THE NEON BIBLE (Terence Davies, UK)
Screened in the main competition
Years later, Davies would confess that he found this, his third feature, a failure whose value was chiefly that without it, he wouldn’t have been able to make The House of Mirth. And I am not one to disagree with a gifted filmmaker: it’s hard not to regard this as the reigning low point of Davies’s otherwise unblemished career. Which isn’t the same as dismissing it as totally without its own merits: it’s dazzling to look at, recasting the U.S. South of ’30s and ’40s as a dreamy, theatrical space, full of impenetrable black backdrops against which the characters move as haunting abstractions of human behavior. The proportion of gorgeous, heavily thought-out shots that burn into the brain is high with this one. But that cuts both ways: the stagey stylisation robs all the humanity out of an already whispery scenario, leaving even as reliable an actor as Gena Rowland unable to make any real impression. It’s not unmemorable, but it’s chilly as hell, to its extreme detriment as a memoir. 6/10
NASTY LOVE (Mario Martone, Italy)
Screened in the main competition
The film has the misfortune to peak in its first ten minutes, a freewheeling introduction to the characters and the film’s overriding theme of weird sexuality that’s so vigorous in its lack of clear connective tissue between thoughts that it borders on surrealism. But even if it grows somewhat less evocatively deranged as it moves along, and its climactic reveals have a certain “ho-hum, people are depraved the world over” feeling, it’s always a pretty unique, even oddball trek through the realms of bleak family drama and increasingly unresolved murder mystery. Anna Bonaiuto does fine work as the daughter soldiering her way through half-formed clues and a host of insistently unhelpful rogues to find out what chain of events led to her mother ending up dead on a beach; it’s thanks almost solely to her flintiness that the film is able to land its final declarations about the ways that hurt begets hurt and ancient sins can keep battering us in the present. A giddy blast of offbeat bleakness through and through. 8/10
RUDE (Clement Virgo, Canada)
Screened in Un Certain Regard
A watershed moment in the Canadian film industry: the first feature made by an entirely black crew and with a mostly black cast. It’s the kind of film that makes one feel tremendously bad to dislike it, especially since a defense of many of its seeming deficiencies can be sketched directly from its outsider perspective: the film is literally finding different ways of looking at its subjects from the norm. But that only excuses the awkward shots and shabby mise en scène up to a point, and it doesn’t include the stilted performances of underwritten characters at all. There are highlights, chief among them the lacerating, sexually aggressive performance of Sharon Lewis as the pirate radio operator of the title, and one of the film’s three plotlines – a newly-released convict trying to find a way back to his son’s life – is as piercing and well-observed as the other two are generic and underfelt. Mostly, though, this is a well-meant amateur misfire, the kind larded up with irritatingly fussy shots and dopey symbolic lions. 6/10
KISS OF DEATH (Barbet Schroeder, USA)
Screened out of competition
The obvious question is “what on God’s earth led to a David Caruso crime thriller getting a Cannes slot?”, it seeming from all the ingredients that this had to be nothing whatsoever other than a generic mid-’90s gangster movie. Which it kind of is, and it’s no wonder based on all the evidence here that Caruso’s leading man career was snuffed out almost before it started (I still have not seen Jade, the movie that delivered the killing blow). He’s simply too generic an actor to support the largely run-of-the-mill moral and psychological questions posed by the script, though Schroeder makes good use of his off-kilter looks. What actually saves the film – almost – are the fascinatingly bizarre supporting characters played by Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Rapaport, Stanley Tucci, Kathryn Erbe, and especially a blustering, mad Nicholas Cage. It feels like dropping a vanilla everyman into a cage of cartoon zoo animals, and damned if it doesn’t give the film a tension that manages to justify its existence in an overpopulated genre. 6/10
SAFE (Todd Haynes, UK/USA)
Screened in Directors’ Fortnight
Nothing less than one of the key English-language films of the 1990s. Its dissection of material society, spirituality, self-definition, and the dis-empowerment of women at first looks barbarically simple in its “allergic to the environment” metaphor, only becoming more fluid, nuanced, and unnervingly applicable to seemingly every aspect of modern life as you try to reduce it to its essentials. Every frame of Alex Nepomniaschy’s cinematography could be cut out and hung on the wall, as he and Haynes present David Bomba’s ingenious, deceptively naturalistic production design in ominously squared-off images that present the script’s suggestion of contemporary life as a house of untraceable horrors with an intuitive precision far beyond words. In the center of this miraculously cryptic and blunt story, Julianne Moore gives the best performance of a legendary career as vivid blank slate, a collection of impressions and responses seeking a center around which to coalesce. So brilliant that it must be difficult and dense, yet so keenly cinematic in its singular aesthetic that watching it is a totally intuitive experience. 10/10