Ben Wheatley's Sightseers has been on
my radar since the director first mentioned it when we met in a fish
and chip shop in Brighton last August. That the film was subsequently
shot, edited and is now in Cannes is a testament to Wheatley's speed;
it is a testament to his skill that it is dark and very, very funny;
but it is a testament to his growing reputation that it was a
must-see movie here.
Just as Kill List was a left turn after
Down Terrace, Sightseers is a right turn after Kill List, and though
all three films are recognisably the work of the same man, the way
Wheatley switches genres so effortlessly is certainly impressive.
Like a berserk Mike Leigh movie with a body count, it stars Alice
Lowe and Steve Oram as Tina and Chris, two awkward, single Midlanders
about to embark on their first holiday as couple. Tina lives with her
needy mother, and for a while it seems the old bird will scupper
their plans to visit some of the most mundane sights in the UK. On
the road, however, Tina decides to seize the moment and start a new
life. Chris has a similar epiphany when he runs over a fellow
traveller in a heritage site car park. Getting a taste for killing,
Chris embarks on a secret killing spree, but when Tina finds out, her
reaction surprises him.
To say any more would deprive this
film of its much needed element of surprise, since it has a sinuous
structure that switches from sight gags to hilarious deadpan
one-liners and exchanges throughout. Both actors are fantastic, Lowe
especially as the frustrated Tina, who spends a good deal of the film
being jealous of Chris's new best friend, the inventor of the
“carapod”. Oram is good too, though, and a lot of the funnier
scenes are fuelled by their dry delivery (in one scene, traumatised
by a litter-dropping lout in a heritage museum, Chris laments
repeatedly, “You just don't expect to see that”). The violence,
though not explicit, is certainly intense and will definitely limit
the audience to those who are up for it. With the right push, it will
probably tickle the Four Lions market, ticking all the right boxes of
wrong, but the great thing about Sightseers is that beneath the fun
and gore it actually has quite a serious intent. Replace “serial
murder” with “potting shed” and you have a film that is about
male/female relationships, about one partner's need for somewhere
private and special and the other partner's desire to share. I
actually thought Lowe might even be looking at a Bafta nomination,
although the line about “brown lipstick” made me think
again.
Another good, dry comedy was Benoit Delepine and
Gustave Kervern's Le Grand Soir. This is another great, if slightly
small-scale character piece from the directors of Louis-Michel and
Aaltra, and though I felt a little underwhelmed at the time, it's
really grown on me since. Benoit Poelvoorde and Albert Dupontel star
as mohicanned punk rocker “Not” Benzini and his brother
Jean-Pierre. “Not” is a dropout (real name something like Eric),
and the film concerns the fallout from Jean-Pierre's marriage, as he
first loses his wife, then his job as a mattress salesman, and likely
custody of his child. Set in a provincial shopping mall, it's a very
entertaining, warm-hearted and sometimes almost Tati-esque romp that
may not break out at the box office but will certainly please fans of
Delepine and Kervern's style, which is surprisingly cinematic in its
staging – notably a scene in which “Not” tries to find
Jean-Pierre a job while his drunk brother sits outside in a shopping
trolley.
Laughter greeted The Paperboy too, but perhaps for
very different reasons than its director, Lee Daniels, planned.
Apparently once earmarked for adaptation by Pedro Almodovar, this
lurid hybrid of bayou noir and erotic thriller is by far the weakest
film in competition. Narrated by Macy Gray, whose character can
recalls events she wasn't actually present at and at one point
addresses the audience directly, The Paperboy is bizarre even by this
festival's standards. Zac Efron stars as the drifting, smalltown son
of a family of newspaper journalists, and he gets involved in a
search for the truth when his older brother (Matthew McConaughey)
returns from Miami to investigate an apparent miscarriage of justice
that may have sent an innocent man to Death Row. Quite what anyone
was thinking as the cameras rolled is beyond me – especially Nicole
Kidman, who plays a murder groupie planning to marry the condemned
man. She plays horny white trash scarily well, but it's the only
bright spot in a horribly misjudged movie, a camp car crash that has
already garnered its place in Cannes history thanks to a jaw-dropping
scene involving Kidman squatting over a jellyfish-stung Efron and
pissing on his cute, insensible High School Musical face.
The
best film of the festival so far for me has been Holy Motors, a film
so strange I actually don't know what to say about it as I have no
idea what it's about or what it means. On a visceral level, it would
appear to be one-time French golden boy's Leos Carax's answer to
Inland Empire, in that it is a hallucinatory film about filmmaking.
The magnificent Denis Lavant appears in ten roles, playing a
mysterious man in a stretch limo who goes from one “appointment”
to another, each time transforming into a different character. As a
barometer of its weirdness, one favoured scene sees Denis Lavant as
Mr Merde (a reprise of Carax's great segment of the 2008 three-in-one
movie Tokyo!) eating Eva Mendes's hair before making her a burkha and
stripping off to reveal a (not very realistic) hard-on. The film is
full of such delights, and though it may be a little melancholy and
weapons-grade pretentious at times, it is definitely an outstanding
and curious film that somehow articulates some fundamental life
problems in a wholly unexpected and lyrical manner.
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