ULYSSES’ GAZE (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece/France/Italy)
Screened in the main competition
God bless anybody who can make it through all three hours without their attention faltering at least once. Angelopoulos’s immodestly slow-moving cinema of languid shots and low-key performances isn’t for everybody, and Ulysses’ Gaze is a particularly extreme version of that. It sends Harvey Keitel as Greek-American film director “A” on a mission to find the oldest piece of cinema made in the Balkans, and straight into a heavily symbolic meditation on the oppressive weight of history and violence in that region, in which enormous dismantled statues of Lenin gaze out coldly at the world, and oppressive fog demonstrates the confusion and obscurantism of human perception. Individually, it’s made up of almost nothing bu striking images and meaningfully slow moments, but long before the movie was even thinking about ending, I was cowed into submission more than transfixed by the gravity of every moment. Angelopoulos was aghast at receiving “merely” the second place Grand Prix, but even that seems more a nod to the film’s important politics than its artistic effectiveness. 6/10
SHANGHAI TRIAD (Zhang Yimour, France/China)
Screened in the main competition
The recipient of a special “Technical Grand Prize”, which basically equates to a Best Cinematography award, given to DP Lu Yue, production supervisor Bruno Patin, and color timer Olivier Chiavassa. It’s absolutely a film that deserves a cinematography award, too, though it’s also the kind of film for which your first thought upon exiting it is, “that definitely deserves something for its cinematography!”, if you understand my meaning. Filtering its tale of gangland warfare through the perspective of petulant nightclub singer and gangster’s moll (she’s played, terrifically, by Gong Li), and then filtering her through the eyes of a teenage boy from the country (Wang Xiaoxiao) who can barely articulate his impressions through all of it, the film has a point-of-view problem, staying at arm’s length from its story (which is a bit overly routine) and characters. It’s far livelier in its last thirty minutes, when it moves to a rural island and starts to complicate Gong’s character, and the beauty carries it through a lot. But this is not one of Zhang’s deeper works. 7/10
THE ARSONIST (U-Wei Bin Haji Saari, Malaysia)
Screened in Un Certain Regard
The first-ever Malay film to play in competition at Cannes, and the first I have seen; I wonder if the UCR jury was as blindsided by it as I was. Fluidly moving the very particular milieu of William Faulkner (it’s based on his story “Barn Burning”) into the very particular milieu of the Javanese immigrant minority in Malaysia, the film is at once a symbolic microcosm of class and ethnic resentment and a transporting family drama. It depicts the thorny relationship between a boy and his sometimes admirable, sometimes beastly father, with actors Khaled Salleh (the father) and Ngasrizal Ngasri (the son) offering up devastating performances based almost entirely in silent reactions and body language – a late moment that finds Ngasri clapping his hands over his ears and scrunching up his face to block out his father’s actions ranks among the great images from Cannes ’95. The aesthetic is casually naturalistic but with a poetic attention to darkness and color; the social insights are smart as they are quiet. And all in just 67 minutes! 9/10