LAND AND FREEDOM (Ken Loach, UK/Spain/Germany/Italy/France)
Screened in the main competition
Solid historical agitprop, examining with a fair degree of evenhandedness the political aspects of the left-wing resistance to Franco’s regime in the ’30s, as experienced by a young man from Liverpool driven by the idea of international solidarity to fight with the Republicans. It’s clearly a subject close to Loach and screenwriter Jim Allen’s hearts, presented with clarity and sophistication, though the attempts to mix political history and personal drama are inconclusive: the character-driven elements have a tendency to feel sticky and artificial. Loach’s later The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which finally netted him a Palme d’Or after several at-bats (Land and Silence was his fourth film in the main competition) is much sturdier as a history lesson and a work of narrative cinema. That said, Land and Freedom is hard to fault on its own terms, with the director’s customary arch-realism serving to keep the story hard and focused, give or take a syrupy rendition of “The Internationale”. A pity, too. about the totally unnecessary modern-day frame narrative, but we can’t have everything. 8/10
GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Japan/Taiwan)
Screened in the main competition
A hair shy of Hou’s top tier, in my opinion; it has a rough time drawing links between its biopic of Chiang Bi-Yu, a Taiwanese resistance fighter against the Japanese in the 1940s, and the story of Liang Ching, an actress trying to muddle through life and deal with an odd stalker while she prepares to play Chiang in a movie. But each half is equally brilliant on its own terms, with the director’s typical long takes and slow development reaching some particularly strong crescendos including a scene at a karaoke bar that’s one of the director’s most striking moments. As both female leads, Annie Shizuka Inoh is tremendous, juggling two entirely different and equally challenging sets of emotional demands so effectively that it almost doesn’t register that we’re ultimately watching the same woman. The director’s heavily formal minimalism is somewhat impenetrable for a non-fan, and stonily refuses to tell you what to think about it; but for what it’s worth, this was one of the movies that made me a Hou fan to begin with. 9/10
KIDS (Larry Clark, USA)
Screened in the main competition
Empty-headed provocation that lingers pruriently over the naughty behavior of its teenage cast while acting shocked at their sordidness and mourning the broken-down world that encourages their excess. Clark and 19-year-old screenwriter Harmony Korine present this in the clucking tones of a Reefer Madness-style cautionary tale, as though the audience they claimed to be targeting would have any use for a virtually plotless slice-of-life drama destined for the art house circuit. But its lapses of taste and, arguably, morality aren’t nearly as aggravating as its demented, off-putting artlessness; this is a preposterously ugly film, attempting to paper over its repellent cinematography under the banner of vérité-inflected rawness and urban grit. The effect doesn’t have the ring of physically present truth, though, just the aimless, grainy camerawork of amateur-hour theatrics. The overworked, unnatural performances complete the package; first-timer Rosario Dawson is the solitary bright spot on either side of the camera. Whatever interest this might have once possessed evaporated along with its controversial moment in the sun. 3/10
HELLO CINEMA (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran)
Screened in Un Certain Regard
Elsewhere in this grand Cannes event, host Nick Davis praised “Iranian art cinema minus the fussy meta-levels”. I understand why somebody would frame an argument that way, but my long-term readers know that fussy meta-levels are my favorite kind. Which is why this defiantly unclassifiable movie about making movies about movies in pre-production hits me right in the gut. Makhmalbaf, as himself, is casting for a movie celebrating the centennial of motion picture exhibition; something like a riot breaks out when he can’t handle the number of applicants who show up. It’s cinema stripped down to its barest elements: actors in a single featureless room feeling emotions and playing characters, and for that alone I’d greatly admire it as an experiment. It declares itself a work of genius because of who and what those characters and emotions are, becoming a tribute to individuals deprived a loud voice in the broad artistic and cultural discourse seeing (or not seeing) stories like their own onscreen, and absorbing (or not absorbing) more dominant strains of pop culture. 9/10