties and the idea of
violence as the crucible of civilisation – are here too, in a
beautifully economic form. But the real standout is Nick Cave's
script, which plays like a longform lyric at times. As one might
expect from the author of Murder Ballads, there's a dark poetry here.
Forrest mutters that, “Violence is not what makes a man stand out,
it's the distance he's prepared to go,” while Jack observes of his
hero, the tommy gun-wielding Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman) not that he
is a tommy gun-wielding murder but that he has “drive and vision”.
Cave really knows this world, these characters, and takes savage
delight in a world where the very concept of law has been abandoned.
It's telling that all attempts at vengeance only beget more
vengeance, and that order is only finally restored by ordinary people
who've had enough of the madness that's been raging around
them.
Speaking of crucibles, Thomas Vinterberg's excellent
Jagten, aka The Hunt, is a riff on Arthur Miller's play about the
Salem witch trials. Where Miller's story used a historical event to
comment on the present day (the government's persecution of
communists), Vinterberg's film is a little more general. It stars Mad
Mikkelsen in perhaps a career-defining role as the nice but nerdy
Lucas, an assistant at a kindergarten. Lucas is popular with the
kids, but when his best friend's little girl shows signs of
developing a crush, he tries to put a stop to it. She responds by
claiming sulkily that Lucas has shown her “his willy”, a claim
that is immediately indulged by Lucas's boss and the girl's parents,
even though quickly tries to retract it as just something “silly”
that she made up.
Things do not go well for Lucas, and the
film brilliantly depicts the aftershock of the allegations. This
isn't a case of did-he or didn't-he, since we do get an objective
angle on the story and we know he is innocent. So this isn't a film
about a pervert, it's about crowd mentality and how much mud sticks:
Lucas loses his job, custody of his son, his best friend and his
place in the community. Vinterberg's film is perhaps a little Danish
in some respects, notably in the way that Lucas seems to give in so
easily, but the film's universality is beyond doubt. The
rehabilitation of R&B singer Chris Brown demonstrates the double
standards of public thinking: while we claim to enjoy democracy,
there are some things you can never come back from, and paedophilia
remains the last taboo.
Michael Haneke likes a bit of a taboo,
and here I make the controversial claim that I didn't much care for
his latest, the beautifully made but for me somewhat hollow Amour.
Vinterberg's film carried a big emotional punch but lacked a grand
theme. Amour has a very grand theme, but for reasons I'm about to
explain, it left me cold. As is the norm for Haneke's films, it preys
on middle-class fears. This is Paranormal Activity for the
bourgeoisie; the fear is not just of becoming paralysed, as one of
its leads is, but of ageing and decaying, losing one's free will,
independence and marbles. It's The Blair Witch Project for people who
think their children hate them usually because they do, and shudder
at the fate of Iris Murdoch, instructing their friends, gravely, to
shoot them if they “get like that”.
There is humanity
here, but for me it was all in the acting. Jean-Louis Trintignant and
Emmanuelle Riva play Georges and Anne, a well-to-do Parisian couple
whose modest but rather privileged life is rocked when Anne suffers a
stroke. Falling in the unlucky five per cent who don't make it
through, Anne has surgery that not only doesn't work but seems to
make her condition worse. All the while, Georges can only watch as
his wife regresses in front of his eyes, to a babbling, helpless
state of infancy. Both leads are superb, and Riva is especially
awesome, confronting a role that is both tough technically and
unflattering aesthetically. For me, though, the film mostly exploits
its audience's fears, and what you get out determines what you put
in. These are people with cultured tastes – their large apartment
is littered with artworks, records and books – but they seem to
appreciate life from a distance. With his glass, as ever, half empty,
Haneke dwells on the misery, and to me the film had more to do with
pride than love. I can see why it's been acclaimed but I couldn't
drink the Kool Aid; these weren't, to quote another Michael, my kind
of people.
No comments:
Post a Comment