BEYOND RANGOON (John Boorman, UK/USA)
Screened in the main competition
Hypnotically clumsy editing and a lead performance that finds Patricia Arquette looking as glazed as a porcelain cat are the most overt problems with this message movie about the 1988 democratic uprisings in Burma. Its particularly galling embrace of the “this story about third-world suffering matters because it affected a white American” trope is another. The most troubling, though, might be the way that Boorman and his cinematographer John Seale, giving unchecked rein to his love of picturesque landscapes, are so busy making the war torn cities and jungles of Burma look like full-page spreads in a travel magazine that they forget to pay sufficient tribute to their dramatic scenario or the real-life torments that inspired it. It’s hard to completely dismiss any film that had the real-world political impact of this one (it forced the Myanmar government to release a high-profile political prisoner), but it would be dishonest to let that be a reason to ignore the pile-up of things going severely wrong in the directing, the scoring, the writing, and the acting. 3/10
ANGELS & INSECTS (Philip Haas, USA/UK)
Screened in the main competition
The central organising metaphor does, admittedly, start to get a bit overly precious as it moves along: the upstairs and downstairs of a 19th Century English country household contrasted (usually unfavorably) with various insects and other small invertebrate creatures that skitter and crawl. But everything outside of its unfortunate tendency towards overplaying its symbolism is absolutely terrific, from the way that the screenplay by Haas and his wife Belinda, adapting an A.S. Byatt novella, uses the characters’ fascination with the newly in-vogue science of taxonomy as a cue to treat them with similarly divorced intellectualism, to the exquisite use of color in Bernard Zitzermann’s cinematography and Paul Brown’s deservedly Oscar-nominated costumes. And yet for all its icy formalism, a ragged, sometimes ugly humanity forces its way up to the fore, as the film depicts the various stages of sexual desire in a repressive culture with sympathy and unblinking fleshiness. Kristin Scott Thomas triumphs in a role that saves all of its depth and shading for a powerhouse final 30 minutes. 8/10
SHADOWS OF THE RAINBOW (Sushant Misra, India)
Screened in Un Certain Regard
A mirage-like study of gender roles and social order in a town deep into urbanisation, presented with long stretches of almost total silence in which we do nothing but watch as the characters move through their actions quietly and purposefully. Misra and cinematographer Jugal Debata never run out of new ways to present their locations with an overdose of physical texture, evocative camera movement in three-dimensional space, and a hard contrast between the two main settings: an old family villa that resembles an ancient ruin, and the streets of a burgeoning suburb. Everything down to the movement of clothes across the actors’ bodies adds to the sense of presence and reality, communicated through poetic images that lend it the diffusion of an impressionistic painting. It’s haunting and gorgeously crafted; the one real problem, if you’ll forgive this laziest of all critical cop-outs, is that it’s kind of boring. There’s a point at which elusiveness and ellipses threaten to slide off the screen entirely, and I wouldn’t blame any viewer for thinking this film passes that point. 8/10
UNSTRUNG HEROES (Diane Keaton, USA)
Screened in Un Certain Regard
A story of the fluidity of mid-century Jewish-American identity that finds Diane Keaton directing Andie MacDowell in the top-billed role: but I promise, it’s not nearly as terrible as it has every reason to be. For one thing, John Turturro’s presence makes everything better, and this film finds him in especially good form as the panicked husband to MacDowell’s cancer-struck mother. For another, Keaton shows a superlative gift for directing children, bringing 11-year-old Nathan Watt to a place of surprising tetchiness and frantic internal turmoil. For a third, Thomas Newman’s score is fanciful and off-kilter in some vivid and unpredictable ways giving a sense of sharp weirdness to a script that keeps fighting a losing battle with just plain kookiness. Taken as a whole, it’s a little bit too cloyingly Rockwellian in its overdetermined emotions, it suffers from stiff directorial choices throughout, and it fights hard for a sense of childlike naïveté that’s mostly just embarrassing. But there’s enough going right that it’s not possible to discard it outright. 6/10
THE USUAL SUSPECTS (Bryan Singer, USA/Germany)
Screened out of competition
The film that made game-changing twist endings the flashiest trick of movies from every genre in the mid-’90s and for years beyond, and… and that’s just the thing. And what? Screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie’s chronological hopscotching showcases an admirable degree of difficulty executed with flair, but even in the moment of watching it, I’ve never managed to convince myself that structural card tricks are enough to cover for how much the meat of the film is a generic post-Tarantino crime picture that thinks it knows more about film noir than is the case. Singer and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel know how to put an interesting angle in to keep the thing from ever getting visually stale, and there’s some terrific lighting in the night scenes, but the style openly serves as a calling card, and there’s no real substance to anything outside of Bencio Del Toro and Kevin Spacey’s top-notch performances. Frankly, the best thing about it is that it won Singer a chance to make X-Men. 6/10